“Remittance” may not be in many people’s vocabularies, but lawmakers have been batting the word back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border since the Trump administration proposed taxing at five percent money electronically sent by foreigners living in the United States to their home countries.
The tax on all non-citizens, whether documented or not, is part of Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” of over 1,000 pages that is inching along a strife-torn path in Congress.
“Arbitrary and unjust,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has labeled the proposed remittance tax.
The remittance measure was conceived by Republicans as part of their wider effort to crack down on immigration. According to the Washington Post, Vice President J.D. Vance unsuccessfully proposed a similar measure (a 10-percent tax) as a senator in 2023, claiming it would “disincentivize illegal immigration and reduce the cartels’ financial power.” Oklahoma imposes a small (one percent) remittance tax.
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