[American Thinker] With Joe Biden's border surge on, only the "experts" were surprised to learn that remittances increased to the countries that supply the illegal aliens to the U.S. According to yesterday's Mexico Daily Post:
Remittances to Mexico from abroad jumped 11.2% year on year in February while dropping from the prior month, according to data published by the country’s central bank on Monday, April 3rd.
Remittances hit $4.3 billion in February, down from the $4.4 billion sent in January.
The number of transactions, made mainly from the United States, increased in February by 10.9% year on year, while the average amount per transfer grew 0.3% to $375.
In the first two months of 2023, remittances reached $8.9 billion, up 11.8% from the $7.8 billion posted in the year-earlier period.
...and...
Remittances to Mexico from abroad hit a record high of $58.5 billion in 2022.
This, to be honest, was kind of surprising, even to me, given that Mexico was not seen as a country that was supplying much of the ongoing border surge's illegal alien count.
The Mexican government was enabling it, of course but the nationals involved tended to come from Central and South America, rather than Mexico itself. The country had been badly hit by COVID, meaning many people were thrown out of work there and needed to rely on relatives abroad to send a lifeline, which may explain some of it. It's also true that not everyone who sends remittances to another country is an illegal alien — many legally present foreign nationals also send remittances to their families back home. But it's also a fact that the more recently an immigrant has arrived here, the more likely he is to send remittances to relatives back home. Let's just say that this new figure may raise questions about whether Mexico is being undercounted in Border Patrol data or signals that the migrant gains that were there, legal and illegal, had an outsized impact.
And if Mexico's sendings of immigrants and illegal aliens had this impact, the bigger question is what the impact looks like for other countries, particularly those that dispatch the greatest numbers of illegal aliens to the U.S. border. Many don't release proper data, but there are signs that the gains were gargantuan.