Trump upends flow of money migrants send home
Mexicans living in the U.S. are suddenly sending less money back home and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is blaming America’s crackdown on illegal immigrants, saying President Trump is hurting her nation’s bottom line.
The central bank in Mexico said July saw a $1 billion drop in remittances, the largest month-to-month fall in more than a decade, to $5.2 billion. And it’s not just a fluke. The total so far this year is off more than 5% compared to 2024.
But remittances to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, three other major sources of illegal immigrants in the U.S., remain at or near record levels, suggesting that Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown isn’t at play, or at least cannot be the only reason.
“It is strange that the two would take different directions. I find that puzzling,” said
Steven A. Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Remittances are a critical lifeline for all of those nations, and during the Biden years, as illegal immigrants surged into the U.S., it was a bonanza.
Remittances accounted for 26% of gross domestic product in Honduras in 2024. The total is running ahead of that so far this year, at $6.9 billion through July, compared to $5.5 billion at the same point last year.
They accounted for 4% of Mexico’s GDP in 2024, though they are steadily dropping in total.
Ms. Sheinbaum said they fell 15% from June to July, and are down 5% for the whole year.
She said it was not “drastic” but marked a return to where they were as the Biden surge ramped up in 2022 and before it peaked in 2023.
“What explains this? Mostly the U.S. tax on our migrant brothers,” she said, according to The Latin Times. “We are working to know exactly the cause for the reduction, the amount of Mexicans who have been repatriated, but if we compare it with previous periods, it’s not that high.”
Mr. Camarota’s latest estimate is that the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. is down 1.6 million since Mr. Trump took office, dipping to 14.2 million.
Immigrants, and particularly illegal immigrants, often send money back home. If the population here returns home, that should, in theory, mean less money.
Since the U.S. accounts for the vast majority of remittances to nations such as Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Haiti, a drop could mean serious economic turmoil.
Manuel Orozco, director of the remittances program at the Inter-American Dialogue, in an analysis in early August, found remittances up so far in 2025 in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica and Nicaragua. And all but Jamaica posted double-digit growth.
Mexico was the outlier with its decline.
Mr. Orozco, in his analysis, said the countries with the high remittance increases are also those whose citizens are facing the most deportation pressure. The increase reflects “a fear or rational calculation that in case of being deported they better send as much as possible.”
The pressure is less for Mexicans. Most have been here for years and face a lower immediate risk of deportation.
Still, Mr. Trump’s border shutdown is derailing a new flow of Mexican migrants, cutting into what Mr. Orozco calls the “replenishment amount” needed to maintain remittance flows.
Mexicans have long been the dominant demographic among the unauthorized population in the U.S., though their share shrank as Mr. Biden democratized the flow of illegal immigrants.
New Pew Research Center numbers last month showed that in 2023, there were 4.3 million Mexicans among the 14 million total illegal immigrants here. Guatemala and El Salvador were distant, at 850,000 each, and Honduras was in fourth place with 775,000.
Venezuela accounted for about 650,000 illegal immigrants in the U.S. as of 2023 — a massive increase from 2021, when there were just 195,000, Pew said.
Yaracuy al Dia, a Venezuelan news outlet, reported last year that 35% of households in the country received remittances.
Congress, in the new One Big Beautiful Bill budget law, imposed a 1% tax on remittances starting Jan. 1.
Backers say it will produce as much as $10 billion in revenue for the U.S., and they hope it will help discourage some illegal immigration. Opponents call the tax short-sighted, saying the money that flows back to other nations ends up being critical development funding.
Whatever the current trend lines, Mr.
Camarota said the drop in the migrant population, and illegal immigrants in particular, will cut remittances in the long run.
“This should be a temporary surge, and I would guess the total scale of remittances will fall with the illegal population, since that’s what the data shows us,” he said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
