The director of the Mexican Center for Migration and Development, Raúl Delgado, emphasized that the main cause of migration is the huge gap in living standards and development between countries receiving migration flows and those regions from which these flows originate. 'Today, over 28 million people of Mexican origin permanently reside in the United States, and another 11 million Mexicans are there illegally. According to official statistics, about 600,000 people leave Mexico for the north each year. These figures only concern migration to the United States, for which Mexico has been the main source of cheap and undemanding labor for decades. How many Mexicans set off in search of a better life to Canada, Australia, or European countries cannot be reliably counted. But even based on migration statistics to the United States, Mexico surpasses all other regions of the world,' the scientist noted.
In 2006, Mexican illegal migrants sent $24 billion to their families. Despite this, Delgado considers migration a true disaster for the country. 'This money is 97% spent on consumption of services and purchase of goods and food, without directly participating in economic development,' he says. 'We have counted 800 municipal associations in Mexico where population growth has regressed due to migration. Furthermore, according to our research, the qualitative composition of Mexican migration flows has seriously changed. If 10-15 years ago they consisted mainly of unskilled workers and middle-aged peasants, today more and more specialists, professionals, and young people, especially students who have just finished their education, are heading north,' the Mexican researcher emphasized.
He considers the 'trigger of the migration explosion' to be the Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the United States, and Canada, signed ten years ago. 'Over the past years, the agreement has failed to fulfill its main tasks: to give Mexico millions of new jobs and eliminate the gap in wage levels in the markets of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. On the contrary, the agreement has led to the ruin of tens of thousands of Mexican farms, which proved unable to compete with state-subsidized American agricultural products. It is this very circumstance that has influenced the increase in migration from Mexico. Furthermore, there is still a wage difference, for example, between a professor at a Mexican university and a window washer of New York skyscrapers. Not in the professor's favor, of course,' the scientist says with a wry smile.
According to him, the report contains a recommendation to seriously analyze the provisions of free trade agreements between developing and developed countries. As Mexican researchers believe, it is in these documents that the answers to many questions related to the problem of growing migration in the world lie.
Based on materials from RIA Novosti.