MEXICO CITY – Mexicans living abroad sent home a record $23 billion last year, raising new questions about whether the government of President Felipe Calderón can afford to slow migration.

In just one year, the amount of money migrants wired their families jumped 15 percent, according to Mexico's central bank, overtaking tourism to become the nation's second-biggest source of foreign income after oil.

“This is a river of gold that flows into Latin America and Mexico. Daily. Weekly. Monthly. It never stops,” said Sergio Bendixen, president of Bendixen & Associates, a public opinion research firm in Coral Gables, Fla., that surveyed Mexicans on both sides of the border for the Inter-American Development Bank.

Bendixen's study highlights a basic fact about immigration: Mexicans who migrate to the United States are key to the economies of both countries...

As Mexican government and business leaders contemplate ways to deal with migrants' increasing economic power, the United States may face an entirely different immigration challenge in the next few decades: a decreasing supply of unskilled labor from Mexico.

“The rate of growth in Mexico's population is headed downward” at an unprecedented rate, said Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C., research group, and the author of a book on shifting demographics titled, “The Empty Cradle.”

“From the mid-'70s until now, Mexico has gone from an average of six children per woman to two,” he said. “That's going to lead to much less pressure to immigrate to the United States.”

Eventually, Longman said, “we may actually find ourselves competing to attract workers.”

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