Immigration Issues

Characteristics of Mexican Immigrants

Estimates of illegal Mexican immigration into the United States have ranged as high as one million a year. But a new study says that each year in the 1990s, only about 105,000 undocumented Mexican workers and their families settled in the U.S., or 630,000 from 1990 to 1996. The study estimates there are 2.3 million to 2.4 million Mexicans in the U.S. illegally, compared with 4.7 million to 4.9 million legal residents.

The Binational Study on Migration, commissioned by the U.S. and Mexican governments in 1995, was written by 20 demographers and scholars who analyzed census and other data from the two countries.

Among the study's conclusions:

  • Most migrant workers return to their homes in Mexico at least once a year, but both legal and undocumented Mexicans are tending to stay longer.

  • The average income of Mexican migrants has dropped -- in 1996 11 percent of recently arrived families headed by a Mexican-born person had incomes below $5,000, compared to 5.5 percent in 1990.

  • Mexican migrants are no more likely to receive welfare than poor Americans; but their families consume more government services, mainly in the form of education, than the taxes they pay.

  • The money they send home to Mexico -- $2.5 billion to $3.9 billion -- is equal to about half the direct foreign investment in Mexico.

In 1995 1.3 million aliens from all countries were detained at the Mexican border trying to enter the U.S. illegally -- but that figure helps little in determining the actual growth of the illegal population, since thousands of workers are detained and sent back several times.

Source: Sam Dillon, "U.S.-Mexico Study Sees Exaggeration of Migration Data," New York Times, August 31, 1997.

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