After the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, the number of Mexican immigrants authorized and unauthorized in the United States grew steadily in size and as a percentage of the total immigrant population see Table 1. Between and , roughly 7. They skirted border inspection by taking more dangerous routes northward across the Sonoran Desert into Arizona, raising the danger and mortality of the trek. In , the unauthorized immigrant population of the United States was estimated at The Great Recession of led many Mexicans to return to their homeland, significantly slowing migration northward.
Note : The term immigrants refers to people residing in the United States who were not US citizens at birth. This population includes naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, certain legal non-immigrants e. Sources : Migration Policy Institute tabulations of the U. Data from the , , and Censuses were accessed from: Steven Ruggles, J. Schroeder, and Matthew Sobek. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Data for to , were from: Campbell J.
IIRIRA redefined a host of minor, non-violent offenses previously deemed simple misdemeanors, into aggravated felonies, which automatically resulted in mandatory deportation, increasingly stripping immigrants of access to any form of judicial review before exit.
Unauthorized immigrants were prohibited from receiving social security benefits and federal student financial aid. These three laws instantly augmented the level of immigrant detentions and deportations.
The securitization discourse, which marked much of the legislation, was increasingly deployed by American presidents, the media, and concerned citizens. Bush signed into law on October 26, Though its most rigorous provisions targeted the financing of international terrorism, foreign immigrants were swept into its web, allowing the government to monitor all private communications originating in foreign countries, establishing the legal means to keep suspected terrorists from entering the United States and to deport suspects already living in the United States, even with valid visa authorization.
Still more security-focused legislation followed. The Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of , signed by President Bush on May 14, ordered the INS to share all its alien databases with the State Department, to form a single computer search engine accessible at all inspection stations, to include computer-readable and tamper-resistant biometric identifiers on American visas, entry, and travel documents, and funding the recruitment of 1, new INS agents.
Between fiscal years and , during George W. Formal deportations, known as alien removals , numbered 2 million in these same years, were overseen by a judge or ICE official, and resulted in a record of their exit circumstances. Because of the harsh criticism President Bush faced for what some deemed his lax border enforcement policies, by the end of his presidency, the number of alien removals rose almost 90 percent, from , in to , in Then DHS recorded 2.
To get the Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform, his priority was to demonstrate that the US-Mexico border was secure and relatively impenetrable. The statistics show that from to President Bush deported a total of From to , President Obama deported half as many, or 5. Several attempts were undertaken to pass comprehensive immigration reform during George W. Unauthorized immigrants, a labor force working in the shadows of American society since , seeing their lives and work increasingly criminalized, deportations reaching soaring levels, and US borders militarized, began asserting their political agency in organized ways, thus marking the sixth and current phase of this history.
With securitization legislation increasingly employed to monitor immigrant movements and force their deportation on the ruse that they were potential terrorists, a variety of pro-immigrant organizations sought legislative relief to prevent the removal of children they had brought to the United States.
If they then graduate from a two-year community college, show two years of progress toward a four-year university degree, or serve in the military for two years, they will be granted permanent resident status, eligible for citizenship after five years. Organizers staged a host of pro-immigrant demonstrations to bring attention to the plight of DREAMers and the conditions in which their unauthorized parents toil.
Among the first was the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, a caravan of 18 chartered buses with protesters from around the country who converged on Washington DC on October 2, Visiting over cities along the way, the organizers intentionally evoked memories of the African American freedom rides to desegregate public transportation in the American South. In , African Americans protested their second-class citizenship. In , the immigrant worker caravans emphasized their hard work at slave wages and the constant threat of deportation.
They brought attention to the fact that as political subjects unauthorized immigrants had absolutely no rights. The bill included more rigorous employment verification requirements and sought funding for a mile border fence. But most controversial were the proposed penalties for entering the United States without authorization. Latino immigrant communities exploded in rage. These events helped coalesce immigrant and labor organizations, religious and civil rights leaders, and legal aid advocates into an immigrant rights movement that quickly became visible and stridently articulate in their demand for rights.
Federal courts mostly struck down these local ordinances as unconstitutional, as encroachments on federal jurisdiction over immigration, but the uninterrupted racial profiling and local policing that accompanied them, were particularly frightening to Mexican immigrants and citizens alike.
