Immigration explorer

---

Interactive map of foreing immigration in the US.

Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero

---

Clic image to download PDF report

Released: April 23, 2012

Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less

by Jeffrey Passel, D’Vera Cohn and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera

The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill. After four decades that brought 12 million current immigrants—more than half of whom came illegally—the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped—and may have reversed, according to a new analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center of multiple government data sets from both countries.

The standstill appears to be the result of many factors, including the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and changing economic conditions in Mexico.

Binational Mexicans

---

Jorge Durán
La Jornada. 11 de marzo de 2012.

Al terminar una conferencia sobre migración en un pueblo michoacano se me acercó una familia a platicar y me informaron que acababan de regresar de Estados Unidos. Al preguntarles por la razón de su retorno me dijeron que se acababan de naturalizar y al día siguiente de haber obtenido su pasaporte estadunidense regresaron al pueblo de origen.

La razón es muy simple, habían pasado muchos años en Estados Unidos, obtuvieron la residencia, pero no querían quedarse de manera definitiva. Sin embargo, consideraban la nacionalidad como un seguro de vida y de salud, para ellos y sus hijos. Una vez logrado el objetivo, emprendieron el camino del retorno.

LEER articulo completo

Mexico's migrants return as the American dream fades

---

By Ignacio de los Reyes
BBC Mundo, Mexico City

Rural towns are changing as migrants bring new influences Silvano Ramos, 36, left his home of Chilcuautla, a town of 12,000 inhabitants in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo, 12 years ago. He left, like so many others, in search of the American dream. 

Rural towns are changing as migrants bring new influences

He crossed the river Rio Grande - or Rio Bravo as it's known in Mexico - along the Texas border to work illegally as a construction worker in Nevada.
But when the US economy began to stall with the housing market collapse six years ago, he decided to leave that dream behind. Last January he became the mayor of Chilcuautla, where 80% of the population has a family member in the US.
He represents a new wave of Mexicans who are deciding to return home - though it is unclear whether their homeland is ready to take them all back.

Improving economy

"The sad situation is that we are not prepared to welcome so many migrants. It is worrying, there will be chaos if they start returning en masse, there's not much we can offer them here," Mayor Ramos tells the BBC. Some 400,000 Mexicans returned last year, the country's National Migration Institute (INM) says.

READ article

Better Lives for Mexicans Cut Allure of Going North

---

Better Lives for Mexicans Cut Allure of Going North

Economic, demographic and social changes in Mexico are suppressing illegal immigration as much as the poor economy or legal crackdowns in the United States.

AGUA NEGRA, Mexico — The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of illegal immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years has sputtered to a trickle, and research points to a surprising cause: unheralded changes in Mexico that have made staying home more attractive.

Read article

Mexican migration to the US has hit a net zero

---

The flow of immigrants from Latin America to the United States, a constant and often accelerating trend of the last three decades, slowed in 2011. The most prominent was the change from Mexico. New arrivals fell off a cliff, withapprehensions at the border hitting their lowest levels in seventeen years. The drop is so great that Doug Massey, head of the Mexican Migration Project (a long term survey of Mexican emigration at Princeton University), claims that for the first time in sixty years, Mexican migration to the United States has hit a net zero. 

READ ARTICLE

How US Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration

---

David Bacon January 4, 2012 | This article appeared in the January 23, 2012 edition of The Nation.


This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation. Some names of the people profiled in this article have been changed.

Roberto Ortega tried to make a living slaughtering pigs in Veracruz, Mexico. “In my town, Las Choapas, after I killed a pig, I would cut it up to sell the meat,” he recalls. But in the late 1990s, after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) opened up Mexican markets to massive pork imports from US companies like Smithfield Foods, Ortega and other small-scale butchers in Mexico were devastated by the drop in prices. “Whatever I could do to make money, I did,” Ortega explains. “But I could never make enough for us to survive.” In 1999 he came to the United States, where he again slaughtered pigs for a living. This time, though, he did it as a worker in the world’s largest pork slaughterhouse, in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

His new employer? Smithfield—the same company whose imports helped to drive small butchers like him out of business in Mexico.

David Ceja, another immigrant from Veracruz who wound up in Tar Heel, recalls, “Sometimes the price of a pig was enough to buy what we needed, but then it wasn’t. Farm prices were always going down. We couldn’t pay for electricity, so we’d just use candles. Everyone was hurtijg almost all the time.”

Ceja remembers that his family had ten cows, as well as pigs and chickens, when he was growing up. Even then, he still had to work, and they sometimes went hungry. “But we could give milk to people who came asking for it. There were people even worse off than us,” he recalls.

In 1999, when Ceja was 18, he left his family’s farm in Martinez de la Torre, in northern Veracruz. His parents sold four cows and two hectares of land, and came up with enough money to get him to the border. There he found a coyote who took him across for $1,200. “I didn’t really want to leave, but I felt I had to,” he remembers. “I was afraid, but our need was so great.”

He arrived in Texas, still owing for the passage. “I couldn’t find work for three months. I was desperate,” he says. He feared the consequences if he couldn’t pay, and took whatever work he could find until he finally reached North Carolina. There friends helped him get a real job at Smithfield’s Tar Heel packinghouse. “The boys I played with as a kid are all in the US,” he says. “I’d see many of them working in the plant.”

North Carolina became the number-one US destination for Veracruz’s displaced farmers. Many got jobs at Smithfield, and some, like Ortega and Ceja, helped lead the sixteen-year fight that finally brought in a union there. But they paid a high price. Asserting their rights also made them the targets of harsh immigration enforcement and a growing wave of hostility toward Mexicans in the American South.

The experience of Veracruz migrants reveals a close connection between US investment and trade deals in Mexico and the displacement and migration of its people. For nearly two `ecades, Smithfield has used NAFTA and the forces it unleashed to become the world’s largest packer and processor of hogs and pork. But the conditions in Veracruz that helped Smithfield make high profits plunged thousands of rural residents into poverty. Tens of thousands left Mexico, many eventually helping Smithfield’s bottom line once again by working for low wages on its US meatpacking lines. “The free trade agreement was the cause of our problems,” Ceja says.

Smithfield Goes to Mexico—and Migrants Come Here

In 1993 Carroll Foods, a giant hog-raising corporation, partnered with a Mexican agribusiness enterprise to set up a huge pig farm known as Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) in Veracruz’s Perote Valley. Smithfield, which had a longtime partnership with Carroll Foods, bought the company out in 1999.

So many migrants from Veracruz have settled in North Carolina and the South that they name markets for their home state. Because of ferocious anti-immigrant laws, however, many businesses have lost customers as immigrants flee the state.

Read full article...