From the right-leaning San Diego Union-Tribune:
The overall undocumented population in this country last year was 11.2 million, down from its peak of about 12 million in 2007, the Hispanic Pew Center said. Mexicans accounted for 58 percent of that group, or about 6.5 million from a high of 7 million in 2007.
The annual inbound migration from Mexico is about one-fifth or one-sixth of what it was about a decade ago, when it was about 500,000 each year, said Jeff Passel, a senior demographer at the Pew center. Demographers said outbound migration to Mexico has remained stable at about 150,000 annually.
Passel pointed to three factors that are likely to have caused the decline:
- Lack of jobs, particularly in the construction industry. due to the high unemployment rate caused by the recession
- Increased border security under the Obama administration
- Improvements in living conditions in Mexico, including a declining birth rate
The birth rate in Mexico has dropped from 6.8 children per woman in 1970 to 2.2 children today, according to Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
So far, politicians in the United States have ignored this new development. Aaron Terrazas, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., said, “No one is talking about the fact that it’s net zero. It holds enormous implications.”
