Migrants’ Remittances to Mexico, Central America Jump to $53 Billion in 2018

Legal and illegal migrants sent $53.4 billion in remittances back to Mexico and Central America in 2018, or more than double the cost of building a border barrier on the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a World Bank report.

Remittances to Mexico reached $33.7 billion in 2018, up 21 percent from roughly $27.8 billion in 2016, the bank reported.

Remittances from the three Central Americans countries are being spiked by the growing inflow of asylum-seeking migrants into blue-collar jobs throughout the U.S. economy, via the border’s catch-and-release laws. The outflow to Central America rose to $19.7 billion in 2018, up from $15.8 billion in 2016, according to the bank.

The outflow to Central America rose 25 percent in just two years.

GOP legislators have urged Congress to pay for the $22 billion border wall by taxing migrants’ remittances.

The money sent back from the United States to Central America includes many migrants’ payments to the cartels who traffic them into the U.S. economy. The trafficking debts can start at $5,000 per head.

The remittances provide a huge stimulus to the countries that export their populations to the U.S. labor market. But that stimulus also imposes huge economic costs, including civic turmoil, poverty, high rates of crime, and loss of foreign investment.

The Guardian reported from Guatemala:

In impoverished villages such as Yalambojoch, agriculture is the only work available.

Such grinding poverty makes emigration an attractive alternative, according to the town’s mayor, Lucas Pérez. “People leave our village, find work in the US and send money to help their relatives,” said Pérez, who estimated about 200 people from the tiny village live in the United States.

The surrounding Huehuetenango province sends the largest number of migrants from the country, according to Guatemala’s foreign ministry, and evidence of the exodus is clear: Yalambojoch has no potable water or electricity, but among the wooden shacks are modern two-story houses with tiled roofs – built with remittance money from abroad.

Dale L. Wilcox, the executive director at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, explained the damage caused by migration:

The Organization for the Americas … cited El Salvador as the worst hit, noting that “one out of every five Salvadorans currently lives outside of the country [which has] provoked a parallel exhaustion of qualified human resources.” This, they say, had caused “a scenario in which less than 11 percent of Salvadorans [have] tertiary education.” Draining an already underdeveloped nation of its best and brightest reduces any prospect of establishing a knowledge-based economy, and disincentivizes their political elite from investing in sorely needed educational infrastructure.

This damage adds up to intellectual colonialism, in which the superpower to the north plunders and loots the skilled labor from its poorer neighbors and condemns them to a bleak future.

Wilcox also noted the impact on families:

Mexico-based journalist Robert Jay Stout shows that a full 12 percent of Mexico’s adult population is now in the United States, according to 2010 census numbers. Such mass outmigration, he found, has contributed to 40 percent of Mexico’s rural towns and villages suffering a population loss as high as 70 percent. Whole communities were uprooted.

The ongoing exodus has resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of single-parent families, homeless, and runaway children — allowing gang membership to proliferate, he says.

Nationwide, the U.S. establishment’s economic policy of using legal migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor of blue-collar and white-collar employees.

The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices, pricing poor U.S. Latinos and blacks out of prosperous cities, such as Berkeley and Oakland.

If we don't tax outgoing remittances we are fools.

My shocked face.

what happened to taxing that shit?

Yessir....there is our border wall money right there.

The fact that remittances aren't taxed shows that nobody is serious about immigration,the wall is nothing but a populist piece of cheese. Remove the prime motivation for illegal immigration and you will see it drop. Charge companies that rely upon illegal labor under RICO laws. If they can do it to a motorcycle gang,they can do it to meat packing plants,dairies and landscaping businesses.

However,both Republicans and Democrats know that cheap,illegal labor is now a cornerstone of the American economy.  Nobody wants to talk about it but kick every illegal framer,landscaper,cook,maid...out of the US tomorrow and there is nobody to replace them.

We are stupid for letting this happen.

Trump needs to latch onto this like a pit bull. Tax the fuck out of these remittances.

Yep.  A 5% tax would pay for a wall in two years.

Disgusting

Turn off all entitlements and i'll find you 40 million workers.

If we don’t close all of our borders then we are being foolish with our children’s future.

Illegals are *still* exempt from all the shit we have to deal with.

Gotta wonder how much bigger the dollars are for the illegal drug trade across our border....

At a 75% rate

They should be taxed, 35% for Fed income tax, then 50% for removing from the country.  Fuck them!!!

I did not vote for this. Did you?

Taxing remittances is the "nuclear option" in regards to immigration. If this comes to be, expect any cooperation with Mexico or any Central American country to cease immediately. I'm not saying it's not a valid option but thats the reality.

Lol. I suggested taxing money transfers going South here in GD about 10 years ago. I was quickly called a commie and blasted for trying to "spread my California big city thinking"
My, how the worm has turned.

How do you determine if that money is gained from legal and illegal people?

