The Mexicans’ relationship with their American neighbours is ambivalent, for they feel overshadowed as well as attracted by them. There is no other place in the world where the stream of migrants of one nation towards the other is bigger. Every year, more than 400,000 Mexicans seek to reach the Promised Land in the north. The figures speak for themselves: 98.7 percent of Mexican expatriates live in the US. One in three foreigners in the US is a Mexican. The remesas, the money migrants transfer back to their relatives in their home country, are Mexico’s second most important source of income, right after oil revenues.
