22 October 2006

Follow the money, they say


And when you follow the twenty billion dollars that Mexicans send home every year, you get to places you would not have thought of, according to this map from Investors.com. The obvious guess would be that Mexicans from the impoverished border states are coming across the line into the US, but this dollar-weighted map shows that, counter-intuitively, the most money is going to Mexican states in the middle of the country, where things must be even worse. Amazingly, "last year, northern states like Nuevo Leon and others created 1 million new jobs. In the north, there's no remittance dependency, no lack of jobs, no emigration problem and no prospect of revolts."
The Governor of Mexico's Central bank declared that "no nation can afford to lose its human capital indefinitely", but it looks like the country's President, who called Mexican emigrants "heroes", doesn't agree.
According to the International Labor Organization, Mexico is now the "world leader in export of its citizens".

Which would make us, of course, a "world leader" in imports of illegal immigrants.
However, the Inter-American Development Bank says that the "people most likely to emigrate illegally are neither the highest income people nor the lowest, but the highest tier of the poor", so we're hardly getting the best and the brightest.
And, just in case you thought it was getting crowded in your neighborhood, this statistic from the Population Reference Bureau: "55% of America's population growth is due to legal and illegal immigrants and their children"...

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