"If It's So Great There, Why Are They All Coming Here?"

An answer to the most annoying question my fellow Americans ask me about Mexico now that I'm here and loving it

I offer my news, investigative and analytical writing freely, but your support is appreciated and necessary. Please like, comment, share and subscribe, paid if you’re able. You may also leave a tip in any amount. Thanks!

---

Another angry ‘murican who thinks Mexicans are actually flooding across our border because the Sam’s Club TEEvee said so.

Every time I write about Mexico — the museums, the safety, the food, the fact that I walked home alone at midnight through Mexico City feeling more at ease than I ever did in an American parking garage — the same reply lands in my inbox like a wet sock.

“If it’s so great there, why are they all coming here?”

The question is asked with the smugness of a person who believes they’ve just delivered checkmate. In fact, they’ve delivered a confession. They’ve confessed to knowing nothing about Mexico, nothing about migration, nothing about their own country’s history, and nothing about the difference between a Mexican national, a Mexican American, and the 65 million people the US Census lumps together as “Latino.” The question is a matryoshka doll of ignorance, and today, dear readers, we’re going to open every layer.

Pour yourself a café de olla. This will take a minute.

First problem: “They” aren’t all coming here. They mostly stopped coming twenty years ago.

Let’s start with the factual rot at the center of the question, because everything else grows out of it.

Net migration from Mexico to the United States — the number arriving minus the number leaving — fell to zero around 2008, and then went negative. That finding comes from the Pew Research Center, hardly a radical outfit, which reported back in 2012 that the largest immigration wave in modern history had come to a standstill: more Mexicans were leaving the United States than entering it. That trend has held, with fluctuations, ever since. The great wave the question imagines — the ceaseless tide of Mexicans pouring north — crested when George W. Bush was president. It has been receding for nearly two decades. That any of you think otherwise is a testament to the high quality of the anti-Mexican propaganda you consume.

The recent numbers are even more dramatic. Border Patrol encounters at the southern border in fiscal year 2025 fell to their lowest level since 1970 — since before I was born. And in 2025, for the first time since the 1960s, the total foreign-born population of the United States shrank. More immigrants left the country than arrived. Not because they’re afraid of Donald Trump and Kristi Noem. Because they realize what the rest of the world other than the United States realizes, which is thei: The United States under Donald Trump is a dying, pathetic, embarrassing empire. Only a fool would want to move there NOW.

American immigrant retirees in Mexico socialize together.

Meanwhile — and here is where the question turns into a boomerang — the fastest-growing migration flow between our two countries runs south. The US State Department estimates that 1.6 million American citizens now live in Mexico, the largest population of US expatriates anywhere on Earth. Americans made up two-thirds of all immigrants to Mexico in the last census. They are retiring in San Miguel de Allende and Lake Chapala on Social Security checks that don’t stretch in Scottsdale. They are remote-working in Roma Norte and Condesa, driving up rents so fast that Mexico City residents are protesting immigration — by Americans. The US Social Security Administration mails more than 62,000 benefit checks a month into Mexico.

So the honest answer to “why are they all coming here?” is: they aren’t. We are going there. In record numbers. Because — and I want you to take as much time with this as you might need — Mexico is actually quite nice, and the USA, increasingly, sucks.

Second problem: “They” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The question imagines Mexico as an undifferentiated mass of desperate people, all identically poor, all facing north with their bags packed. This is roughly as accurate as imagining that all 340 million Americans are one paycheck from living in a tent, because some Americans are

Pedestrians in Mexico City. Please note: None are running towards the USA border.

.

Mexico is the twelfth-largest economy in the world. It has billionaires and surgeons and software engineers and a large, urban, educated middle class — people with mortgages and orthodontist appointments and opinions about which private school is overrated. It also has profound poverty, particularly in the rural south, particularly among Indigenous communities. Just like the United States, Mexico is a country of classes, and which Mexicans have migrated, when, and why is a story about class — and about what was done to specific classes of Mexicans at specific moments, very often by the government of the United States.

The Mexican middle class are not generally moving anywhere, least of all the USA.

A doctor in Guadalajara was never “coming here.” A campesino in Oaxaca whose corn price collapsed 66 percent after 1994 — we’ll get to why — sometimes had no other choice. Collapsing those two people into one “they” is the whole trick, and it’s a trick with a long pedigree. You believe “they’re all coming here” because your scripted TV shows, movies, nightly news and pinche gringo president have brainwashed your ass.

Third problem: America has spent a century ordering Mexicans like takeout, then blaming them for showing up.

Here is the pattern, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. When the United States needs labor, it recruits Mexicans — actively, officially, sometimes door to door. When the economy sours, it expels them — violently, indiscriminately — and rebrands them as invaders. Then it forgets it did either, and asks, innocently, why they keep coming.

Run the tape:

1910s–1920s: American railroads, mines, and farms recruit Mexican workers en masse, especially after immigration laws choke off Asian and European labor. Mexicans are exempted from quota laws — because employers demand them.

1929–1939: The Depression hits, and America needs a scapegoat. Federal, state, and local authorities carry out the “Mexican Repatriation,” expelling somewhere between several hundred thousand and 1.8 million people. Historians estimate that up to sixty percent of those expelled were United States citizens — American-born children and adults, deported to a country many had never seen, on the basis of looking Mexican. California formally apologized for this in 2005. Almost no one north of the border has ever heard of it.

1942–1964: World War II creates a labor shortage, and suddenly Mexicans are heroes again. The US government creates the Bracero Program and imports roughly 4.6 million contracted Mexican workers to plant, pick, and lay track. Washington literally begged for these men. They were fingerprinted, fumigated with DDT at the border, housed in barracks, and had wages skimmed into savings accounts many never saw again.

1954: Even while the Bracero Program runs, the Eisenhower administration launches a mass-deportation campaign — its official name was a slur, “Operation Wetback” — sweeping up more than a million people, including, once again, US citizens. Recruit with one hand, deport with the other, simultaneously.

1986: Reagan signs an amnesty. 1990s onward: border militarization begins in earnest, which — in one of history’s crueler jokes — traps seasonal migrants inside the United States. Men who once worked the harvest and went home to their families in Zacatecas now couldn’t risk the crossing twice, so they stayed, and sent for their families. The undocumented population ballooned precisely because circulating became impossible. We built a wall around people and then acted shocked to find people inside it.

This is the actual history: a century of deliberate recruitment punctuated by spasms of expulsion, each expulsion accompanied by a propaganda campaign explaining that the workers America had just finished recruiting were actually a disease, a crime wave, an invasion.

Fourth problem: Then came NAFTA, the extreme circumstance nobody mentions.

People do not leave home casually. I want to say that plainly, because I am living it. A month ago, I left the United States for good. I’m in Mexico at the moment, but it two weeks I will leave Mexico for yet another country that made it easier for my entire family to gain residency and also has robust protections for journalists and the free press. I am migrating, with my son, my mother, my dog and my cat and the compressed remains of a life, and I can tell you that even a voluntary, relatively well-funded, middle-aged-writer emigration is grief. You leave your mountains. You leave your dead. Thirteen generations of my family are in New Mexican soil, and I feel every one of them pulling at my ankles. Nobody — nobody — walks away from the village where their grandmother is buried because they heard Iowa has good WiFi. It takes an extreme circumstance.

For millions of rural Mexicans, that extreme circumstance had a name, and the name was NAFTA.

When the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, it forced small Mexican corn farmers — many of them Indigenous, growing native maize on plots their families had worked for generations — into direct competition with Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, whose corn was mechanized, genetically modified, and massively subsidized by the US government. The agreement disciplined Mexico’s protections for small farmers while leaving American farm subsidies intact. As a condition of the deal, Mexico gutted the ejido system, the revolutionary-era constitutional guarantee of communal village land — the single greatest achievement of the Mexican Revolution, traded away at the negotiating table.

The results were exactly what you’d predict. Subsidized American corn flooded the Mexican market. The price paid to Mexican corn farmers collapsed by 66 percent. Roughly two million Mexicans in farming and farm-dependent work lost their livelihoods. And in a detail that should be taught in every economics classroom as a monument to what “free trade” actually means, the consumer price of tortillas — the staple food of the Mexican poor — rose 279 percent over the same decade. Farmers got paid less; families paid more; the difference went where it always goes.

And the displaced went north. Annual migration from Mexico, stable in the years before NAFTA at around 370,000, doubled to 770,000 by 2000. Mexico’s own president at the time, Carlos Salinas — a man who governed as Washington’s willing partner, one in a long line of Mexican administrations happy to serve US capital over their own campesinos — framed the American choice with breathtaking cynicism: accept Mexican tomatoes, or accept the Mexican migrants who would otherwise pick them inside the United States.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, with her predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Mexico’s current president, Claudia Sheinbaum, like her predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is nothing like Salinas. Now, I know this might be hard for many Americans who’ve never met a Mexican other than the twin brothers in in Breaking Bad to believe, but not all Mexicans are the same. And it just so happens that for the past eight years, Mexico has been governed by the Morena Party, a new third party, leftist, that eschews the neoliberal predatory capitalism that both dominant U.S. political parties still embrace. Morena emphasizes Mexican sovereignty, and their literal slogan is “First, the Poor.” Mexico is engaged in trickle-UP economics now, and it’s working very well, so well, in fact, that all corporate U.S. news outlets have agreed to run dishonest piece after dishonest piece insisting otherwise. (Fuck David Frum, by the way.) Things are improving quickly for the average person in Mexico as a result of its wildly popular socialist government, just as things worsen rapidly for the average U.S. citizen under predatory capitalism as imagined by a bloated demented con artist.

So when an American asks me why “they” all came here, the truthful answer is often: because your government’s trade policy demolished their village economy on purpose because your leaders are racist opportunists, with the enthusiastic cooperation of a white Mexican ruling class that got rich brokering the demolition.

The migrant at the border and the shuttered factory in Ohio are casualties of the same document. That’s the dirty little secret of North America that neither the democrats or republicans want you to understand. Your billionaire corporate overlords would much prefer you to fear and blame “Mexicans” for their own crimes against you. And mostly, you’re all falling for it. Even the liberals. Especially the liberals.