What if a US citizen who is already taxed is sending money to support her grandparents? Tax them again? Because of......illegals?

A 40-50% tax would do so much more.....

Tax the remittance at the point of them sending it downrange. The wire companies collect and remit just like a sales tax. Let the senders write it off on their 1040 as taxes already paid. The legal residents and tax paying workers won't be hit as hard. The illegals and those working for cash under the table will be finally folded into the tax paying side of things, and have incentive to naturalize or work legally.

One of the Mexicans (legal) I work with says that alot of it is extortion of the families by gangs and cartels...if they know the relatives are working in the US they hit them with protection rackets.

If you make the transfer tax too high, people will find a way around it.  I think about $1 per transfer would be a level few non-SJW's would complain about.

Estimates of the number of illegals in the country vary widely, but assume the lower 11 million number.  With workers getting paid weekly and sending money weekly, that would be 11 million x 52 x $1 = $572,000,000 per year.  That would almost be like Mexico paying for the wall over a 10 year period.

End welfare and there will be. There's no motivation to do manual labor because of free handouts. Those jobs used to be done by poor younger Americans. Now those people are on welfare and dragging down the healthcare system.

Maybe a remittance tax of 20% would be a good start.

I’m not a fan of more taxes, but I’m okay with taxes on money going to foreign nationals.

Back in the 80s it was said that per year... the drug trade brought in a little less than crude oil but above both coffee & sugar...

It was also said that during it's existence the amount of cocaine flown into Mena was north of a trillion dollars.

Can't imagine that after Iran-Contra days how much it's been since...when the Caribbean routes got dropped in favor of the Mexican routes.

There is going to be "comprehensive immigration reform" in the next decade that will mean chain migration of tens of millions. It's far too late for the wall to matter.

If that is the case then the Luciferian Globalist-Marxist Deep State Swampers will get their North American Union vassal state of the New World Order they've been hawking since the League of Nations led to the United Nations.

Should have been done years ago but there’s no time like the present.

10% ought to do it.

These would be nearly impossible to tax. If you’ve been to Central American on a US pay day you’ve seen the lines of people at ATMs and Western Unions. Immigrants in the US just send their family members an ATM card and a pin to a shared account.

The Western Union option would be easier to tax if you could see the origination and withdrawal location, but the ATM option would lead to taxiing every single withdrawal from an ATM from a US bank account. It could have massive implications for US tourists.

This 100%.

Its easier to fucking annex mexico.  Putin/Crimea style.

Tariffs on China who is developing a military to fight US. Make all the apples, walmart and everything that is made in china- move those manufacuring centers to mexico or any shithole central american country for cheaper labor.

Bring the crap jobs in china to mexico. That would give those fools jobs and not giving the chinamen money to kill us.

They don’t cooperate now. Mexico gives them a free pass to transit through to the US.

A 10% tax would have funded the wall.

This really isn't news, we've known this for decades and chose to do nothing. Remittances to Mexico, Central America South America the Caribbean and other shitholes is around $75 Billion.

Watching our country slowly destroy itself.

This was part of my reasoning for a $1 per transfer tax.  Most people already pay $1-$5 per withdrawal to use another bank's ATM.  People might try to avoid  the current fees by using a different ATM, but they generally don't boycott ATMs completely.  Also, if the tax is much higher, people will move to other options, like prepaid gift cards.

You are also correct that the tax would apply to everyone, whether legal or illegal.  That's another argument to make it a non-punitive amount, like $1.  If you make it something large, like 10%, it would be a lot like the current 10% tariff on goods imported from China.  That has caused moderate short term impacts to the economies of both China and the US.

Wouldnt even need a wall if we stopped allowing the remittances. I bet we could even do it through an executive order. Why hasnt trump discussed this?

No shit, or let them starve. We don't need leaches.

Not we, the corrupt left and feckless R's in the DC establishment are stupid for letting this happen...

ETA: What "We" are stupid for is continuing to gleefully hand over our hard-earned tax dollars to these corrupt clowns in DC that misuse it against the will of the People. At least those of us that believe in the Constitution...

My friends Peter, Michael, and Samir can take care of that.

Americans should be taxed, but those here illegally and siphoning money out of the economy and sending it to a foreign country get a fucking free ride?

Have we finally found an income stream that the democrats *don't* want to tax?

Sounds like a great revenue stream , ripe for taxation.  You know scrape about half off the top for room and board.

This.  It would help take away the incentive for coming illegally.

Watch the home flipping shows on HGTV.  I suspect that 75% or more of the people doing everything (framing, plumbing, electrical, garden) appear to be hispanic.

Yep...pretty apparent.

BS, we have about 90 million people who can work but do not.  The market will adapt.  Obviously not in 24 hours but it will.

Someone should create a software program that skims fractions of pennies off of that money, that goes into a build the wall account.

This is like having five extra Puerto Ricos.   They produce very little but absorb millions from the economy.