# 400,000 Americans live in Mexico City?



## Meritorious-MasoMenos (Apr 17, 2014)

I'm planning on returning to Mexico after finishing with writing projects in Thailand. I've always lived in D.F. but was stunned in today's WashPost sidebar on Trump's comment, observing just on passing, that 400,000 Americans live in D.F. Can that be true? Sure, zillions of tourists, but they're talking about ex-pats.

"Many of the Americans living outside the country at that point weren’t living very far away. About 1.7 million of the 4 million people in total were in Mexico or Canada, with more than 400,000 in Mexico City alone. Many more were in Europe, including Britain, Germany and Italy."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...th_top_mostshared_2_na&utm_term=.0d1a017f9137

Maybe they all live in wealthy areas that aren't welcoming to riff-raff like me?


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

Meritorious-MasoMenos said:


> I'm planning on returning to Mexico after finishing with writing projects in Thailand. I've always lived in D.F. but was stunned in today's WashPost sidebar on Trump's comment, observing just on passing, that 400,000 Americans live in D.F. Can that be true? Sure, zillions of tourists, but they're talking about ex-pats.
> 
> "Many of the Americans living outside the country at that point weren’t living very far away. About 1.7 million of the 4 million people in total were in Mexico or Canada, with more than 400,000 in Mexico City alone. Many more were in Europe, including Britain, Germany and Italy."
> 
> ...


It sounds ridiculously high to me. Wonder how they arrived at that figure since, as far as I know, there is no official count of of US citizens living in the CDMX (FYI, the capital of the country is now the CDMX not the DF).


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## TundraGreen (Jul 15, 2010)

I don't know about the CDMX specifically, but, years ago, I spent some time studying the results of the 2010 Mexican census. If memory serves, a questionable assumption, that census found that there were about 1 million US citizens living in Mexico. About half of them were children of Mexican heritage, born in the US, and living in Mexico. 

In addition to the children with dual citizenship, there are many Mexicans who lived and worked in the US, became citizens, but now are back in Mexico for retirement or family or whatever. 

Not all US citizens in Mexico are wealthy retirees living in expat enclaves.


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## lat19n (Aug 19, 2017)

I can't read that article as I don't have an account with Wapo - But are you saying that the source of the 400,000 number is Donald Trump ? If so I would take that with a pound of salt...

If it were to be important to me - I'd give the US Embassy a call and ask them.


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## maesonna (Jun 10, 2008)

Apparently they got the figure from a 1999 list compiled by the Bureau of Consular Affairs. There’s a link in the article. The information at the link doesn’t say how the data were gathered. If it was by counting people accessing the U.S. consulate in Mexico City for services to U.S. citizens, and/or registering with the consulate as U.S. citizens residing in Mexico, then the Mexico City figure could well include Americans from anywhere in Mexico who came to Mexico City either because it was the closest consulate, or to get access to services that some other consulates don’t offer.


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## modeeper (Mar 21, 2015)

Jeez, and to think I am the only ****** living in my townsito. 

So now we all have to call DFers CDMXers. Can we still call them Chilangos?

Here's a tale of DF:

I worked at El ITESO, it's a Jesuit Uni in GDL. So they planned a convention and invited a mass of Jesuit folks all over Latin America.

A lot of them went missing for a period while in route after landing in DF. Two Bolivian nuns were among them. 

So what happened to these two? They hailed a taxi, one of those Bochos with the front seat taken out to accommodate the passengers. The driver stopped and let his friend climb aboard. Then they went to the ATM and the nuns were escorted up to it, inserted their cards and drew out the maximum allowed for a 24-hour period. Then they were taken to a safe house where they were kept for the next day's withdrawal, then the next.

They arrived in GDL by way of the grace of unknown people along the way. These are nuns brethren.

So the point being .. what's the attraction?


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## modeeper (Mar 21, 2015)

TundraGreen said:


> I don't know about the CDMX specifically, but, years ago, I spent some time studying the results of the 2010 Mexican census. If memory serves, a questionable assumption, that census found that there were about 1 million US citizens living in Mexico. About half of them were children of Mexican heritage, born in the US, and living in Mexico.
> 
> In addition to the children with dual citizenship, there are many Mexicans who lived and worked in the US, became citizens, but now are back in Mexico for retirement or family or whatever.
> 
> Not all US citizens in Mexico are wealthy retirees living in expat enclaves.


I was in the census biz myself. Been doing it for the past four decades, as a bilingual enumerator in LA. 

Here's how accurate the US census is: You knock on the door, you see the curtin open a tinge, you watch 8 people run out the back.

Good morning sir, how many people live at this address? "Two"


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## perropedorro (Mar 19, 2016)

Isla Verde said:


> It sounds ridiculously high to me. Wonder how they arrived at that figure since, as far as I know, there is no official count of of US citizens living in the CDMX (FYI, the capital of the country is now the CDMX not the DF).


I'm also thinking it's an exaggerated figure, and my guess is they're counting Mexicans with "dual" citizenship as U.S. citizens, be they Mexican returnees who acquired U.S. citizenship, pochos, or American expats who naturalized. As we know, there's no such thing as a Mexican citizen having dual citizenship when in Mexico. Legally, they're Mexican...period.


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## chicois8 (Aug 8, 2009)

Can we still call them Chilangos?.........YES


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## Meritorious-MasoMenos (Apr 17, 2014)

lat19n said:


> I can't read that article as I don't have an account with Wapo - But are you saying that the source of the 400,000 number is Donald Trump ? If so I would take that with a pound of salt...
> 
> If it were to be important to me - I'd give the US Embassy a call and ask them.


WaPost, and most other paid services except WSJ and Financial Times, gives 3-5 free articles a month for each browser you have - Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari (for Apple folks). Even ways around that that they intentionally leave open in order to get large number of views. (WaPost even published an article once giving this reason why they left the way open for even slightly knowledgeable net users.) WaPost cut free visits from five to three per month last year, working up nerve to go to zero, I guess.

Re; "I'd give the US Embassy a call and ask them."

Gov't bureaucrats love folks like you, who take their word as gospel. And, having dealt with U.S. embassies in Mexico and around the world, they don't consider themselves to be an analog Google.


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## maesonna (Jun 10, 2008)

It says in the article where they got that figure, as I mentioned above. It was from this web page.
It looks like all residents on the list were listed under one of the cities where there was a consulate in 1999. So the Mexico City figure would include all U.S. Mexican residents who registered in Mexico City, wherever in Mexico they lived.


maesonna said:


> Apparently they got the figure from a 1999 list compiled by the Bureau of Consular Affairs. There’s a link in the article. The information at the link doesn’t say how the data were gathered. If it was by counting people accessing the U.S. consulate in Mexico City for services to U.S. citizens, and/or registering with the consulate as U.S. citizens residing in Mexico, then the Mexico City figure could well include Americans from anywhere in Mexico who came to Mexico City either because it was the closest consulate, or to get access to services that some other consulates don’t offer.


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## Meritorious-MasoMenos (Apr 17, 2014)

maesonna said:


> It says in the article where they got that figure, as I mentioned above. It was from this web page.
> It looks like all residents on the list were listed under one of the cities where there was a consulate in 1999. So the Mexico City figure would include all U.S. Mexican residents who registered in Mexico City, wherever in Mexico they lived.


Thanks for finding that.

It's incredible that the WaPost reporter would use nearly 20-year-old data and editors didn't catch it. Post is of course owned by Jeff Bezos, currently richest person in world with net worth north of $100 billion, but his plan to make the paper profitable involved buying out most veteran reporters and editors and slowly making it pure digital with Millennials.


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