More Mexicans are Crossing the Border - to Leave the US. Here's One Family's Story Daniel Connolly - PRI's The World
go to original January 31, 2017

Dustin Ramos, left, waits with his parents at a Memphis bus station. Dustin was born in America. His parents crossed the desert to come to America from Mexico. In 2015, they decided to leave their sons in Memphis and return to their native country. (Karen Pulfer Focht/PRI)

In December 2015, a family arrived at Memphis' Greyhound bus terminal, a modern, spacious new building near the airport. The parents, Mexican immigrants, were about to say goodbye to their three Mexican American sons.



The parents planned to board a bus that would carry them from Tennessee to Dallas, where they would take a plane to Mexico, a country they hadn't seen for almost 13 years.

...The mother and father had entered the country illegally, and once they left, would have no right to return to the US. Years might pass before the whole family sees each other again. In the meantime, the two older sons would take care of Dustin.

But Mario Ramos and his wife Cristina Vargas weren't being deported. Like many Mexican immigrants, they were simply choosing to go home. They told me it had nothing to do with President-elect Donald Trump, a mere candidate at the time of their departure in 2015.

Modern immigration from Mexico is the largest migration in history from any single country to the US, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Despite Trump's statements about ongoing illegal immigration from Mexico, however, Pew researchers have concluded that around the time of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, Mexican immigration to this country slowed dramatically.

Not only did fewer Mexicans come to this country, many Mexicans went home. Between 2009 and 2014, slightly more than one million Mexicans and their US-born children left the US for Mexico.

Read the rest at PRI's The World

Related: What It's Like to Return to Mexico, from the Perspectives of Three Kids Who Grew Up North of the Border (PRI's The World)

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