January 28, 2008

A Review of Two New Reports on Mexican Migration

Frontera NorteSur

Two new studies have reconfirmed the central place of migration in Mexican life. In one new report, The World Bank ranked Mexico as the number one expeller of economic migrants in the world, even ahead of Russia and India. According to The World Bank, 11.5 million Mexico citizens have left their homeland, principally for the United States. Relatively unskilled migrants are not the only ones making the trek north. The World Bank reported that while 2.4 percent of doctors in all of Latin America have emigrated, more than double the percentage of Mexican doctors, or 5 percent, have left their country.

The World Bank defines the 2,000-mile border between Mexico and the United States as the biggest "migration corridor" in the world. In its study, The World Bank found that 10.3 million migrants crossed the border zone in a five-year period, putting the region far ahead of the next largest corridor, Russia-Ukraine, where 4.8 million people crossed in a similar time period.

In a second new study, the School of Economics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) reported a dramatic leap in the number of Mexican households receiving remittances from abroad between 1995 and 2005. According to researchers, the number of such households jumped almost seven-fold from 600,000 to 4.1 million in the ten year period examined. Researchers estimated that rural migration alone increased 40 percent during the last six years.

As in previous studies, the UNAM faculty discovered that little remittance money was invested in long-term economic development projects. Instead, more than three-quarters of all remittances were spent on food, rent and healthcare. Simply put, most money from migrants abroad went to the basic survival needs of recipients back home. What's more, the UNAM study did not find a correlation between increased remittance income and the quality of life in rural zones. Because of low wages and increases in the prices of basic necessities, the study contended that the quality of life of rural residents decreased by 44 percent between December 1, 2000 and December 1, 2007.

Given the life raft function of remittances in Mexico, increasing concern is being voiced by many observers about the potential effects of the wobbling United States economy on the economy south of the border. Although some analysts had predicted an absolute decrease in remittances sent from the United States last year because of immigration law crackdowns as well as the economic slowdown, especially in the construction industry, The World Bank study estimated that migrants sent US$25 billion in remittances to Mexico in 2007. If accurate, the sum represents a one percent increase above the 2006 figure.

Sources:  La Jornada, January 20 and January 24, 2008. Articles by Patricia Muñoz Rios and Roberto Gonzalez Amador.

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Frontera NorteSur (FNS)

Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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(Reprinted with authorization from Frontera NorteSur, a free, on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news source.)

Translation FNS