From 2018 to 2022, remittance shipments from Minnesota to Mexico have grown 585.3% and with this the northern state of the United States ranked third in the origin of remittances, only behind California and Texas, last year, said the think tank Signos Vitales in its report “Euphoria of remittances: exodus, money laundering and economic boom”.
However, unlike California and Texas, Minnesota is home to only about 200,000 countrymen and remittances from that state represented 8.3% of the total in 2022.
The report highlighted surprising signs and one of them is the increase in remittances from the United States, where the Mexican population is not very representative.
There is a lot of money that is not so easy to explain and the truth is that whoever generates this information hopefully could make the reports to be able to explain it,” Enrique Cárdenas, president of Signos Vitales, told El Economista.
The document, for its part, maintains that “doubts are growing about the origin of these resources and whether the phenomenon (mechanism), already complex in itself, will continue to spread in other states with similar demographic and economic characteristics.”
The report also indicates that in 227 municipalities the number of transfers was greater than the total number of households in that place. In other words, households that receive remittances have coverage greater than 100 percent.
These municipalities received 14.3 billion dollars in remittances. Statistically speaking, this type of phenomenon is unlikely, the document maintains.
The Vital Signs work explains that “it is true that this exercise only applies in cases where we can somehow control the effect of other phenomena, but it is a first approach to the magnitude of the problem, which we believe is major and could reach to be much more complex than it is now.
According to the think tank, some 4.4 billion dollars, 7.6%, of the more than 58 billion dollars that Mexicans received in remittances in 2022, would be related to money laundering and that, in turn, would be linked to drug trafficking.
Mexico ranks as the third country with the highest income from remittances in the world, behind China and India.
