Migration is a macroeconomic variable that tells us which countries have a better standard of living than others.
Normally the inhabitants of a country leave, emigrate, to another that offers them a better standard of living.
If we want to know which countries were most advanced at a certain time, it helps us to know where they emigrated from and where they immigrated to.
At the peak of the Roman Empire, its capital, Rome, was the most important city, not only in the Roman Empire, but in the entire world.
Then Constantinople and later Napoleon's France. Opinions are currently divided on which city or country is the most important. To correctly classify which country or city is the most important in the world, we must put aside sympathies, antipathies and ideologies.
When I was a kid, in high school, I liked to go talk to a neighbor, who had been the leader of the union of workers at the Veracruz docks, where the ships arrived.
He was a good, left-wing man. He told me that in socialist Russia workers lived with the highest standard of living in the world.
If today we compare with figures, which did not exist at that time, we can point out with certainty in which country there is a better standard of living.
Emigration and immigration are definitive phenomena to know in which countries life is relatively better.
The United States, made up of 99 percent of immigrants from all over the world, is currently one of the countries that offers the highest levels of wages and freedoms in the modern world, whether we like the 'gringos', so-called, or not. for their gray clothing when they arrived in Veracruz.
If we compare the standard of living between Russia and the United States we can conclude which economic system is more efficient in reducing poverty. In 2022, the GDP per inhabitant in the capitalist US was 76,329 dollars, five times higher than that of the socialist USSR, at 15,270.
Almost all those who emigrated and emigrate to the United States are poor.
Mexico is the main country from which immigrants come legally or illegally to the United States. And the more Mexicans who go to the United States reflects the greater poverty in Mexico.
From 2013 to 2018, 870,000 Mexicans emigrated to the US, and from 2018 to 2023, 1,329,000, 58 percent more. These figures make it clear to us that with the current Mexican government, the standard of living and the opportunities to improve it were reduced for the majority of middle-class Mexicans and those who live in extreme poverty.
