President Donald Trump‘s “big, beautiful” bill, about to face the Senate, entails a new 3.5% tax on remittance transfers from non-citizens, drawing widespread criticism for disproportionately affecting poor migrants while failing to completely close off channels for sending money overseas.
What Happened: The United States was responsible for over $656 billion in global remittances in 2023, and the newly passed tax is applicable to all remittances made by individuals who are not US citizens or nationals, according to the Financial Times.
While the tax was reduced from a previously proposed 5% rate, experts expect the new cost burden to fall heaviest on low-income Central American migrants. According to Andrew Selee of the Migration Policy Institute, “It is essentially a tax on the very poor.” The U.S. citizens …