Justice
More Mexican Immigrants Have Been Leaving the U.S. Than Entering It
The post-recession trend reverses decades of steady arrivals, according to a new Pew report.
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.” But since the recession, that Mexico-to-U.S. flow has weakened significantly, and more migrants have been returning to Mexico than arriving in the U.S., a new Pew analysis finds.
Using government data, Pew researchers estimated that 1.4 million migrants came from Mexico to the U.S. between 2005 and 2010. That’s roughly half the 3 million or so who arrived between 1995 and 2000. And in the post-recession period, from 2009 to 2014, the total number of Mexicans coming to the States—legally and illegally—was 870,000: