Free Republic

Beyond providing supplemental income for Mexican households, remittances—funds sent by migrants to friends and families in their home country—provide a stable flow of developmental finance to the poorest subregions of the country, which have not historically benefited from international capital flows, such as development aid or foreign direct investment. Mexico, the world’s second-largest recipient of remittances, has seen a steady increase in the total volume of remittances received, primarily due to the strength of the U.S. labor market and concurrent wage growth among Mexican workers in the United States. Mechanisms to keep remittances secure are not impermeable to criminal organizations,...

FRANCISCO VILLA, Mexico — Over the past 30 years, this corn-growing hamlet in central Mexico emptied out. Around half the 3,000 residents moved to the United States. As the migrants went north, the dollars flowed south. They were construction workers and gardeners, cooks and nannies. They became the saviors of this village of tiny adobe homes. They helped establish the town’s first high school. Their donations paved the dirt streets. They bought computers for the classrooms. “The kids had no idea what they were,” recalled one of the town’s migrant benefactors, Rubén Chávez. Now, a current of fear is running...

One of the most under-discussed drivers of illegal immigration is the explosion of remittances, which has created a major economic incentive for foreign nationals to pour into the U.S.Immigrants of both the legal and illegal variety are coming to the U.S., earning money, and sending it back home instead of putting it into the U.S. economy. Take for example, Nicaragua, which received a record $462.4 million in remittances during the month of May, with $385.9 million coming from the U.S., according to a report cited by Breitbart News. As Breitbart points out, not only is this money not going into...

(The Defender)—Can pediatricians afford to run their medical practices without the generous kickbacks they receive for vaccinating every child? Dr. Paul Thomas, a Dartmouth-trained pediatrician, discussed this dilemma during an April 16 interview with Polly Tommey on Children’s Health Defense’s “Vax-Unvax: The People’s Study” bus tour. “You cannot stay in business if you’re not giving pretty close to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] [childhood vaccine] schedule,” said Thomas, who ran a general pediatrics practice with 15,000 patients and 33 staff members. Thomas also addressed the risks and harms of vaccines — including COVID-19 mRNA vaccines — and...

People often ask how illegal aliens can afford to pay for their journeys. Much of the funding comes from predictable sources: Relatives in the United States may send the money, the migrant may borrow it or even indenture himself to smuggling gangs and work off the debt once here. But a lot of the money comes from the American taxpayer. At every stage of a migrant’s journey, U.S. tax money smooths the way for people planning to enter and live in the United States illegally. Start with the United Nations. The United States gave all the U.N. agencies $18 billion...

The more people Ortega can drive out of his country, the richer and more oppressive he gets. With Joe Biden's migrant surge, migrant remittances follow, and some very baleful developments are happening abroad. The one that stands out is that of Marxist socialist Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's little dictator, who along with a string of failed leaders before him, impoverished his country in relative obscurity, leaving it the hemisphere's second-poorest after Haiti. The country boasts a per capita income of about $2,200 per year which is lower than even Cubans are paid, and hard as heck to live on even in...

SAN JOSE (Reuters) - Nicaraguan migrants sent relatives back home record remittances this year through November, data from the country's central bank showed on Wednesday, fueled by massive waves of migration leaving the Central American nation in recent years. In a statement, the bank noted a record haul of about $4.24 billion in remittances for the 11-month period, 47% more than the amount sent home during the same period last year. The 2023 remittances tallied by Nicaragua's central bank showed that nearly 60% came from the senders in the United States and almost 20% from neighboring Costa Rica.

Drug cartels are using remittances – money transfers favored by migrant workers – to send illicit earnings back to Mexico. They’re hiring armies of people on both sides of the border to move small sums that are difficult to trace to narcotics kingpins, authorities say. Reuters visited Sinaloa, where some residents admitted to cashing remittances for the Sinaloa Cartel. CULIACÁN, Mexico -- A Mexican mother walked into a bank in her home city of Culiacán in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, where an $8,000 remittance from the United States was waiting. She withdrew the funds in local currency, then strolled...

Some countries run their entire economies around remittances, promoting mass migration to America, and then profiting from the"/>The David Horowitz Freedom Center Is Under Attack. Learn More Here.Frontpage Mag"Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out" @Horowitz39, David HorowitzThe PointAuthorsDavid HorowitzStoreWho We AreDH TV Mailing List DonateAfghan Refugees in U.S. Are Sending Our Tax Dollars Back to AfghanistanSun Aug 28, 2022Daniel Greenfield Not actually a surprise. Some countries run their entire economies around remittances, promoting mass migration to America, and then profiting from the money sent back to their families. Once we enabled money to enter Taliban territory,...

