The number of Mexicans crossing without immigration documents to the United States through the common border increased to levels never seen before, sources from the neighboring country indicated today.
The correspondents of the newspaper La Jornada in Washington and New York verified this fact by examining documents on the matter from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). That institution points out that the flows have changed dramatically in the last 10 years, with a decreasing percentage of Mexican migrants as the volume of Central American, South American and Caribbean migrants increases, but since 2017 there has been a new increase in absolute numbers.
Official data calculated by policy analyst Ariel Ruiz Soto of the MPI, indicate that the number of Mexicans intercepted by US officials at the border increased from 130,454 in 2017 to 738,780 in September 2022. The pattern from then to February 2023 suggests that this trend continues in the current year.
The attention of the media, politicians, and officials in the United States and Mexico has focused on migrants from other countries who have transited through this country on their journey to the north bank of the Rio Grande, but once in the United States, many of them have been returned.
Data on unauthorized crossings is not perfectly accurate, the report notes. Under the policies in place before the pandemic, the US government registered any individual intercepted crossing the border without documents. If those intercepted repeated their attempts, they could be subject to fines and even imprisonment in the United States.
But with the so-called Title 42 that established supposed public health emergency measures with the pandemic, the United States justified the mass expulsion of asylum seekers and other migrants. However, under that measure, no consequences were established for repeated attempts to enter the United States and therefore the count of “encounters” with undocumented immigrants could include individuals who were “found” on more than one occasion, they point out.
Even so, the statistics calculated by MPI continue to register an unprecedented number in the last decade of Mexicans crossing the border in 2022, part of the trend of the most recent years. Mexicans are the largest group in the migratory flow to the United States.
