Latino Immigration To U.S. Has Fallen To “Net Zero”

If you grew up in a border town, like I did, the idea of an immigration “net Zero” is not strange. The rhythm of the daily comings and goings across the border is frantic – it’s not a stretch to think there are as many people coming as there are going. Take that idea, stretch it across the entire border between the U.S. and Mexico, include all immigrants from all Latin American nations in all the cities in the country and that realization is suddenly startling. But a recent Council on Foreign Relations article makes that point:

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, with apprehensions 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.

The reason that immigrants had for trekking north was almost universal: economic opportunity, jobs…

The reasons for returning are not so easy to define. Many are country specific; national economies, political atmospheres and birth rates vary from nation to nation and influence the “pull” factor. But there are common factors in the U.S. that may explain the trend:

• The Obama administration’s tough stance on deportations: more than 400,000 immigrants were deported last year and immigration prosecutions increased by 80%.
• A weak U.S. economy with high unemployment rates reduces the incentive for northern migration.

There are factors that could reverse the trend: a U.S. economic recovery, dismal economic opportunities in Central America.

The real question is Mexico. There, demographics have already shifted, with fewer Mexicans coming of age and entering the work force each year. As a result, the Mexican immigration boom of the 1990s and early 2000s is unlikely to be repeated ever again.

And that may be the hardest thing to fathom, even for a border kid.