Could there be another wave of illegal immigration?

The Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project released a survey Monday to help set the stage for President Obama’s visit to Mexico later this week. In 1,000 in-person interviews conducted across Mexico last month, Pew researchers asked, in Spanish, “If at this moment, you had the means and opportunity to go to live in the United States, would you go?” Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said yes.

The population of Mexico is about 110 million. If the Pew numbers are correct, that means about 38 million would like to live in the U.S.

Going into a little more detail, Pew found 20 percent of all Mexicans would be “inclined to go work and live in the U.S. without authorization.” That’s about 22 million people who might come to the U.S. illegally, if they had the chance.

“The story line that we’ve been hearing that Mexican immigration to the U.S. is now over is simply not true,” says Mark Krikorian, head of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors stricter immigration enforcement. “It could well be that we won’t see the same level of Mexican illegal immigration that we saw in the ’90s and ’00s, but if 38 million people want to come here, that’s a lot of people.”