Dissatisfied Mexico

The Pew Research Global Attitudes Project has some data on Mexico that caught my eye for a few reasons. The headline is that Enrique Peña Nieto has slipping approval ratings, but there are other, more interesting, bits.

For example, Mexicans aren't happy, and haven't been happy for quite some time.

You can't even blame the drug war because in 2002 (four years before Felipe Calderón declared it) Mexicans were more dissatisfied. This period also encompasses much of the democratic period (e.g. post 2000) but that didn't help either (or we might hypothesize that it made things worse!). And this is also a period of much exaltation of the growing Mexican middle class. In short, there's a lot of food for thought here.

Next, there is a sharp uptick in the number of Mexicans without strong connections to the United States.

This surprises me. Migration has slowed down but was strong for years so we should expect plenty of people to stay connected. I might be tempted to dismiss it as a blip but Pew got those results both in 2013 and in 2014. Remittances have slipped a bit, though this is also strongly tied to the U.S. economy. Yet they're still over $20 billion, so now we have more money going to an even smaller number of people in Mexico?

There's other stuff too--it's worth checking out.