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s central bank says remittances — the money migrants send home to their relatives — grew by 27.1% in 2021 to total about $51.6 billion for the year as a whole. That is a record amount, despite the coronavirus pandemic, and would surpass almost all other sources of Mexico’s foreign income, including tourism, oil exports and most manufacturing exports.

Mexicans received more than $4 billion in remittances from the United States in March, a 49 percent increase from the $2.7 billion sent in February, marking the biggest month-to-month increase on record. The February-to-March spike in remittances – money sent to friends and family abroad by U.S. residents – was the single largest month-to-month rise since at least 1995, the earliest year when data is available from the country's central bank, the Banco de México. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador referenced the surge in remittances at his daily press conference Tuesday, framed as part of his commemoration of Cinco...

Mexican migrants working abroad sent home a record $36 billion in remittances in 2019... It’s the highest level of remittances on record. It’s also greater than the $25 billion in income Mexico receives from foreign tourism, or the country’s $22.4 billion in annual petroleum exports. Mexico’s central bank said the average amount of each electronic transfer sent home was about $300...

President Trump threatened Guatemala on Tuesday with tariffs and remittance fees after the Central American country pulled out of their agreement with the Trump administration. As The Hill reported the two countries had not formally committed to such a safe third deal, which would require Guatemala to process asylum claims from migrants who set foot there first on their way to the United States. Guatemala’s Constitutional Court earlier this month blocked President Jimmy Morales from declaring the nation a safe third country. President Trump: Guatemala, which has been forming Caravans and sending large numbers of people, some with criminal records,...

As the Chinese are learning way too late, a healthy level of population is critical to a healthy economy in the long run. In the short run, however, migrant outflows to the United States can make a significant contribution to a sending country's economy, as a recent Forbes article demonstrates. The question is whether those contributions create incentives for governments to increase migrant outflows, and whether those incentives will get dampen these governments' interest in discouraging their citizens from migrating illegally to the United States. Forbes reports that last year, Guatemalan nationals abroad "sent a record breaking $9.3 billion in...

• Remittances to Mexico • Incentive for illegal aliens living in the U.S. to return to their home country A feckless Congress has failed to face up to the issue of illegal immigration. Even if the House had passed an immigration reform bill it would have been dead on arrival in the Senate. The President has pinned his hopes for immigration reform on the Republicans retaining control of the House and gaining seats in the Senate in the upcoming mid-term election. Sadly, even if that turns out to be the case, given that 41 Republicans voted against the Goodlatte Immigration...

Paris. The year is 1788. The air is heavy with the scent of impending revolution. Some praise the king in hushed whispers, others shout “Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!” in the streets. Either way, the time for talk is over. How did it get to this point? The hopeful specter of radical liberalism played its part, as the father of modern conservatism Edmund Burke observes in his masterpiece Reflections on the Revolution in France. But most men aren’t dreamers. Most live parochial lives and think parochial thoughts—there’s no time to dream when you’re working to put bread on the table. For the...

Imagine the worst possible tax you can think of. What would it look like? If you’re like most people, you thought of some fat, curly-haired king sitting in a palace spending your money on foppish garments and a harem of French harlots. That’s a bad tax. No doubt about it. But at least he’s (presumably) your king, and he’s spending the money in your country. Eventually you will see that money again, no matter how frivolously he spends it. I can think of a worse tax: pretend the above situation’s exactly the same in every respect except now he’s not...

President Donald Trump’s tougher immigration enforcement has reduced the flow of people heading north across the U.S.-Mexico border, but it has had no effect on the amount of money heading in the opposite direction. In fact, Mexico is on pace to receive more remittances from abroad in 2017 than it ever has before, according to World Bank estimates released Tuesday. Mexico, which takes in more remittances than any other Latin American country by a wide margin, will likely receive $30.5 billion from the Mexican diaspora living abroad — 6.5 percent more than it did in 2016. About 95 percent of...

This is a little funny.  Back in 2015 we originally shared an easy peasy way to pay for the border wall by charging a 4% remittance fee on wire transfers to Mexico.  With more than $25 billion (2015) in Western Union transfers, more than Mexico’s entire oil and energy sector combined, a 4% U.S. surcharge on remittances creates $1 billion revenue annually. The U.S. Treasury already has a similar process in place for Cuban Remittances and Western Union compliance affidavits.  The remittances to Mexico have now jumped to $27 billion in 2016.  Making the remittance fee even more feasible.

Caribbean Foreign Ministers, including Belizean Foreign Minister Wilfred Elrington, attended a meeting in Grenada yesterday with two officials from the new U.S. administration of President Donald Trump. “Basically I thought they wanted to tell us they still have an interest in us and to hear our concerns and interests, and so we told them the various ills confronting our region,” Elrington told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) following the talks. UnderSecretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas A Shannon Jr. and Acting Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Francisco Palmieri, met with the foreign ministers on the sidelines of the...