Immigrants

For the first time in history, the number of displaced people around the world exceeds 100 million, according to the latest UNHCR data. In Ukraine alone, eight million people have fled since February. To put it into perspective, if a country were formed with all of them, it would rank as the fourteenth most populous on the planet as they are equivalent to more than 1% of the world's population. This figure includes refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the 53.2 million people displaced by conflicts within their own countries. Many of them flee with little and have to start from scratch, sometimes from an even more vulnerable situation. Their settlement and success in the country of settlement depends very much on their legal status because displaced, migrant and refugee are not synonymous.

Remittances remain a major, if not the largest, source of foreign revenue for Mexico. In 2016, the dollar volume for remittances to Mexico jumped 8.8% over the prior year and reached an all-time high of nearly $27 billion — about 95% of those remittances came from the U.S. The U.S.-Mexico corridor is one of the largest remittance sectors in the world, and four key influences are helping to further fuel its significant growth.

Dreamers are individuals who were brought to the United States before the age of 16 and who don’t have lawful immigration status.  They’re pursuing the American dream. They came to the United States as children and many of them discovered as adolescents that they had entered the country without documents. They’re the “dreamers” - immigrants and, most of them children of immigrants who are trying to escape from their legal limbo.

The U.K. is convinced that London will continue to be Europe's fintech capital and a global financial center after Brexit. But other European capitals are hoping to take its place. It will all depend on the long negotiation about to begin between the EU and the U.K.

BBVA Compass Chairman Manolo Sánchez, who immigrated to the U.S. from Spain, was honored last week in his adopted hometown with an Arrival Award from the University of Houston Law School’s Immigration Clinic.

Fintech firms could be the saving grace for the U.K.’s financial sector, but greater complications to attract global talent could pose a serious problem. It all depends on the political negotiations.

What connects a customer who is about to lose two million Mexican pesos (nearly 100,000 euros), soy milk, butterflies, and children who immigrate to the United States? One person. Her name is Amelia Aguilar and she is the manager of a BBVA Bancomer branch in Puebla, Mexico.

Op-ed by Tim Bennett for Emerging Europe

2016 is a very critical year for TTIP, and a conclusion of negotiations couldn’t come soon enough for small and medium size companies (SMEs). Nearly 95,000 out of the 28 million US SMEs export to the EU, while about 150,000 of the 20 million SMEs in the EU export to the US Most SMEs do not have the human, financial, or time resources that larger companies have to develop export markets when faced with tariffs, complex customs procedures, duplicative and expensive regulatory approval requirements. These barriers are cost prohibitive for too many SMEs.