Mexico City Dealing With Own Migrant Crisis: An Influx Of Remote Workers
Folks in Mexico City are starting to get fed up with foreigners flooding into their country, changing the fabric of their cities, and driving up real estate prices.
Really?! We're unfamiliar with those concepts here in the United States. It's not like we have a border crisis going on that our president and vice president try to ignore.
Please, do tell...
The New York Times published an article discussing the problem the city has faced since the rise of remote work in the wake of COVID. Thousands of foreigners are descending upon that nation's capital.
The influx is causing the cost of housing to increase and pricing people out of what were once affordable neighborhoods.
Mexico City is one of the biggest cities in the world. They can take on a few thousand remote workers.
Mexico City Is Being Inundated By Digital Nomads
As this started to unfold, the city's mayor Claudia Sheinbaum (who The New York Times called a "leftist" which must mean she's waaaay out there) told reporters that people should brace for the incoming foreigners.
“The digital nomads are arriving,” she said in November. “Obviously, we don’t want this to mean gentrification or price increases.”
Not gentrification! These well-paid remote workers from across the globe are going to bring with them a veritable plague's worth of Korean BBQ joints and yoga studios. The horror!
No one is happy about people being forced out of their homes. Still, if you're the mayor of Mexico City, doesn't there have to be at least a tiny piece of you that wants to pump a fist when no one is in your office? Isn't getting people to come to your city and spend their money kind of the goal?
These aren't your run-of-the-mill tourists either. These are usually well-paid people who spend months at a time in their city boosting the local economy in the process.
Plus, I thought having residents from around the world with different customs and who speak different languages was a good thing
Isn't that how diversity works?
Neighborhood demographics change. New residents bring cultural diversity. Have the very people who preached these concepts until they were blue in the face forgotten them?
Oh, I guess American culture doesn't count.
Despite what the Biden administration would tell you, there are some serious issues at the southern border. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
Mexico City's Expat Problem Is A Cake Walk Compared To The US Border Crisis
I get why people who have lived in Mexico City are upset, at least to a degree. But this is just one of life's harsh realities. We see it in our own cities and even for the same reason. The surge in remote work led to real estate in places like Orlando, Miami, Nashville, and Austin skyrocketing.
The funny thing about this is that you may think Mexico is talking about a cataclysmic number of digital nomads. Laptop-wielding yuppies flooding the city (which already has a population of over 22 million).
Compared to what the US is seeing at our southern border, that is not the case.
From January to October of this year, 9,500 Americans got permits to live in Mexico City. Granted many more have tourist visas that allow them to live in the country for six months.
That pales in comparison to the 1.6 million encounters US Border Patrol had with migrants in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center.
Yeah, so...
I can appreciate the gripe. Mexico City seems like a lovely place. Just get back to us when the people coming to your country in droves are doing it under the floorboards of vans and not on Virgin Atlantic flights.
We're dealing with a humanitarian crisis at our southern border. Mexico City is dealing with an inconvenience.
Follow on Twitter: @Matt_Reigle