Mexican Immigration to U.S. Slowed Significantly, Report Says
Mexican immigration to the United States, the largest wave of migrants from a single country in the nation’s history, has stopped increasing after four decades of surging growth and may be declining, according to a report released Monday by the Pew Hispanic Center.
In what the report called a “notable reversal of the historic pattern,” the number of Mexicans leaving rose sharply in the five years after 2005, while the new flow of migrants coming from Mexico into the United States fell steeply.
For the first time in at least two decades, the population of illegal immigrants from Mexico living in this country was significantly decreased, according to the report. In 2011, about 6.1 million Mexicans were living here illegally, down from a peak of nearly 7 million in 2007, it said.
“We really haven’t seen anything like this in the last 30 or 40 years,” said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, who co-wrote the report with D’Vera Cohn and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera. The center is a nonpartisan research organization in Washington that does not advocate for policy positions.
Over all, the report said, about 58 percent of an estimated 11.2 million illegal immigrants in the United States are from Mexico.