By: Lauren Villagran | USA TODAY
Marta Castillo is angry about immigration. There are too many migrants in her town, she said, and they don’t speak the language.
“We’ve been invaded,” she said, standing outside her job at a restaurant. “I changed my opinion (about them), because I live in a place where we didn’t see any of this. But now everywhere there are people who aren’t from here.”
Castillo is Mexican. She lives in Mexico. Like a growing number of her fellow citizens, she’s become increasingly negative about the migrants who have poured into her community – despite living in a country where millions of people have ties to someone who migrated to the United States.
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House, he is demanding Mexico do more to crack down on the tens of thousands of migrants who are in Mexico, headed for the U.S. border. He may find support in an unlikely corner ‒ among Mexicans themselves.
It wasn’t long ago that most Mexicans could say they had family or a friend who had gone to “el norte” to work or escape violence and insecurity. But the changing demographics of migration – first the rise in the number of Central Americans, then Haitians, then Venezuelans, then people from all over the globe – has hardened some Mexicans’ views.
Seven in 10 Mexicans believe that migrant flows into their country are “excessive,” according to a survey by the nonprofit Oxfam Mexico published in 2023. More than half of respondents said they believe migration has a negative or no positive impact on the economy or culture, and 40% think migration in Mexico should be limited or prohibited.
The budding anti-migrant sentiment has led to occasional flare-ups of protest or violence and prompted the United Nations refugee agency to conduct its own poll of public views on migration in Mexico.
That survey, published in October, found nearly a third of respondents believed migrants should only be allowed to transit rapidly through Mexico to the U.S., while 13% believed their border should be closed and migrants deported. By contrast, in the United States, 55% of respondents in a June 2024 Gallup poll said they want to see immigration decreased.
In Mexico, “among the general public, the idea of diversity hasn’t been normalized,” said Emilio Gonzalez Gonzalez, a senior assistant for migrant protection at the United Nations refugee agency in Mexico City, known as ACNUR. “There are stereotypes and stigmas.”
Patience for migrants runs thin
Migration to the U.S. was a tradition in Mexico and still is.
U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended Mexican nationals more than half a million times in each of the past two years, remaining the single-largest nationality encountered at the border.
But at home, Mexicans are increasingly facing immigration issues similar to those seen in the United States. They’re wrestling with questions like how to accommodate and provide for people arriving with few resources, who don’t speak Spanish.
In recent years, a tent city has flourished in a stone-floored plaza in the heart of Mexico City’s historic center. In late September, migrants battled rain and filth from their camping tents and makeshift lean-tos. Many were waiting for appointments at the U.S. border or to chance an illegal crossing, evading Mexican authorities on routes north.
Venezuelans waited in line for a free breakfast served inside a cavernous Catholic church. Haitians speaking Creole washed their children in the street. A French-speaking Angolan woman tended a chicken boiling over an open fire.
The Mexican neighbors who live near the plaza have grown frustrated. Anger boiled over in February, when local media reported police responded to a physical altercation between locals and Haitians in which two people were injured.
Negative views in Mexico tend to be stoked by proximity, especially when large numbers of people take up in encampments, said Tony Payan, executive director of the Center for the U.S. and Mexico at Rice University.
People are generally supportive of migration “if immigrants are in a shelter locked away and don’t affect their day to day,” he said. “As soon as they feel there is interference with their daily activities, then the underlying racism, prejudice and xenophobia become apparent.”
Ten blocks west of the tent city, tourists bustled through the city’s Zocalo public square, marveling at the grand cathedral and the ruins of an Aztec temple.
Castillo, the restaurant worker, stood on a corner hawking breakfast and the restaurant’s fourth-story view. She lives in a suburb of the city, she said, where hundreds of migrants have arrived in recent months.
“I understand and comprehend that in the country they came from, they’re going through a difficult situation, but everyone should resolve their problems in their own country,” she said.
Raul Priviesca Zara expressed similar concerns. At a newsstand in a nearby shopping district, the 71-year-old Mexico City resident said he worries – as many Americans do – that migrants bring crime.
“There are many Venezuelans and Cubans who come here to steal, to make their mafia,” he said as he looked over the day’s headlines. “We’re giving them asylum and refuge so they can steal from our people. I agree that we should help people, just not those who come to steal or do crime – and the majority come for that.”
