Mexicans Are Now Sending Remittances to Family Members in the U.S.

And you said it would never happen: Poor Mexicans have begun to send peso wire transfers to their unemployed family members in the U.S., who had originally fled Mexico in search of jobs in the U.S., in order to send remittances back home to Mexico.

According to an article in the Nov. 16, 2009 New York Times, 'unemployment has hit migrant communities in the United States so hard, that a startling new phenomenon has been detected: instead of receiving remittances from relatives in the richest country on earth, some down-and-out Mexican families are scraping together what they can to support their unemployed loved ones in the United States."

There is probably an element of drug money laundering going on in this, which we are further investigating. But the underlying physical economic collapse of the economies on both sides of the border, is the dynamic causing this new phenomenon.

Over the last three decades of British free trade and globalization, there has been a mass exodus of some 13 million Mexicans, who were driven to the United States as virtual economic refugees in search of sustenance for themselves and their families back home in Mexico. Not only could the Mexican economy no longer maintain these workers; their families back home were kept alive by the remittances they sent, which reached a peak of $25 billion in 2007.