Undocumented immigrant population from Mexico declining; steady from other nations – Pew Research

United States-Mexico Border/Wikimedia

Amid raging controversy over immigration, a new report says the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States fell to a 12-year low in 2016, possibly due to economic recession.

The population of undocumented immigrants has been on the decline for several years and shrank from 12.2 million in 2007 to 10.7 million in 2016.

The Pew Research Center, whose researchers conducted the analysis, says part of the reason for the decline was the economic recession that hit the United States in 2007, taking a toll on economic opportunities.

“The combination of economic forces and enforcement priorities may be working together to discourage people from arriving, or sending them home,” D’Vera Cohn, one of the authors of the center report, said.

President Donald Trump has made immigration enforcement a focus for his administration, most recently pressing the US Congress to authorize funding of a wall on the border with Mexico and deploying troops to deal with flow of migrants.

Borderwallbrownsville Nofx221984 [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew’s director of global migration and demography research, says the U.S. government’s ever-expanding security presence along the southwestern border – under Democratic and Republican administrations – deterred more immigrants from trying to cross illegally. Shifting demographics in Mexico have left fewer working-age males willing to make the dangerous trek.

“Those are the main themes,” Lopez said.

The Pew report shows that more people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras entered the USA. The share of the undocumented population from Central America increased from 12 percent in 2007 to 17 percent in 2016.

That increase has not offset the drop in the number of undocumented immigrants of Mexican descent, which fell by 1.5 million over the same time period. The population of Mexico is four times larger than that of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras combined, so fluctuations in Mexican immigration remain the driving force behind the overall undocumented population in the USA.

In fact, Pew concluded in 2015 that more Mexicans returned to their home country than entered the USA, a historic shift in the source of illegal immigration.

That leaves Central Americans, Asians, Africans and people from other corners of Latin America representing a bigger share of recent arrivals to the USA.

The slowdown in illegal immigration means that undocumented immigrants living in the USA are more likely to be long-term residents.

In 2000, about 38 percent of undocumented immigrants had lived in the USA for five years or less, compared with 35 percent of undocumented immigrants who had been in the country longer than 10 years. Now, 66 percent of undocumented immigrants have lived here more than 10 years, and only 18 percent have been here less than five years.

The median number of years an undocumented immigrant has lived in the USA stands at 15 years.

“The population has become more settled,” Lopez said. “They’ve had children in the U.S., have formed family relationships.”

SOURCE: Pew Research Center