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More Mexicans left than came to U.S. in past 5 years

Among the most common reasons Mexicans are saying adiós to the U.S. are a slow economic recovery here and the fact that they miss their families back home, the study found.

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More Mexicans are returning to their mother country than are migrating into the United States, a new report found, reversing a long-standing immigration pattern that has helped shape America’s economy and politics. Over 16 million Mexicans immigrated to the US between 1965 and 2015, accounting for 28 percent of immigrants. According to data collected by the Mexican government and analyzed by Pew, most returned to Mexico to rejoin their families.

According to Pew’s findings, a growing percentage of Mexican adults see life in the United States as no better than living in Mexico.

The non-partisan research centre underlines though that measuring migration flows between Mexico and the U.S. is challenging because there are no official counts of how many Mexican immigrants enter and leave the USA each year.

What are Donald Trump and a few of the other Republican candidates for president to do now that a new study shows that more Mexicans have been leaving the U.S.in the last five years than have been coming into this country?

A half-century of mass migration from Mexico is “at an end”, said Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew’s director of Hispanic research. That’s up 10 percent from 2007.

USA immigration laws have become more strictly enforced, perhaps causing fewer Mexicans to attempt to cross the border. “I would not say that Mexico has more of a pull”, said Pew research associate Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, who was the study’s author.

Cynthia Prida, Deputy Consul from the General Consulate of Raleigh, says North Carolina is an exception to this trend, as the rates of Mexican immigrants leaving and coming into the state have stayed about the same.

Obama had been the target of protests last year and earlier for his administration’s record deportation numbers, which were totaling more than 300,000 a year. Illegal immigration increased from 1995 to 2000, when the net increase of migrants was 2,270,000, the study says. An additional 14 percent had been deported, and 6 percent said they returned for jobs in Mexico. There is no Mexican invasion of undocumented immigrants pouring into the country. Seven years later, 12.8 million Mexicans were living in the U.S. Then we suffered a financial crisis and jobs evaporated.

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Blame it on the stringent immigration norms or the quest to be reunited with their families, Mexican immigration into the US could soon be dwindling.

Mexican immigration flow to US has reversed: Study