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New Remittance Numbers
Frontera NorteSur (Las Cruces, NM), June 18, 2006

Soaring in importance, migrant dollars are playing a bigger and bigger role in sustaining many Mexican communities. New figures recently released by the Bank of Mexico report a big jump in the flow of remittances from early 2003 to early 2006. In the state of Aguascalientes, for example, a family of four took in an average of $323 dollars in remittances every month during the January-March 2006 quarter. In the same quarter of 2003, the average monthly remittance income in Aguascalientes for a four-person household was just over $200 dollars. For many households, a $323-dollar income is enough to pay the monthly rent and utility bills and still have a little bit of extra spending cash left over.

Despite the incorporation of many different Mexican communities into the migrant stream, the Bank of Mexico's study reported that the bulk of remittance monies is sent to the traditional migrant-expelling states of Michoacan, Jalisco and Guanajuato, plus the federal capital of Mexico City. During the time period studied by the Bank of Mexico, 45 percent of all remittances registered in Mexico were received in the four entities.

The uneven geographic distribution of remittances suggests that migrants from central Mexico and the capital might be obtaining higher-paying jobs in the United States than their counterparts from newer, migrant-expelling regions who have less time and connections north of the border. Also, it's likely more people from the four dominant remittance-receiving entities are working in the United States than migrants from other states.

In the case of Michoacan, the $595 million dollars in remittances received during January-March 2006 accounted for a full 11.5 percent of the state's gross domestic product. Neighboring Jalisco, which boasts a bigger population and industrial base than Michoacan, received $456 million dollars during the first three months of this year, an amount that made up an estimated 3.6 percent of the state's gross domestic product. Michoacan, Zacatecas, Guanajuato and Aguascalientes were the states registering the highest amounts in average remittances per-family, while Baja California Sur, Yucatan, Quintana Roo and Nuevo Leon were the states with the lowest.

Noticeably absent from both the high and low end of the remittance spectrum were the northern border states of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas. The Bank of Mexico's numbers were based on a study of money exchange houses.