Mexicans sent billions of dollars back to Mexico in November after President-elect Donald Trump’s election win.
Immigrant workers and illegal aliens rushed to take money out of the American economy and send it to their home countries, Reuters reports:
Mexicans abroad sent home nearly $2.4 billion in transfers in November, 24.7 percent higher than a year earlier, marking their fastest pace of expansion since March 2006, according to Mexican central bank data on Monday…
Trump’s surprise Nov. 8 election triumph also sent the Mexican currency to record lows in a sell-off fueled by his threats to scrap a trade deal between Mexico and the United States, and to levy punitive tariffs on Mexican-made goods…
Bank BBVA Bancomer has forecast that those Mexicans will have sent a record $27 billion in remittances into Mexico in 2016, an increase of more than $2 billion over 2015.
Not only do Americans give Mexico millions in foreign aid each year, Mexicans take in some $20 billion to $25 billion annually in remittances, according to the World Bank, much of it from the U.S. In total, foreigners took $54.2 billion in remittances out of the U.S. economy in 2014, with Mexico and China receiving the greatest sums from their citizens abroad.
American taxpayers are thus forced to pay for the welfare and schooling of millions of Mexican citizens and their children while enduring the costs of crime (gang activity, drug trafficking) and stagnant wages that unchecked immigration brings.
“The $ 20 billion being sent to immigrants’ grandmothers in Chiapas is forever eliminated from the American economy— unavailable for investment in American companies, the purchase of American products, or hiring American workers. That’s a cost of immigration that Americans are never told about,” conservative author Ann Coulter wrote in the influential Adios America about remittances.
“These billions of dollars being drained out of the U.S. economy every year would be bad enough if the money were coming exclusively from cheap-labor employers like Sheldon Adelson. But it’s worse than that,” Coulter continues. “It comes from American taxpayers. Not only do taxpayers have to support Americans who lose their jobs to low-wage immigrant laborers, taxpayers support the immigrants, too.”
“Seventy-five percent of immigrant families from Mexico are on government assistance… Seventy-three percent of legal Mexican immigrants send money back to their native land and 83 percent of illegal immigrants do,” she adds.
Remittances also fuel international criminal enterprises, according to one watchdog.
“Remittances can be used to launder proceeds from different types of criminal activities, including drug trafficking and human smuggling, through methods such as structuring,” a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released February 2016 stated. The high reporting threshold of $3,000 lets individuals send broken-up payments without raising questions.
Trump issued a memo in April 2016 telling Mexico he would tax remittances flowing out of the U.S. economy, or the Mexican government could issue a one-time payment of $5 billion to $10 billion for a U.S.-Mexico border wall.
“Mexico has taken advantage of us in another way as well: gangs, drug traffickers, and cartels have freely exploited our open borders and committed vast numbers of crimes inside the United States,” he wrote. “The United States has borne the extraordinary daily cost of this criminal activity, including the cost of trials and incarcerations. Not to mention the even greater human cost.”
“We have the moral high ground here and all the leverage,” Trump said.
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