Roughly 10% of Mexico's population of about 107 million is now living in the United States

Carolyn Lochhead:

The current migration of Mexicans and Central Americans to the United States is one of the largest diasporas in modern history, experts say.

Roughly 10 percent of Mexico's population of about 107 million is now living in the United States, estimates show. About 15 percent of Mexico's labor force is working in the United States. One in every 7 Mexican workers migrates to the United States.

Mass migration from Mexico began more than a century ago. It is deeply embedded in the history, culture and economies of both nations. The current wave began with Mexico's economic crisis in 1982, accelerated sharply in the 1990s with the U.S. economic boom, and today has reached record dimensions.

It is unlikely to ebb anytime soon.

"There is no scenario outside of catastrophic attack on the United States that would make immigration stop," said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

The fierce immigration debate now under way in Congress focuses almost exclusively on the U.S. side of the equation. Senate legislation attempts to reduce the flow by hardening the border, sanctioning employers who hire illegal migrants, and expanding avenues for legal immigration. The House passed a bill focused solely on U.S. enforcement.

Yet whatever the United States decides about immigration will have a huge impacton its closest neighbors, especially Mexico.

What happens in Mexico, by turn, has a big effect on immigration flows to the United States. Those events include a hotly contested election six weeks away that pits a leftist populist against a market-oriented heir to President Vicente Fox.

"We want Mexico to look like Canada," said Stephen Haber, director of Stanford University's Social Science History Institute and a Latin America specialist at the Hoover Institution. "That's the optimal for the United States. We never talk about instability in Canada. We're never concerned about a Canadian security problem. Because Canada is wealthy and stable. It's so wealthy and stable we barely know it's there most of the time. That's the optimal for Mexico: a wealthy and stable country."

What isn't wanted, Haber said, "is an unstable country on your border, especially an unstable country that hates you."

Three-quarters of the estimated 12 million illegal migrants in the United States come from Mexico and Central America. Mexicans make up 56 percent of the unauthorized U.S. migrant population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Another 22 percent come from elsewhere in Latin America, mainly Central America and the Andean countries. These same countries send many of the half-million new illegal immigrants who arrive each year.

Migration is profoundly altering Mexico and Central America. Entire rural communities are nearly bereft of working-age men. The town of Tendeparacua, in the Mexican state of Michoacan, had 6,000 residents in 1985, and now has 600, according to news reports. In five Mexican states, the money migrants send home exceeds locally generated income, one study found.

Last year, Mexico received a record $20 billion in remittances from migrant workers. That is equal to Mexico's 2004 income from oil exports and dwarfing tourism revenue.

Arriving in small monthly transfers of $100 and $200, remittances have formed a vast river of "migra-dollars" that now exceeds lending by multilateral development agencies and foreign direct investment combined, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.

The money Mexican migrants send home almost equals the U.S. foreign aid budget for the entire world, said Arturo Valenzuela, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University and former head of Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.

"Where are we going to come up with $20 billion?" to ensure stability in Mexico, Valenzuela asked at a recent conference. "Has anybody in the raging immigration debate over the last few weeks thought, could it be good for the fundamental interests of the United States ... to serve as something of a safety valve for those that can't be employed in Mexico?"

Migration has caused significant social disruption in Mexico, though research is scant, said B. Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University.

"We do know that it can break up families, and has done so in many traditional sending areas," he said. "The husband comes to the United States and stays for many years. His wife is on her own with the children. In some cases, the couple comes to the United States and leaves their children behind with relatives."

The migration is driven in part, experts say, by the large income differentials between the two nations. A rural Latin American migrant may earn 10 times in the United States what he or she can earn at home.

But an equally intense pull comes from U.S. employers, including private households, who employ large numbers of illegal immigrants as nannies, housekeepers and caregivers, said Jeffery Passel, a senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center.

The U.S. information economy has created a split labor market, one with a powerful demand for high- and low-skilled workers, economists say.

While U.S. professionals toil in office buildings, others come to clean their offices, prepare their food and provide the host of services that support modern life. In a bygone era, teenagers, women and rural U.S. migrants filled these jobs. The U.S. labor market offers opportunities to "a younger, vibrant labor force and Mexican immigration has been filling that void," said Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, director of the Mexico Project for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

U.S. demand has driven a record increase in wages for newly arrived immigrants, about 30 percent between 1994 and 2000, according to Lowell. The migration has also raised average wages in Mexico by 8 to 9 percent, economists estimate. As the first U.S. Baby Boomers turn 60 this year, this demand is only expected to intensify.

Once migration starts, social and economic networks sustain and fuel it, which explains in part why flows have not fallen despite solid economic growth in Mexico.

Most illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America have not completed high school, although education levels are rising. Harvard economist George Borjas found that in 2000, 63 percent of Mexican immigrants had not finished high school.

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