Americans make up Mexico’s largest group of immigrants

TIJUANA, Mexico — They come for the tacos. Or the music. Or the nightlife.

They stay to live a less-expensive lifestyle or to retire in a casita in the sand.

Americans immigrants living the Mexican dream can have the same hopes and goals of the Mexican immigrant in the United States: to get a little ahead or to start a new life.

There may be more Americans living south-of-the-border than previously noticed.

Last month, Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador tasked his foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, with gathering data on U.S. immigrants, who also go largely undocumented.

The Mexican government determined Americans are actually Mexico’s largest group of immigrants.

Lopez Obrador mentioned the southbound surge last week during a speech in Tijuana promoting friendship between the two countries.

“A little-cited fact is that in Mexico, there are about 1.2 million Americans. That is, our two countries are protagonists of the largest demographic exchange in the world,” said Lopez Obrador.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City said the figure might be an undercount, because many Americans overstay their visa.

They estimated there are more than 1.5 million U.S.born citizens in Mexico, including some 600,000 U.S.born children of Mexican parents whose families have returned home.

For 34-year-old Josh Nichols, who moved to Mexico City three years ago and now lives in Tijuana, it wasn’t the cheaper rent or the nightlife or the beaches.

He fell in love with the culture and the pace of his lifestyle south of the border.

“(Here) I probably get to spend a lot more of my time just socializing, especially with people that I don’t know,” said Nichols. “One of the things I really like about Mexico is just that people tend to be more open.”

Nichols mentioned the Spanish word convivencia, which literally translates to coexistence, but he said he doesn’t think the translation gives the full context of the word.

“You know how the Eskimos have so many different words for snow? If you interact with something more, you have more vocabulary to describe that thing,” he said. “I don’t know that we have a word in the United States for just sharing time with one another and I think that word reflects a big cultural difference between the two countries.”

President Donald Trump has made bemoaning northbound immigration the cornerstone of his presidency, initially targeting Mexicans and then Central Americans.

But, the number of unauthorized Mexicans living in the U.S. has fallen by 2 million people during the last decade or so, from 6.9 million in 2007 to 4.9 million in 2017, according to Pew Research Center.

The number of Mexicans living in the United States declined so sharply over the past decade that Mexicans are no longer the country’s largest demographic of undocumented migrants. Many are returning home.

Apprehensions of Mexicans at the U.S. border also dropped from a high of 1.6 million in 2000 to 152,257 in 2018. For the third consecutive fiscal year, apprehensions of non-Mexicans outnumbered those of Mexicans.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans living in Mexico has increased by more than four times since 1990, according to federal data.

For Nichols, who left Colorado several years ago, the sense of community is stronger in Mexico, and he has some ideas about why.

“If you’re rich, you have access to lots of materials. If you get sick, you can buy medicine. If you get bored, you can buy entertainment. And you can basically be a terrible person if you want to without it necessarily affecting your survival,” said Nichols.

“But if you’re poor, there might be a day when you don’t have food. Or you get sick and you need your neighbor to take care of you. So, you have to be nice and you have to maintain those relationships with your family and your neighbor and your community. You need to have people around you that are going to bring you food. I see that all the time in Mexico,” he said.