Posted on July 15, 2011

The Mexican-American Boom: Births Overtake Immigration

Pew Hispanic Center, July 14, 2011

Births

have overtaken immigration as the main driver of the dynamic growth in the U.S.

Hispanic population. This new trend is especially evident among the largest of

all Hispanic groups–Mexican-Americans, according to a new analysis of U.S.

Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research

Center.

 

In the

decade from 2000 to 2010, the Mexican-American population grew by 7.2 million

as a result of births and 4.2 million as a result of new immigrant arrivals.

This is a change from the previous two decades when the number of new

immigrants either matched or exceeded the number of births.

 

The

current surge in births among Mexican-Americans is largely attributable to the

immigration wave that has brought more than 10 million immigrants to the United

States from Mexico since 1970. Between 2006 and 2010 alone, more than half

(53%) of all Mexican-American births were to Mexican immigrant parents. As a

group, these immigrants are more likely than U.S.-born Americans to be in their

prime child-bearing years. They also have much higher fertility.

 

Meanwhile,

the number of new immigrant arrivals from Mexico has fallen off steeply in

recent years. According to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis of Mexican government

data, the number of Mexicans annually leaving Mexico for the U.S. declined from

more than one million in 2006 to 404,000 in 2010-a 60% reduction. This is likely a result of recent

developments in both the U.S. and Mexico. On the U.S. side, declining job

opportunities and increased border enforcement (Passel and Cohn, 2009)

may have made the U.S. less attractive to potential Mexican immigrants. And in

Mexico, recent strong economic growth may have reduced the “push” factors that

often lead Mexicans to emigrate to the U.S.

 

As a

result, there were fewer new immigrant arrivals to the U.S. from Mexico in the

2000s (4.2 million) than in the 1990s (4.7 million). However, the Mexican-American

population continued to grow rapidly, with births accounting for 63% of the

11.2 million increase from 2000 to 2010.

 

At 31.8

million in 2010, Mexican-Americans comprise 63% of the U.S. Hispanic population

and 10% of the total U.S. population (Ennis, Ríos-Vargas and Albert, 2011). According to Pew Hispanic Center tabulations from the

March 2010 U.S. Current Population Survey, 39% of Mexican-Americans-or 12.4

million-are immigrants. With the

exception of Russia, no other country in the world has as many immigrants from

all countries as the U.S. has from Mexico alone. Nor does any country in the world have

as many citizens living abroad as does Mexico. According to the World Bank

(2011), more than 10% of Mexico’s native-born population lives elsewhere, with

the vast majority (97%) of these expatriates living in the United States.

 

Overall,

the Hispanic population of the United States grew from 35.3 million in 2000 to

50.5 million in 2010, accounting for more than half of the nation’s overall

population growth during that decade (Passel, Cohn and Lopez, 2011). Some 58% of this Hispanic population increase came from

births rather than the arrival of new immigrants. However, for many

non-Mexican-origin Hispanic groups in the U.S., births accounted for less than

half of their population growth in the past decade. For example, from 2000 to

2010, births accounted for just 38% of the growth of the Cuban-American

population and just 39% of the growth of the population of U.S. Hispanics of

Central or South American origin.

 

Hispanics

now comprise 16.3% of the total U.S. population. This share is projected to

rise to 29% by the middle of this century, with the bulk of the future increase

driven by births, many the descendents of today’s immigration wave, rather than

the arrival of new immigrants. (Passel and Cohn, 2008).

 

Read the full

report at pewhispanic.org.