page_title: Immigration to Mexico
section_title: Central American
hierarchical_section_title: Immigration to Mexico / Immigrant groups in Mexico / North American / Central American
caption_attribution_description: English: Central American migrants find quarter in southern Mexico. The majority of the migrants starting out on the route are young men. But there are women and children, too. Mexico's National Migration Service (INM) estimated that one in 12 people on the route are under 18, some making the journey alone. This photo was taken on July 14, 2008 in De Los Doctores,&#160;Ixtepec,&#160;Oaxaca, Mexico.
context_page_description: Since the early sixteenth century with the Spanish conquest, Mexico has received immigrants from Europe, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East and from Asia. Not only today, millions of their descendants still live in Mexico and can be found working in different professions and industries. According to the 2010 National Census, there are 961,121 foreign-born people registered with the government as living in Mexico, the majority of whom are US citizens. This is almost double the 492,617 foreign-born residents counted in the 2000 Census. According to the intercensal estimate conducted in 2015, the foreign-born population was 1,007,063. In 2017, the UN DESA Population Division gave a foreign born population in Mexico of 1,224,169. Unofficial estimates put the total number of foreigners in Mexico closer to four million. More than 45,000 migrants from Central America were deported from Mexico between January and April 2019.
context_section_description: The largest recent immigrant flows to Mexico are from Central America, with a total of 66,868 immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama and Nicaragua living in Mexico in 2010.
  Recently, Mexico has also become a transit route for Central Americans and others (from the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe) into the United States. 2014 was the first year since records began when more non-Mexicans than Mexicans were apprehended trying to enter the United States illegally through the U.S.-Mexico border. Non-Mexicans (vast majority of whom are Central American) were up from about 68,000 in 2007 to 257,000 in 2014; Mexicans dropped from 809,000 to 229,000 during the same period.
  In 2014, Mexico began to more heavily crackdown on these transient migrants. According to Mexican officials, the Plan Frontera Sur (Southern Border Plan) is designed to retake control of the historically porous southern border and protect migrants from transnational crime groups. However, the measures have been widely attributed to pressure from the United States, who does not want a repeat of 2014, when a surge of tens of thousands of women and children clogged up American immigration courts and resulted in a severe lack of space in detention centers at the US-Mexico border. In January 2020, Mexico detained 800 migrants who entered it illegally from Guatemala to reach the United States as part of the strict measures taken by the Mexican authorities to reduce migration to the United States through Mexico.
caption: Transient migrants from Central America making their way to the U.S.-Mexico border. These migrants use a rail network known as La Bestia to traverse Mexican territory.
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