According to the United Nations refugee agency, migrants in Mexico commit crimes at lower rates than the general population, just as they do in the United States. In Mexico, migrants are more likely to be victims of crime, preyed upon by smugglers and corrupt authorities alike.
The agency’s survey of Mexican perceptions showed 85% of respondents believe people migrate for economic reasons. Meanwhile more than half of migrants themselves, responding to United Nations’ surveys, say they are fleeing violence or insecurity, said Gonzalez Gonzalez.
Among the Mexicans polled, “few understand that migrants arrive fleeing violence,” he said, even though Mexican migrants have also fled to the U.S. to escape violence tied to organized crime.
Mexico adopts U.S.-style immigration enforcement
Alexandra Haas, now executive director of Oxfam Mexico, has followed the evolving patterns of migration for more than a decade. Beginning with the migrant caravans in 2018, Haas began to note a shift in public opinion – a spate of angry protests in Tijuana in the north, outbreaks of violence in the southern city of Palenque. Sill, there were contradictions.
“I could see expressions of solidarity, people leaving clothes and food,” she said. “But on the other hand, in some cities migrants faced some rejection. I thought we didn’t really know what the Mexican public thought of migration.”
Oxfam launched a survey in 2022 and a research project that included evaluating more than 48,000 social media posts that mentioned migrants or migration.
One of the messages that emerged, Haas said, is that Mexicans “are not so much preoccupied with migration but with the lack of capacity by Mexican institutions to deal with problems” that can come with it.
The other finding, according to the Oxfam report, was that Mexico’s immigration policies “based on repression, containment and deportation … have steered the public conversation toward racist, classist and xenophobic discourse.”
Mexico’s laws provide ample protections for migrants. The country has its own refugee agency that processes asylum claims. But in practice – under pressure from the United States – Mexico is leaning more and more on U.S.-style enforcement, including blocking migrants from traveling north and curbing access to asylum.
Mexico has “accepted a de facto outsourcing of U.S. enforcement-driven migration policies,” said Arturo Sarukhan, former Mexican ambassador to the U.S.
Mexico’s Interior Ministry reported more 925,000 migrant encounters in the first eight months of 2024, more than double the 440,000 encounters registered in 2022.
The surging number of migrant encounters reflect, in part, Mexico’s policy of apprehending migrants on routes north and transporting them back south multiple times. At the same time, the country’s refugee agency, known as COMAR, is processing far fewer applications for lawful refugee status, less than half the rate of a year ago.
Mexico stepped up its immigration enforcement earlier this year after the U.S. saw record-breaking crossings in December 2023, and the Biden-Harris administration asked for more enforcement.
U.S. State Department officials told USA TODAY in September that Mexico agreed to harden its enforcement of migrant routes north, “not just out of the kindness of their hearts, but also recognizing this was an important challenge to them,” the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak freely about the bilateral discussions.
Mexico has its own migrant roots
The quiet shift in Mexico, from broad acceptance of migration to an increasingly negative view, echoes a similar shift in the United States, where more than 76 million people voted for Trump, who has promised a “mass deportation” of immigrants living in the U.S. without permission.
Mexico could now face the prospect of millions of its own people being deported.
At the high point of Mexican migration in 2007, there were nearly 7 million Mexicans – roughly 7% of Mexico’s population – living unlawfully in the United States, according Pew Research and Mexico’s INEGI census agency. Today, according to Pew, there are roughly 4 million Mexicans living illegally in the U.S.
Then, “almost everybody in Mexico had a friend or relative who had migrated (to the U.S.),” said Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America. “They would view migrants as brothers, ‘just like us.’ Now when you hear somebody talking that way, it’s a throwback.”
Many Mexicans do remember their close connections to migration.
Outside the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, a family – father, mother and their toddler daughter – strolled along the tree-shaded Reforma boulevard. They were killing time before their appointment to request a travel visa to the United States and were in town from Michoacan, a state in southern Mexico where migrating to work in the U.S. has been a tradition going back decades.
“People simply go in search of better opportunities,” said Ernesto Anguiano Ayala, who said he has family in California. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad. But people go there for a better life, for their babies.”
“Just like others have a right to look for a better future here in Mexico, maybe one day we’ll want to look for a better life in another place, too,” said Jessica Hernandez, holding their young daughter. “So there should be equality.”
