Remittances from U.S. to Mexico, 1995 – 2005


Wikipedia
has a well developed entry on illegal immigration to the United States. One of its tables tracks the growth of remittances to Mexico. They grew at a phenomenal rate in the past ten years, from a little under $4 billion to over $20 billion, according to Mexican banking officials. I have entered below by year the amount of remittances and the annual percentage of increase. I surmise the growth rate was spurred mostly by increases in per capita earnings of Mexican workers here – legal and illegal, for the scale of the growth cannot be accounted for by the increase in population. As I have posted before, the number of Mexican households earning more than $100,000 increased by 65% between 2000 and 2005.
The Mexican study which presented the data is found here.
year, dollars in millions, % change over prior year
1995 3.673
1996 4.224 15.0%
1997 4.865 15.2%
1998 4.744 -2.5%
1999 5.910 24.6%
2000 6.573 11.2%
2001 8.895 35.3%
2002 9.814 10.3%
2003 13.396 36.5%
2004 16.613 24.0%
2005 20.035 20.6%