Rise in Family Migration from Mexico to the US
Mexican migration to the U.S. is surging, with entire families now predominating over single adults. This shift, driven by pandemic impacts and organized crime, saw family migrants rise from 1,000 in 2017 to nearly 40,000 in late 2023. Other nationalities also show significant increases.
Mexican mobility to the United States presents a dominant rebound above migrants of other nationalities and the “accelerated expansion of new flows” such as entire families, highlighted the researcher of the UNAM University Development Studies Program, Tonatiuh Guillén López. By participating in the cycle “You have a C.I.T.A. Science, Innovation, Technology, Academia in the C3 with the Mexican Academy of Sciences”, he explained:
This is a dramatic exodus “that we did not have” due, among other factors, to the impact of the pandemic situation, but also due to elements such as the violence carried out by members of organized crime in their places of origin, which has had an impact on a deterioration of the rule of law. The mobility of Mexicans as a family surpassed other modalities such as that of single adults, said the also former president of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte.
According to monthly figures presented by the former commissioner of the National Migration Institute, while in October 2017 approximately one thousand Mexican people grouped in families were registered on the southern border of the neighboring country to the north, in July 2022 they exceeded five thousand; but in November and December 2023 they almost reached 40 thousand, even above single adults who were around 29 thousand.
In the auditorium of the Center for Complexity Sciences, the specialist explained during his presentation that since April 2021, migrants to the southern border of the USA — from countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela—have also increased.
He said that in the case of Cuba, a peak occurred from December 2022 to January 2023 when around 43 thousand people were registered; In that same period, citizens from Nicaragua reached 35 thousand; and from Venezuela, in August 2023 it reached approximately 66 thousand.
At the academic meeting — moderated by Julia Tagüeña Parga, emeritus researcher at the Renewable Energy Institute —, Guillén López made a classification of periods of regional mobility to the United States.
He located 2008 and previous years as the Classic Era where Mexican migration was practically the only one that ventured to our neighboring country to the north, in addition to having as its characteristic the composition of single adults.
The so-called Central American Era (2009-2020) followed, in which there was a decline in Mexican mobility and expansion of the Central American flow and its predominance; and, finally, the current Post-COVID Era (2021-2024), with the rebound of the Mexican, the relative growth of the flow of Central American nations, where the dominant social composition is refugee seekers.
“Mexican mobility has been denied, that is, they seek to make this phenomenon invisible and, frankly, we are expanding in both categories, families and single adults,” he highlighted at the meeting in which Elba Gutiérrez Castillo, litigator in matters of asylum and access to justice; Patricia Mercado Sánchez, director of the information site, Conexión Migrante; and Sister María Magdalena Silva Rentería, from the Shelter, Training and Empowerment House for Migrant and Refugee Women and Families.
