Economic problems have encouraged poor people from southern Mexico and the Dominican Republic to move to the United States. Similarly, migrants in search of opportunity have moved to Venezuela from Colombia, and to Argentina from Chile, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Many also consider themselves temporary migrants, ready to return home once they make enough money. When they do so, they often bring ideas, values, and practices of the United States back with them. Areas of economic, cultural and political interconnection.
Migrants often find it easiest to follow routes of traditional economic and political connection.
Citizens of northeastern and north central Mexico, who share in the norteno culture of south Texas and El Paso, have also tended to move into Texas along lines of cultural and economic interconnection. In these cases, migrants tend to include many middle class and professional people, and contact with the home country is often lively and highly visible. These movements helped stabilize Latin American population during the colonial period, replaced some exterminated Indians, and created population cores in regions which had not had dense Indian settlement. There were relatively few immigrants from Iberia, and these were mostly male and concentrated in certain cities and areas of special attractiveness such as Arequipa in southern Peru. There were probably less than a million Spanish migrants in colonial times.