56 Percent Of Deported Mexicans Want To Stay, Say Officials

Ana Cecilia Oliva Balcárcel, director of the Migrant Protection branch of Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM) said at a conference in the southeastern state of Yucatan on Thursday that in 2013, 330,000 Mexicans were “repatriated” – a term that encompasses both deportees who were flown out of the United States by authorities as well as those who left the country out of their own auspices after being ordered to leave. Of that group, 56 percent told the INM they wished to stay in Mexico. “It’s a very interesting piece of data because previously it was, ‘no, I’ll just be here a few days and I’ll try to cross again’”, said Oliva Balcárcel, according to El Golfo.

She went on to point to “zero migration rates in saying that Mexicans who had been deported “were more or less those who are leaving [again]”. As of 2012, 12 million people born in Mexico were living in the United States, according to the Pew Center. But over the past decade, net migration from Mexico has been decreasing sharply, a phenomenon which the Pew Center attributes to a combination of a host of factors, including a weakened US economy and better economic conditions in Mexico, increased border enforcement and interior deportations, a long-term decline in Mexican birth rates and growing danger in traditional border-crossing routes.

The majority of those repatriated – some 288,000 of the 330,000 – were sent to just two cities: Tijuana, in the state of Baja California, and Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Those cities are the sites of two of the nine repatriation units created in 2007 and run by Mexican immigration authorities in states along the US-Mexico border. The units provide shelter and medical attention as well as reorientation services and links with temporary job offers for former migrants who often find themselves in a part of Mexico which is foreign to them – in recent decades, the proportion of migrants who come from states in the south has grown, while traditional senders in the central regions have decreased.