Mexico: migrants in US to open accounts at consulates
Mexico will set up a system allowing migrants living in the United States to open accounts with its Bank of Welfare so they can more easily and cheaply send money back to their families
ByThe Associated Press
February 8, 2021, 6:13 PM
• 2 min read
MEXICO CITY -- Mexico will set up a system allowing migrants living in the United States to open accounts with its Bank of Welfare so they can more easily and cheaply send money back to their families, officials said Monday.
The bank is Mexico’s main distributor of money for the federal government’s social welfare programs. Migrants living in the U.S. would be able to open accounts through Mexico’s consulates.
Mexico’s finance ministry said in a statement that the goal is to expand financial services to that sector of the population and do so “on the best terms and conditions, so that sending remittances to the country happen in a simple, safe and economic way.”
Remittances amount to more than Mexico earns from oil exports or tourism and are second only to manufacturing exports. In 2020, despite the pandemic, Mexicans in the U.S. set a new record, sending $40.6 billion back to Mexico.
More:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/mexico-migrants-us-open-accounts-consulates-75764651
~ ~ ~ ~
You may well remember Trump's perpetual threats to block Mexicans' and others' money saved from their salaries here back to their families in Mexico and other points south in the form of remittances:
The numbers behind Donald Trump’s threat to block money from being sent back to Mexico
Image without a caption
By
Philip Bump
National correspondent
April 5, 2016 at 12:05 p.m. CDT
Add to list
Donald Trump's famously nonspecific plan to make Mexico pay for a new, beautiful wall on the border between our two nations got slightly more specific on Tuesday. The campaign produced a memo for The Post specifying that Trump's plan was essentially to twist Mexico's arm behind its back -- threatening to stop wire transfers from noncitizens to places outside the United States. Or, to use the term with which the process is usually described, to try to block remittances from people working in the United States back to Mexico.
There are valid legal questions about whether Trump would actually have the power to do that as president, questions that The Post explored this morning. (Short answer: Probably not.) But given the regularity with which the topic has come up during Trump's candidacy, we figured we'd look a little more closely at the numbers behind remittances.
Mexico takes in about $2 billion a month in remittances.
The Bank of Mexico tracks how much the country receives in remittances on a monthly basis. In 2015, Mexico took in nearly $25 billion in total, including from countries besides the United States. But most of it was from the United States. (According to Pew Research, 98 percent of the remittances received in 2012 were from the U.S.)
January and February saw the smallest amounts come in.
Most remittances these days come into the country by electronic transfer.
In 1995, the first year for which data is available, about half of the remittances sent to Mexico came in the form of personal checks, money orders or cash. In February 2016, 98 percent of the money sent to Mexico from workers overseas was sent electronically -- the form that Trump is threatening to blockade.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/05/the-numbers-behind-donald-trumps-threat-to-block-money-from-being-sent-back-to-mexico/