Immigrants Send $200 Billion To Their Origin Countries Every Year, Study Finds

Articles | July 23, 2025 | by Catholics for Catholics

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And some migrants qualify for U.S. government-funded benefits even as they send their paychecks back to their home countries.

By Catholics for Catholics

Immigrants in the U.S. send about $200 billion back to their home countries every year, found a new study on remittances.

The mind-boggling amount of monies was exported out of the U.S. economy in 2021, when both legal and illegal immigrants sent the funds to 134 different foreign countries, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

The Daily Wire reported that FAIR indicated that the sum of the remittances —money sent out of America to foreign countries — has almost undoubtedly augmented in recent years alongside record levels of immigration into the United States.

“Remittances effectively represent a transfer payment of hundreds of billions of dollars from American workplaces and communities to people abroad. To compound the problem, many migrants who send remittances out of the U.S. earn so little that they qualify for public benefits,” FAIR Executive Director Dale Wilcox explained. “The result is that American citizens subsidize social services and welfare benefits for aliens, legal and illegal, who send much of what they earn out of the country.”

Mexico, India, Guatemala, the Philippines and China are the biggest receivers of remittances, according to FAIR. In some countries, the level of remittances they receive have turned into those countries biggest source of income, like in Mexico, Guatemala and other Central-American countries.

“Mexico benefits more than any other country from U.S. remittances. Mexican nationals living in the U.S. remit on average almost a fifth of their monthly incomes to Mexico,” the FAIR report explains. “Remittances to Mexico represent more than a quarter of the money sent out of the U.S.”

“Placing a fee on remittances is crucial because the more money that is smuggled back into Mexico, the stronger the cartels become,” FAIR Media Director Ira Mehlman told The Daily Wire. “Many illegal aliens are working off-the-books, and therefore, no payroll taxes have been collected. Taxing the money as it leaves the country would be a way to recoup some of that revenue loss.”

The Daily Wire reported that a remittance tax of 5 percent was placed in the original version of the Big Beautiful Bill, but the figure shrank to a meager 1 percent tax.