Print-Friendly Version    

Almost 12 million Mexican-born residents live in the US, including some seven million who are unauthorized. Mexico has 110 million residents in 2009, suggesting that 10 percent of the 122 million people born in Mexico have moved to the US.

Most of Mexico's poverty is concentrated in the rural areas that were home to many of the Mexicans who have moved to the US. About 24 percent of Mexico's 108 million residents, 22 percent, live in 200,000 rural communities with fewer than 2,500 residents. Some 4.5 million Mexicans hold agricultural land titles, and 75 percent of title-holders are men. However, women do an increasing share of the work in many farming households because many men have migrated to the US or elsewhere in Mexico.

An August-September 2009 poll of 1,000 Mexicans in Mexico conducted for the Center for Immigration Studies found that most believe illegal migration to the US would increase if the US government announced a legalization program. Two-thirds of those polled knew someone living in the United States; a third had an immediate household member living in the United States. As with a similar Pew poll, over a third of Mexicans said they would move to the US if they could. Pew reported that half of the 36 million potential Mexican migrants were prepared to move illegally to the US.

Remittances to Mexico, $25 billion in 2008, are likely to fall to $21 billion in 2009, bringing hardship, especially to rural places where most breadwinners are in the US. About 10 percent of Mexico's 106 million residents depend in part on remittances. Reports from towns accustomed to receiving remittances emphasize that many remittance-funded construction projects have stopped.

3x1. Mexico has had a widely discussed 3x1 program since 2002 to match contributions made to Mexicans in the US via Hometown Associations to improve the infrastructure of migrant-sending areas of Mexico. The 3x1 program provides $3 in federal, state and local funds for each $1 contributed by HTAs for water, sewer, road and similar infrastructure projects. HTAs propose the projects, and Mexican government agencies vet and approve them before providing the matching funds.

The program operates in 27 of Mexico's 32 states, but most 3x1 funds are spent in the four western Mexican states that are the sources of most Mexicans in the US? Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Jalisco, and Michoac n.

The 3x1 program is very small in relation to Mexico's annual remittances? 458 million pesos ($38 million) in federal (Sedesol) funds were available in 2008, when 2,500 projects were supported. About 40 percent of these projects involved paving roads. The federal government contributes up to 800,000 pesos ($60,000) per project.

In 2008, a 1x1 Migrant Business Fund was established to provide subsidized loans to Mexicans in the US who want to invest in Mexico. Migrant entrepreneurs must submit business plans to the Mexican development agency Sedesol, which can grant up to 300,000 pesos ($22,600) to help establish a business in Mexico.

The movie "Sleep Dealer" imagines a world in which Mexicans in Mexico operate machinery in the US via remote control to pack meat, pick oranges, and build buildings. The premise of the movie is that the world is evolving into a place in which technology but not low-skilled workers cross borders, extending what the WTO calls cross-border trade in services, as with call centers, to many other jobs.