Biden’s border crisis is helping fuel a surge in Mexico’s economy, new data shows

The border crisis under President Joe Biden has fueled Mexico’s economy through an increase in Mexican migrants in the U.S. sending money back home, according to multiple reports.

Remittances, the money sent by Mexicans working abroad sent back home, increased from $33.5 billion in 2018 to $60 billion in 2023 after a record number of migrants crossed the southern border, according to The Associated Press. From 2018 to 2022, Mexico’s poverty rate declined from 49.9% of the population to 43.5%, declining by 5.7 million, according to a study conducted by Coneval, an autonomous organization coordinated by the Secretariat of Welfare in Mexico.

In fiscal year 2022, the southern border recorded more than 2.2 million individual encounters, up from around 400,651 encounters recorded in fiscal year 2020, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. At the current rate of crossings, 9.7 million migrants will have crossed into the U.S. during Biden’s time in office, allowing more migrants to send remittances back to Mexico.

Out of all the remittances arriving in Mexico in 2021, 94.9% came from the U.S., according to the Wilson Center. The top three states sending the remittances were California, Texas and Minnesota.

The number of people who fall under extreme poverty, classified as not having enough income to even buy food, rose from 8.7 million people in 2018 to 9.1 million people in 2022, according to Coneval. The study did not attribute a cause to the reduction in poverty.

El #CONEVAL presenta las estimaciones de Pobreza Multidimensional 2022.
️https://t.co/RmeTENOrkV
https://t.co/6WtNlleBhp #ComunicadoCONEVAL #MediciónDePobreza2022 pic.twitter.com/G7pJZf142c

— CONEVAL (@coneval) August 10, 2023

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took office in 2018, has taken steps to increase wages and crack down on poverty, according to the AP. Lopez Obrador has more than doubled the country’s minimum wage since he took office, increasing it from the U.S. equivalent of $4 per hour to $12 per hour.

The Biden administration has taken policies such as allowing the end of Title 42, a Trump-era expulsion policy that began in March 2020, and allowed immigration authorities to quickly expel migrants, denying their entry.

On Monday, authorities were deployed to the southern border in response to hundreds of migrants attempting to storm a bridge across from the border town of El Paso, Texas, after cartels circulated rumors that the migrants would be let in.

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