Hispanic Immigration Down With Economy

By Conor Dougherty
The economy has pushed Mexican immigration to the lowest level in a decade, according this Journal article. But even though the economy has fallen hard on Latino laborers in the U.S., immigrants here aren’t returning home, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

The reasons for this are also economic: Mexican immigrants risk their lives on the way here, in the process spending most everything they’ve got. Between stepped up border patrol, the high cost of “coyotes” who ferry undocumented workers across the border and Mexico’s own economic problems, immigrants already here have no incentive to return home.

“The sense I get from these numbers is that for the undocumented immigrants it’s been expensive and dangerous to get into the United States,” Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew Hispanic, in an interview. “Given that they’re here, going back has both some immediate cost and has some potential cost to them because it’s going to be expensive and dangerous if they want to come back to the U.S.”

The movement of Hispanics into and around the U.S. has long been one of the more reliable economic indicators. In the boom years the growing number of construction and service jobs prompted many Hispanics to move away from the coasts and traditional gateway cities like Los Angeles, while new immigrants increasingly bypassed cities for the suburbs. And, as today’s Journal story notes, fewer Hispanics are showing up at all. The number of Mexicans, both legal and illegal, immigrating to the U.S. is down about 75% from its 2005 peak. Pew Hispanic estimates that the Mexican immigrant population in the U.S. slipped to 11.5 million from 11.6 million between March 2008 and March 2009, according to the story.

With the economy in recession, the spread of diversity around the country has slowed as cities and traditional gateway states reclaim their status as the big go to places for immigrants in search of work.

The results of this “Hispanic immigration indicator” are echoed in this report, released today from the Brookings Institution. The report notes that suburbs, and especially the outer lying areas known as exurbs, have been hit harder than in the last recession.