Send the Mexicans back to Mexico? No need, they're leaving on their own.
Since the Great Depression, Mexicans have poured over the United States border in pursuit of jobs, a better life, more money, whatever. However, it looks as if that migration of Mexicans to the United States may be ebbing rather than increasing. From 2005-10, 1.4 million Mexicans returned to Mexico from the United States, twice as many reverse immigrants as in the previous decade. For the first time since the Depression, more Mexicans are leaving the US than are coming to the US.
There are many factors influencing this, according to the Mexican Migration Project and the Pew Hispanic Center. The Mexican Migration Project has monitored Mexican immigration, both legal and illegal, for 30 years. The reversal in trends is due to many factors, including a tighter US job market, declining construction industry jobs, decreasing Mexican birth rates, increasing US deportations, a growing Mexican middle class, and improved border security. One in ten people born in Mexico lives in the United States; some of them snuck over the border in suitcases.
“I think the massive boom in Mexican immigration is over and I don’t think it will ever return to the numbers we saw in the 1990s and 2000s,” says Princeton University professor of sociology and public affairs Douglas Massey, a co-director of the Mexican Migration Project.
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