💸 Remittance States of America
Mexicans across the US send lots of money back home. The states where they're at may surprise you.
Welcome to Latinometrics. We bring you Latin American insights and trends through concise, thought-provoking data visualizations.
Today we’re diving a bit deeper into remittances: where are they coming from? To answer this, we’ve teamed up with our friends at Inter&Co, a financial super-app which helps to facilitate international transfers.
Mexican Remittances 💵
The United States has always been a country of immigrants. From the Italians, Irish, and Jews of early 20th-century New York to the Caribbean Latinos who arrived to Miami in the 1980s en masse, the US has always been strengthened by the millions who have come from abroad to improve the lives of their families.
Speaking of families, remittances – which are financial payments sent home by immigrants living in a different country – are a vital part of many migrants' stories, as we detailed in our look last month at these financial flows and Latin America's dependence on them with Inter&Co.
But it's one thing to see the value of remittances in the countries they head to, from Nicaragua to Chile. How about where they mostly come from: the US?
Looking at Mexicans in the US, we see some interesting trends when it comes to remittances being sent down south, which totaled $61B last year (roughly equal to the entire GDP of Myanmar). Banco de México divides this flow by state. If we divide it by each state's population, we see California comes out on top with $530 sent per person last year. This is doubly impressive given that California, at over 40M inhabitants, is the largest US state and has a population big enough to be its own country.
Your eye might instinctively then look next to border states like Arizona and Texas, given their high Mexican populations. But we're more surprised by the degree to how their neighboring New Mexico is outshone by an Upper Midwestern state like Wyoming and especially the northernmost state of North Dakota, which is over 1K miles from the Mexican border and has a Hispanic population of less than 5%.
North Dakota surely isn't what most people think of when they think of Latin American immigrants making their life in the States. And yet, since the mid-2010s there's been an interesting trend of Latinos diffusing out from the usual destinations and instead moving to cities across states like North Dakota, Georgia, and Alabama.
With our chart this week, we hope you realize a bit of the bigger picture when it comes to Mexican remittances across the US. Big states, small ones, rural communities and big cities—Latinos make up an increasingly important part of the US economic landscape.
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I would like to see the same relevant information about Ecuadorians. The increased number of people immigrated to the United States in the last 4 years is absolutely shocking.