The ebbing Mexican wave

FROM A VANTAGE point on a scrubby hillside south of San Diego, Mike Jiménez, an agent with the United States Border Patrol, gazes across the Mexican frontier into Tijuana. For decades the poor neighbourhood of Colonia Libertad, rammed up against the border fence, has served as a base for illicit crossings. From its tin rooftops scouts peer over to the United States, monitoring the movements of Mr Jiménez and his colleagues and relaying their positions by mobile phone to migrants as they creep across the border. Mr Jiménez has little time for the coyotes who guide people into the United States. “They don’t care about lives, they care about the money they’re going to make. If someone twists an ankle or breaks their leg, they leave them behind,” he says. On average, one person dies every day trying to cross the 2,000-mile border.
The decades-old game of cat and mouse between Mexican migrants and la Migra, as the American migration authorities are known, has historically been a fairly one-sided contest. About one in ten Mexican citizens, 12m in total, live in America, half of them illegally. This makes for the biggest immigrant community in the world. (The wider Mexican-American community, including the American-born offspring of immigrants, comes to about 33m.) After Mexico City, the world’s biggest collection of Mexican citizens is found not in Guadalajara or Monterrey but in Los Angeles.

But the Mexican wave has ebbed. Between 1995 and 2000 some 3m Mexicans moved to the United States, vastly outnumbering the 700,000 or so who returned to Mexico. Yet in 2005-10 the number of newcomers slumped to 1.4m, whereas that of returners increased to a matching 1.4m, according to estimates by the Pew Hispanic Centre, a Washington, DC, think-tank. It thinks that now there are probably more people departing than arriving. La Migra has noted the same trend. In 2000 the Border Patrol foiled 1.6m attempts to cross the frontier. Last year the figure was just 286,000, the lowest for 40 years. The world’s biggest migration has gone into reverse.

Back and forth
Mass migration from Mexico to the United States is a fairly recent phenomenon. Only 40 years ago the United States had more immigrants from Canada, Germany and Italy than from Mexico. The Mexican wave swelled in the 1970s and kept growing in the 1980s and 1990s (see chart 7) as a rocky Mexican economy propelled more migrants north and a relaxed American immigration policy made it easy for more to settle. In 2000, the peak year, more than 750,000 Mexicans crossed the border.
The flow has gone into reverse because the rewards for going north have diminished and the risks have increased. Mexicans emigrate for jobs, and there are fewer of them available than there used to be. In 2000 unemployment in the United States was around 4%; it is double that now, and almost double Mexico’s rate. The construction industry in the United States, in which many migrants toil, has been especially badly hit. Migrants are also missing out because Americans are eating out less, cleaning their own homes and firing their gardeners. Deportations have increased, to about 300,000 a year. But now even those who have been turfed out are lukewarm about going back. In past surveys by Pew, about eight out of ten of them said they would try to return as soon as possible. Now it is six out of ten.
At the same time getting into the United States has become much harder. Crossing from Tijuana into San Diego used to be a matter of dashing over the frontier in a group that was too big for the border agents to stop. These days the San Diego border is a fearsome thing to cross. Two lines of fencing, one topped with razor wire, are monitored by night-vision cameras mounted on towers. Border Patrol agents—more than 21,000 nationwide, making up America’s biggest law-enforcement agency—scoot around on quad bikes. There are seismic sensors to detect footsteps and ground-penetrating radar to scan for tunnels. Robots are sent into sewers to check for holes burrowed into the system. Americans caught helping migrants often used to be let off, but now they are usually prosecuted first time around.

The favourite place to cross now is the Arizona desert, which involves a 72-hour trudge with scorching days and freezing nights