NAFTA’s authors set the American working class and the Mexican working class against each other, and forty years later both are still snarling at each other instead of at the people who signed it.

Fifth problem: You’re probably not even talking about Mexicans.

Now we arrive at the deepest layer of the doll, the conflation so total that most Americans don’t know they’re doing it.

“Mexican,” in the American imagination, has been stretched to cover three entirely different things: citizens of Mexico, Americans of Mexican descent, and all 65 million US Latinos — a category that includes Puerto Ricans (US citizens by birth since 1917), Cubans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, Colombians, and my own people, Hispanic New Mexicans, some of whom have never in four centuries lived under the Mexican flag for more than a generation.

Untangle it. Nearly two-thirds of Latinos in the United States were born in the United States. They didn’t “come here” from anywhere; they are as native to this country as anyone whose ancestors arrived at Ellis Island, and in tens of millions of cases far more so. The majority of people of Mexican descent in the US are American citizens, most of them by birth.

And here is the part your history teacher skipped: a very large number of Mexican Americans never crossed the border at all. The border crossed them. Until 1848, the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, along with parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma — roughly half of Mexico’s territory — were Mexico, seized in a war that Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in it, called one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker one. Before that, this land was the Kingdom of New Spain for nearly three centuries, tied by governance, language, faith, and blood to what is now Mexico and much of Latin America. Santa Fe was a capital city decades before the Pilgrims landed. My own ancestors came up the Camino Real in 1598, into lands where my other ancestors, Tewa women, had been living for millennia.

When someone in Albuquerque or San Antonio or East LA is told to “go back where you came from,” the geographically correct response is: I am standing in it.

Sixth problem: You learned all of this from the |U.S. corporate media, and the U.S. corporate media is lying.

So where does the myth come from — the eternal, undifferentiated brown tide, forever pouring north? It comes from the two most powerful storytelling machines ever built, and it is one of their oldest products.

Hollywood has been manufacturing the menacing Mexican since before it had sound. Silent-era Westerns literally billed characters as “greasers.” A century later the technology improved and the story didn’t: study after study of American film and television finds Latinos wildly underrepresented on screen relative to population, and when they do appear, disproportionately cast as criminals, gang members, drug traffickers, maids, and gardeners. Generations of Americans who have never met a Mexican national have met ten thousand fictional ones, and nearly every one of them was holding either a weapon or a leaf blower.

The corporate news media completes the circuit. Immigration coverage spikes when there is political theater at the border and vanishes when the data turns boring — which is to say, when it turns good. “Net migration from Mexico falls below zero” is a real, documented, era-defining story, and it received a rounding error of the airtime devoted to caravan panic. Fear is a product. Calm doesn’t sell ad slots, and calm doesn’t pass appropriations bills.

Because that is the function, in the end. The stereotype is load-bearing. A population you have dehumanized is a population you can pay sub-minimum wages to pick your strawberries and roof your houses; a population you can deport when the business cycle turns; a population whose children you can put in cages to thunderous applause. The fiction of the invading Mexican serves the same policy it has served since 1929: keep the labor cheap, keep it frightened, keep it deportable, and keep the American public angry at the worker instead of the employer. Hollywood wrote the character. Cable news gave him a time slot. Washington wrote him into law.

The answer, then.

So here is my answer to the question, and you may clip and save it for the next family barbecue.

They are not all coming here. Net migration from Mexico turned negative when the iPhone was new, and last year the border saw fewer crossings than in any year since 1970 — while 1.6 million Americans moved themselves to Mexico, making it the largest colony of US citizens on the planet. The Mexicans who did come, in the great waves of the twentieth century and the NAFTA decade, came overwhelmingly because the United States either recruited them outright or destroyed their livelihoods by policy — often both, often on purpose, always with the help of Mexican governments happy to sell their own people’s labor at a discount. Most of the “Mexicans” you think you see around you are American citizens, millions of whom descend from families who were here when the border arrived, uninvited, at their door. And the reason you believe otherwise is that a hundred years of movies and cable news found the lie more profitable than the ledger.

Leaving home is an amputation. I know because I am seventeen days from my own. Nobody does it for fun. People do it when staying becomes impossible — and for a century, whenever staying in Mexico became impossible for millions of ordinary people, the fingerprints on the impossibility have been, again and again, stamped Made in USA.

That’s why they came. It’s also why they stopped. And it is worth asking — as you price out that little casita in San Miguel — what it says that the traffic now runs the other way.

---

Sources for the skeptical: Pew Research Center (”Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero — and Perhaps Less,” 2012; border encounter analyses, 2026), US Census Bureau Vintage 2025 population estimates, US State Department consular estimates, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch NAFTA legacy reports, and Mexico’s INEGI census data. All of it public. None of it secret. Almost none of it ever on your television.I offer my news, investigative and analytical writing freely, but your support is appreciated and necessary. Please like, comment, share and subscribe, paid if you’re able. You may also leave a tip in any amount. Thanks!