Non-Mexicans outnumber Mexicans among those caught illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released Tuesday.
The Border Patrol apprehended 229,000 Mexicans in fiscal 2014, Pew found, versus 257,000 border-crossers from countries other than Mexico.
Those numbers reflect both an ongoing relative slowdown in unauthorized immigration from Mexico to the U.S. and an uptick in the number of people traveling from countries far away from U.S. borders to try to enter the country.
In particular, 2014 saw a surge in unaccompanied minors from Central American countries to the southern U.S. border. Thousands of children, and in many cases young families, from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador were detained by the Border Patrol during the late spring and early summer. The incident raised immigration as a national political concern before the November midterm elections.
But the new non-Mexican majority of people caught by the Border Patrol also includes significant numbers of people from Asia, the Caribbean, and all over the world, according to Pew.
“The new Border Patrol apprehensions data reflect a broader ongoing shift in the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population that was shaped by a migration wave from Mexico that lasted from the 1980s until the Great Recession,” Pew’s Jens Manuel Krogstad and Jeffrey Pasell wrote.
The researchers note that as recently as 2007, Mexican apprehensions totaled 809,000, versus 68,000 non-Mexicans.
That changed in the wake of the recession, when the U.S. economy entered a deep recession, reducing the job prospects for potential immigrants.
The total number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. peaked at over 12 million before the financial crisis, according to Pew, and has drifted down to just above 11 million since then. That decline largely reflects the drop in Mexican immigration.