These were the events that birthed an immigrant rights movement that had been a long time in the making. Immigration reform has been a hot-button issue during the Bush, Obama, and Trump presidencies. In general, Democrats have favored pathways to citizenship, the legalization for young people brought into the United States as children, and amnesty for their parents if they were long-time residents of good moral character.
Anti-immigration Republicans, on the other hand, have refused to forgive or forget. Since DACA was issued, , applications have been approved; some 72, denied. On April 24, , Judge John D. Bates of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia prohibited the government from abolishing the program, explaining that no evidence had been offered that the program was unlawful. As this survey of the history of Mexican immigration to the United States has shown, it has been a long one— years thus far—marked by the migration mainly of unskilled, minimally educated males and females seeking to improve their lot and those of the households they leave behind.
Their monetary remittances have had a tremendous impact on the well-being of Mexico and Mexicans. Since the s, whether they be citizens of the United States, authorized immigrant, or undocumented, ethnic Mexicans have been victimized by avowed racists and by their allies complicit in enacting racially motivated laws that have defined them as criminals , as problems , as illegal aliens whose work is needed and desired to maximize profit, but whose human bodies are imagined as polluting the body politic and therefore cannot be assimilated.
Though the DHS pronounces that it simply enforces immigration laws, this rhetoric normalizes and dehistoricizes what have long been racially motivated, anti-Mexican laws; laws that are selectively and seasonally ignored to attract criminalized labor, then to mercilessly expel those who refuse to be servile, who demand humane treatment, fair wages, and paths to citizenship for their years of toil and taxes.
The literature on Mexican immigrants in the United States is immense, mainly because this migrant stream has existed for more than years.
The least-documented period is the one following the US-Mexico War, from to roughly The historical literature on this period chronicles the impact of American colonial rule on the former Mexican residents of the territory annexed by the United States—their land loss and the onset of Mexican labor migration north, spurred by the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. On these themes see Laura E. The impact of the Mexican Revolution on migration and politics in both Mexico and the United States is another important topic that has yet to receive its due, especially the tensions and labor competition that developed between ethnic Mexican American citizens and the newly arriving immigrants.
Harris and Louis R. A History of the U. How Mexicans have integrated into American society is a major theme in the literature. One should start with George J. More recent is the comprehensive tome by Edward E. Some scholars likewise have sought to compare the Mexican immigrant experience of integration to that of other ethnic groups.
See: Luis Fraga et. The current anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States begs for robust social scientific analysis but has yielded little so far.
Instead, the printed word is still dominated by anti-Mexican rants, the best known being Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The following works look at xenophobia and immigrant identities more extensively: Juan Perea, Immigrants Out!
On the Dreamers, see Walter J. Since the beginning of the 20th century, immigration has been a process exclusively controlled by the nation-state through the offices of the federal government. The agents, agencies, and the laws they enforced, as mandated by Congressional legislation, can be found in many digitized archives. The history of the federal bureaucracy charged with the control of immigration, now denominated as Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE , under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security, can be intensively studied at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
There are many first-person narratives of the Mexican immigrant experience in the United States. Sharon R. Department of Commerce. Jens Manuel Krogstad and Jeffrey S. Oscar J. Lawrence A. Robert A. Fox, Three Worlds of Relief , Richard B. Calavita, Inside the State , —, — John F. Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Lisa C. Laura E. George J. See also Luis Fraga, John A. Samuel P. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice.
Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Oxford Research Encyclopedias American History. Department of State, and U. Customs and Border Protection. The main change in net flow between the two countries in the most recent period comes from the decreased return flow from the U. The number of Mexican immigrants going from Mexico to the U.
There are several potential reasons for the changing patterns of migration flows between the two nations. In the U. In addition, stricter enforcement of U.
Some changing patterns in Mexico could also be behind the reduction in the number of immigrants coming to the U. First, growth in the working-age population of Mexicans has slowed due to a decades-long decline in the average number of births among women in Mexico. Lower fertility rates also mean smaller family sizes, which reduces the need for migration as a means of family financial support. Coupled with this, the Mexican economy over the past two decades has been more stable than in the s and s, when the country was hit with a number of profound economic crises.
