Los bienes son para remediar los males: Sustaining the US-Mexico Remittance Corridor through COVID-19 Hardship

• In Event: 30421 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1. Women on the Global Margins

Abstract

The US-Mexico remittance corridor is one of the world’s most consistent and abundant. In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportional negative impact on Latinx immigrants and specifically Mexican immigrants threatened this corridor. Yet after an initial drop, remittance sums to Mexico rebounded and continued to grow. This raised questions about the remitters facing both COVID-19 hardship and simultaneously maintaining remittance flows: who were the Mexican immigrants struggling to remit? What parts of the pandemic experience—ranging from health to economic issues—hurt their ability to remit? Moreover, what strategies allowed them to sustain remittance flows in the face of COVID-19? This analysis tackles these questions drawing on an original 2021-2022 survey on Mexican and Mexican American remitters in the United States (N=419). Using these original data, this analysis: models which remitters were most likely to report experiencing pandemic hardship, details descriptive findings on what elements of the pandemic hurt respondents’ ability to remit as well as what strategies respondents used to maintain their remitting. Second to household income, the strongest predictor of hardship was the respondent’s linguistic preference: with those who opted to take the survey in Spanish being much more likely to struggle. Further, most respondents reported struggling to remit due to the pandemic’s economic rather than health repercussions. To continue remitting, respondents reported utilizing multiple strategies: predominantly utilizing their savings. Findings bring a remitter-end perspective to the literature on crisis and remittances as well as act as another example of resilience in post-COVID literature.

Author

• Kimberly B Higuera, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo