Startup Funding, English Proficiency, and Panama’s Immigration

Welcome to Latinometrics. We bring you Latin American insights and trends through concise, thought-provoking data visualizations.

Thank you to the 128 new subscribers who have joined us since last week!

Today's charts:

1. A look at a less-talked-about border — Panama’s

2. The biggest startup funding rounds of 2022

3. English proficiency in LatAm makes no intuitive sense

Make sure you check out the comment of the week at the bottom!

Immigration 🛂

Visualizing Panama's Migration Surge

The media has widely reported that illegal border encounters from Mexico to the US reached an all-time high in 2022. By year's end, 31% were Mexican citizens, and most detainees were from other LatAm countries.

Less reported is the fact that Panama's Migration authorities recorded a 71% yearly surge in irregular border crossings. Incredibly, this is in addition to the fact that in 2021 they had detained more people crossing the border illegally than in the previous ten years combined.

Venezuelans accounted for 65% of all detained crossings this past year, with 149K. Ecuadorians were the 2nd most detained, with 22K. Ecuador's number went up 54x from 2021 to 2022. Many of these migrants are attempting to cross all of Central America by foot, through its forests, jungles, and deserts, to reach the US-Mexico border. A few weeks ago, President Joe Biden invited Ecuador's president, Guillermo Lasso, to discuss the growing crisis.

So, what is causing so many people to flee home and seek a better life elsewhere? It's worth noting that this issue is not exclusive to Latin America — Asians and Africans more than doubled their illegal crossings into Panama in 2022.

While many causes may compel someone to take the dangerous journey to the border, worsening economic conditions following the Covid-19 pandemic largely account for the surge. However, the countries faring worst may be losing citizens in record numbers due to additional X factors, such as the dictatorships in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela and Haiti's catastrophic earthquake in 2021.

Startups 🚀