Migration

Mexican migration to the United States

Migration is a phenomenon that has existed for a very long time. It has served as a vehicle for the transmission of ideas, customs, traditions, technological, artistic, and culinary exchange. Migration has changed its patterns through time, in the past, the migration flow was from northern industrialized countries to countries in the south, where there were opportunities for development. Today, migration has had an inverse process, where people who migrate from their developing countries to northern developed countries, to countries with high GDP levels, from countries with high unemployment rates to countries with reasonable levels of employment, from countries with serious problems of poverty to countries with a better quality of life.

It is estimated that at present, almost 23 million inhabitants of Mexican origin reside in the United States (legal and illegal immigrants who have settled in the US). This represents about 8% of the total population of the USA. Around 10 million of them are Mexican born, and 4 million of them are undocumented.

We share with the United States a 3,000-kilometer border. Approximately 1 million people cross the border coming and going every day with legal documents. Roughly three thousand people cross the border every day through rivers, deserts, climbing border walls, risking their lives. At least one thousand of these illegal Mexican migrants reach their destination every day and stay in the US to work and usually stay for 3 to 4 years. Consequently, at least three hundred thousand Mexican undocumented migrant workers stay in the United States every year. (Riestra Venegas, Mario, 2002)

Despite the fact that one out of every Mexicans lives in the United States, Mexico still does not see itself as a country of emigrants. This absence of national consciousness has to do with a century long

...