Tijuana, which used to be the most popular place for illegal crossings from south to north, has fallen out of favour. In some years in the 1990s half a million Mexicans were apprehended trying to cross into San Diego, nearly half the total caught along the entire border. Last year Mr Jiménez and his colleagues stopped just 42,000, barely a tenth of the national total. The favourite place to cross now is the Arizona desert, which few people attempted in the past because it involves a 72-hour trudge with scorching days and freezing nights.
Getting into the United States has become dicier still since Mexico’s criminal gangs realised that migrants made good extortion targets. “The obstacle course doesn’t begin at the border, it begins in northern Mexico,” says David Scott Fitzgerald, a migration expert at the University of California at San Diego. His surveys in small Mexican towns have found that whereas the main perceived risk used to be natural hazards—rivers, animals, the desert—these days the biggest worry is gang violence. The fear is well-founded. Mexico’s human-rights commission estimates that each year some 20,000 Central and South American migrants are kidnapped while travelling through Mexico. Mass graves discovered in the border state of Tamaulipas in 2010 and 2011 contained nearly 300 bodies.
Meanwhile many rich Mexicans have fled from places that are no longer safe for the conspicuously wealthy. Texan cities such as Brownsville and McAllen have seen an influx of well-to-do Mexicans who live north of the border while continuing to manage their businesses in Matamoros or Monterrey. San Diego neighbourhoods such as East Lake are home to many wealthy exiles from Baja California.
Bienvenidos a Tijuana
Nowadays most of those who pass through Tijuana are on their way south. The Instituto Madre Assunta, a shelter for women and child migrants in Tijuana’s hilly outskirts, accommodates about 120 people a month, offering board and lodging along with legal advice and internet access. Ten years ago the centre dealt almost exclusively with migrants heading north, says Mary Galván, its director. Now virtually all are women who have just left the United States, many of them unwillingly. “Some were taken [to the US] as babies. They arrive in shock—some don’t even know the pueblo where they used to live,” says Ms Galván.
The women in the shelter have mixed plans. Ángela, in her 40s, is hoping to visit her family in Oaxaca before going back to San Bernadino, California, with the help of a coyote. There she had a job in a plastics-recycling plant, earning $250 a week, compared with the paltry 54 pesos ($4.20) a day that she says she would earn in Oaxaca. Rosa, who has lived in the United States for 24 years, is also determined to go back. “I’ve spent half my life in America. It’s so strange to be back. When they say 20 pesos I think 20 dollars,” she says. A younger woman who doesn’t give her name is planning to return to her home state of Guerrero with her four children. “It’s uglier here,” she admits. But crossing the border is so difficult these days that she will stay.
The increase in new arrivals has put pressure on the city. About 400 people are deposited there every day. Víctor Clark Alfaro, of the Binational Centre for Human Rights, estimates that about a third come from prisons or are members of gangs. Tattooed, speaking broken Spanish and sporting weird American fashions (enormous trousers currently seem to be in), they find it hard to get work. One willing employer is organised crime, which likes to recruit young men with links to the drug retailers of San Diego neighbourhoods such as Barrio Logan. To ease the pressure on the border, the American authorities have started flying some deported people to Mexico City. The Tijuana government is also trying to move them on. “It’s cheaper for the city to pay for a ticket and for them to go back to their places of origin,” says Carlos Bustamante, the mayor.
But even the millions of Mexicans who remain abroad are firmly plugged into life back home. Phone calls from the United States to Mexico add up to more hours than to the whole of western Europe. Mexican expats pay little attention to politics at home: only 40,000 bothered to vote in Mexico’s presidential election this year, even though if all of them had voted they could easily have changed the result. But they play an active part in their home country’s economic life. Last year Mexicans abroad, overwhelmingly in the United States, sent $22.8 billion to their families. Payments from the United States to Mexico make up by far the world’s biggest stream of remittances, bringing in more foreign currency than does tourism.
Inflows have not yet returned to the heights of 2007, when they topped $26 billion, but they are recovering. As in other parts of the world, remittances have been surprisingly resilient during the financial crisis, notes Marcelo Giugale of the World Bank. “Migrant workers [in the United States] have enough money to live on, but the people at home need every dollar. So they think, ‘I won’t do restaurants or movies any more, but I’ll keep sending money to Mamá’,” he says.
Remittances will be boosted by a growing trend for Mexicans in the United States to have their papers in order. According to Pew, between 2007 and 2011 the undocumented Mexican population there fell from 7m to 6.1m and the legal population rose from 5.6m to 5.8m. Being legally resident improves migrants’ potential earnings and entitles them to the same social-security benefits as other workers. (Fiscally, America has done rather well out of illegal immigrants: many of them pay social-security contributions under a false identity, so they cannot claim many of the benefits that they are paying for.) On present trends, by the time this report is published there will be more legal than illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States. That must be good for people on both sides of the