Jesús Cervantes is Director of Economic Statistics at the Center for Latin American Monetary Studies and a leading authority on remittances. He kindly sends me each month the note he prepares on the subject, and in the most recent one—written jointly with Juan Antonio Ortega, a senior economist at the same institution—they report that the number of workers of Mexican origin and immigrants in the United States reaches 19 million people. It immediately stands out that this figure is very similar to the number of workers registered with the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social.
I then thought of taking the opportunity to compare incomes between the two groups, and also to include informality. As often happens with labor and wage information, it turned out to be almost impossible, as you will see. For the income of Mexicans in the United States, I again use as a reference the work of Cervantes and Ortega in a previous note, where they report a wage bill for our compatriots of around 376 billion dollars in 2025. The average exchange rate that year was 19.24, so those 19 million Mexicans earned 7.2 trillion pesos during the year. In Mexico, workers registered with IMSS averaged 22.4 million, and the total wage bill in 2025 was 5.1 trillion pesos. If we translate both groups’ income into monthly pesos, those living in the U.S. earn 31,700 pesos, compared to 19,000 pesos for Mexicans registered with IMSS.
Now comes the difficult part. The National Occupation and Employment Survey (ENOE) does not report a wage bill, and income by minimum-wage brackets has a very high non-response rate, which reached 15% in 2025. Although with that information CONEVAL in the past, and now INEGI, calculate a wage bill, the reported amount is ridiculous. With some juggling (using GDP data), we might estimate the informal wage bill at 5.5 trillion pesos for 37 million people, which would give an average monthly income of 12,500 pesos.
But—and here comes something many colleagues do not want to analyze—it turns out that in Mexico we measure, thanks to the Institutional National Accounts, something called Gross Mixed Income (GMI). These are the incomes households receive that could be considered either business profits or wage income if they were formally constituted as firms. They are not, precisely because they are informal. You often see colleagues complain that labor income in Mexico is very low, representing barely 30% of GDP, whereas in developed countries it is around 50%. The reason is precisely GMI, which accounts for 22% of GDP. If we consider it part of labor income (informal), then the total reaches 52%, perfectly comparable to any country.
But if we apply this to what we were analyzing, we get strange results. We would have to divide the 37 million informal workers into two groups: subordinate and non-subordinate. Interestingly, they split almost evenly: 18.6 million vs. 18.4 million people. For the first group we already had income—the 5.5 trillion pesos mentioned—but when distributed among the 18.6 million “informal subordinates,” their average income turns out to be nearly 25,000 pesos per month—higher than that of formal workers! Meanwhile, GMI in 2025 was 7.7 trillion pesos, and when distributed among the 18.4 million “non-subordinate” informal workers, each would have a monthly income of 35,100 pesos.
That concludes the exercise, which experts could surely improve. What should be made clear is that the ENOE cannot properly report people’s incomes, labor poverty measurements underestimate the wage bill, and—as we have already discussed at some point—the ENIGH is incapable of accurately measuring income from remittances.
In short: we have no idea how much Mexicans earn, nor how they earn it. Without that, no policy can work.