Why Do Mexicans Have Pride for Being Mexican When They Live in America?

Why do mexicans have pride for being mexican when they live in America? My parents are both mexicans and they left mexico because it is a poor country that is extremely corrupt. They have a deep respect for americans and the american way of life. They feel that the american way of life is superior. My dad only watches english television and only reads in english. My dad inculcated in me a sense of pride for being an american. When my brother was young, at an assembly, he felt lazy and didn’t do the pledge of allegiance. My dad scolded him and told that he should always do it. My dad would tell me horrible stories of the poverty he had to live through. His family was so poor they would sometimes have to eat animal feed during the dry season. My parents dislike the corrupt mexican government and thank god that they were able to come to america. Mexico has (like i said) a corrupt government, high poverty rate, drug cartels that hold the country hostage and a poor educational system. Don’t get me wrong, i love mexican culture, food and the language. I’m a spanish literature major and i don’t dislike my fellow spanish speaking brethren. But i think we should appreciate the opportunities this great country gave us and not a aggrandize life in mexico. I think we need to copy the asian immigrants and put more emphasis on educating our youth. That is something we can be proud of. To finish, when people ask me if i’m mexican or mexican american, i tell them “no, my parents are from mexico, im American!”

Why do comparatively so many Mexicans migrate illegally?
Part of the explanation has to do with Mexico’s relative poverty and proximity. Mexico shares a 2000-mile land border with the United States. This border marks the largest income gap between any two neighboring countries in the world. The US-Mexico border is also something that meant much less in the past, and hundreds of thousands of Mexicans used to come and go between home and the US every year with relative ease until our immigration laws changed so dramatically in 1986. This long history as neighbors means that the border splits millions of Mexican and American families. As a result of the U.S-Mexico income disparity and our countries’ exceptional social, economic, and historical ties, a lot of Mexicans want to migrate to the US. Another part of the explanation has to do with the fact that our immigration laws essentially treat Mexicans the same as just about any other nationality despite Mexico’s special status as a neighbor. That so many Mexicans compete with each other for such a small number of visas means that it’s virtually impossible for the typical Mexican immigrant to enter the country legally in his or her lifetime. With no way to enter legally, people make the difficult decision of migrating illegally.

Mexicans are still by far the largest single immigrant group in the United States, accounting for 30% of the foreign-born. The population of Mexican immigrants in the United States is larger than that of most countries or states: 10% of Mexican-born people worldwide live in the United States. No other nation in the world has as many of its people living abroad as does Mexico. What caused the big immigration wave to stop? We think that many factors were at work, on both sides of the border. We cannot say how much of a role each of them played in tamping down migration to the United States and setting up the large reverse flows, but they all seem to have had an impact.

The sharp decline began about five years ago, around the time the U.S. housing market collapsed. Many construction jobs held by Mexican immigrants vanished. The continued weakness in the overall U.S. economy made it harder to find other jobs as well. Although the Great Recession has officially ended, the job market is not back to what it was. During these same years, U.S. officials have heightened enforcement of immigration laws along the border and elsewhere. Unauthorized border-crossers have faced harsher penalties, and deportations have risen. We estimate that anywhere from 5% to 35% of the Mexicans who went home over the past five years did so involuntarily. Six states, including Arizona, have passed laws intended to reduce unauthorized immigration. For these and other reasons, it has become more dangerous to try to cross the border from Mexico.