Americans increasingly moving south to Mexico
SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE, Mexico — Spanish friars brought their faith to this colonial city in Mexico’s central highlands.
The silver barons of the 18th century built its mansions. Now comes the pickleball invasion.
It started with just a few American retirees. These days, two dozen players fill the courts at the municipal sports center most mornings, swinging paddles at plastic balls. There are so many clubs in Mexico dedicated to the U.S. sport that a tournament was held here last year.
“It was a madhouse,” said Victor Guzmán, a 67-year-old entrepreneur from Charlotte, N.C., who helped pull the event together.
President Donald Trump regularly assails the flow of migrants crossing the Mexican border into the United States. Less noticed has been the surge of people heading in the opposite direction.
Mexico’s statistics institute estimated this month that the U.S.-born population in the country has reached 799,000 — a roughly fourfold increase since 1990. And that is probably an undercount. The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City estimates the real number is 1.5 million or more.
They’re a mixed group. They’re digital natives who can work just as easily from Puerto Vallarta as Palo Alto, Calif. They’re U.S.-born kids — nearly 600,000 of them — who’ve returned with their Mexicanborn parents. And they’re retirees like Guzmán, who settled in this city five years ago and is now essentially the pickleball king of San Miguel.
If the thousands of Mexicans moving home are taken into account, the flow of migrants from the U.S. to Mexico is probably larger than the flow of Mexicans to the United States.
The American immigrants are pouring money into local economies, renovating historic homes and changing the dynamics of Mexican classrooms. “It’s beginning to become a very important cultural phenomenon,” Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s foreign minister, said. “Like the Mexican community in the United States.”
Yet, he said Mexican authorities know little about the size or needs of their largest immigrant group. Ebrard has been tasked by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador with changing that.
While the U.S. is deeply divided over immigration, American immigrants here have largely been welcomed. In San Miguel — where about 10 percent of the city’s 100,000 residents are U.S. citizens — Mayor Luis Alberto Villareal delivers his annual State of the Municipality address in English and Spanish.
Thanksgiving is celebrated a few weeks after Mexico’s Day of the Dead. Restaurants have adopted “American timing” — serving dinner at the ungodly hour of 6 p.m. — the mayor reports.
“Despite the fact that Donald Trump insults my country every day, here we receive the entire international community, beginning with Americans, with open arms and hearts,” Villareal said.
Mexican authorities say that many of the Americans are undocumented — typically, they’ve overstayed their six-month visas. But the government has shown little concern. “We have never pressured them to have their documents in order,” Ebrard said.