Top Story – More Mexicans are now leaving the United States than arriving, a Pew Research Center report released on Thursday revealed.
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The North American Free Trade Agreement also led Mexicans out of their country’s farm sector, Gonzalez-Barrera said, and the US border was so porous that there was little disincentive to stay in Mexico.
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson recently promised Arizonans during a tele-town hall that, if elected, he could get a double-fenced, 2,000-mile wall built on the U.S.-Mexico border within a year. If Mexicans stop migrating to the United States, and if Mexicans who are here return home, it’s possible the US population – and its economy – could age rapidly. Stepped up enforcement efforts toward undocumented immigrants, including border security and increased deportations, probably also contributed. Between 2009 and 2014, an estimated 870,000 Mexican nationals came to the U.S. from Mexico-but a million Mexicans went back the other way. However following the recent decline in new migration, the US Census Bureau said in 2013 Chinese immigrant numbers have overtaken the number of Mexicans coming to the US.
From 1965 to 2015, upwards of 16 million Mexican immigrants came to America in what the Pew Research Center calls “one of the largest mass migrations in modern history”.
The Pew report follows a 2012 study that found the influx and departures of Mexicans basically even. Now more are heading for the exits.
Many in the US regard Mexico as a poor country with most of its citizens wanting to flee into the United States. The center said net migration of Mexicans to the United States had fallen to zero. Of those surveyed, 33 percent said life in the U.S.is neither better nor worse than life in the US – 10 percent higher than eight years ago.
Pew’s findings accounted for both documented and undocumented immigrants.
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The USA economic recovery has been slow, perhaps meaning fewer jobs for Mexican immigrants. According to a previous Pew report, border apprehensions in 2014 fell to a 1971 level, indicating that relatively few Mexicans were even trying to cross. A small portion, 14 percent, were deported. Over the past decade, more immigrants have come to the United States from Asia – mainly China, India, Korea, Philippines, and Vietnam – than from any other region in the world, now making Asians the fastest growing immigrant population in the United States. One outcome of that can be seen the Mexican birth rate, In 1980, the fertility rate in Mexico was 7.3, meaning that the average Mexican woman in that year could expect to have seven children in her lifetime.