While net migration from Mexico to the U. In the five-year period between and , for example, nearly 3 million immigrants came to the U. Mexico is the largest country of birth among the estimated 47 million immigrants living in the U. After peaking at Preliminary estimates show that in , the overall population of Mexican immigrants in the U. The decline in Mexican immigrants in the U. Mexican immigrants have been at the center of one of the largest mass migrations in modern history. Between and , more than 16 million Mexican immigrants migrated to the U.
Her father was born in Mexico and moved to the United States by himself when he was Rita was born right before they moved. She came into the. United States undocumented and has since become a permanent resident with her mom.
Back in Guadalajara, her father was a firefighter and professional soccer player. He now works at a construction company in LA to support Rita and her brother. Rita says that after she and her brother are able to live on their own and graduate college, her parents would like to move back to Guadalajara to be reunited with their families. Another reason for immigrating to the United States is to flee a home country where someone is subjected to persecution and imminent danger.
In this case, the immigrant can seek asylum in the United States, and during the process is safe from being deported. However, not a large number of asylum cases get approved from Mexico. In , the total number of Mexican citizens who were granted asylum in the United States was , according to the Department of Homeland Security. In removal proceedings, only out of applications for asylum from Mexico were approved by immigration judges in Although Arellano in her words had no choice but to come to the United States initially because she could no longer support her family, it is unlikely that she will be able to attain asylee status.
In recent years, the number of Mexicans leaving the United States has outpaced the number of new arrivals, although the country remains far and away the top destination for Mexican emigrants. Since , Mexico has ceased to be the top country of origin for recent immigrants to the United States, overtaken by India and China. As with immigrants overall, recent arrivals from Mexico are more likely to be college graduates than those who arrived in prior decades.
Figure 1. Mexican Immigrant Population in the United States, Sources: Data from U. Click here to view an interactive chart showing the number of Mexican immigrants and their share of all U.
The number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico has also been on the decline, although Mexicans still make up the majority of the unauthorized population. Mexicans accounted for 51 percent of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in , according to estimates from the Migration Policy Institute MPI. Mexicans in the United States are more likely than other immigrant populations to be long-time U. However, given that a relatively high proportion are unauthorized, Mexican immigrants overall are less likely to be naturalized U.
They are also more likely to live in poverty and less likely to have health insurance than the overall immigrant population. Most Mexicans who become legal permanent residents in the United States referred to as LPR status, also known as getting a green card do so through family reunification, either as immediate relatives of U.
The United States is overwhelmingly the most popular destination for Mexicans living abroad, accounting for 97 percent of all Mexican emigrants. In fact, of all Mexicans residing either in or outside of Mexico in , 8 percent were in the United States.
Canada is home to the next largest population of Mexicans 86, , followed by Spain 53, , Guatemala 18, , and Germany 17, , according to mid United Nations Population Division estimates. Click here to view an interactive map showing where migrants from Mexico and other countries have settled worldwide.
Within the United States, more than half of all Mexican immigrants live in one of two states: California and Texas. Using data from the U. The U. Census Bureau defines the " foreign born " as individuals who had no U. The foreign-born population includes naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, refugees and asylees, legal nonimmigrants including those on student, work, or other temporary visas , and persons residing in the country without authorization.
The terms " foreign born " and " immigrant " are used interchangeably and refer to those who were born in another country and later emigrated to the United States. Distribution by State and Key Cities In the period, most immigrants from Mexico lived in California 36 percent Texas 22 percent , Illinois 6 percent , and Arizona 5 percent. The next six most populous states—Florida, Georgia, Washington, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada—were home to an additional 13 percent of the Mexican-born population.
Together, these counties accounted for 22 percent of the Mexican immigrant population. Figure 2. Note: Pooled ACS data were used to get statistically valid estimates at the state level for smaller-population geographies. Not shown are the populations in Alaska and Hawaii, which are small in size; for details, visit the Migration Policy Institute MPI Migration Data Hub for an interactive map showing geographic distribution of immigrants by state and county, available online.
Source : MPI tabulation of data from U. Census Bureau pooled ACS.
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