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Mexican Entrepreneurs in Texas. The Opportunity Many Municipalities Are Failing to Capture

  • Writer: Editorial
    Editorial
  • 3 hours ago
  • 5 min read
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Mexican Entrepreneurs in Texas: An Opportunity Missed by Many Municipalities – *interAlcaldes* Magazine

While Texas has built mechanisms to attract Mexican companies and investment, many municipalities in Mexico still view their diaspora primarily through remittances. A much larger economic opportunity exists: turning Mexican entrepreneurs, professionals, and business leaders into a network for investment, suppliers, knowledge, and access to the U.S. market.


For decades, many Mexican municipalities learned to measure their relationship with communities in the United States through one figure: remittances.


That money has supported households, financed education, improved housing, and even contributed to community infrastructure. According to Banco de México, the country received $61.791 billion in remittances in 2025.

But reducing the diaspora to the money it sends home means recognizing only part of its economic value.


Texas is home to a generation of Mexican and Mexican-origin entrepreneurs, professionals, business owners, executives, and investors who operate companies, employ workers, participate in supply chains, and understand one of North America’s most important markets from the inside.


The problem is that many Mexican municipalities still do not know who they are.


“The Mexican diaspora’s next major contribution may not arrive as a remittance. It may arrive as a company, a contract, knowledge, or access to a new market.”

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Texas is already part of Mexico’s economic geography

The relationship between Mexico and Texas extends far beyond their shared border.


In 2024, bilateral trade reached approximately $281.2 billion. Mexico was Texas’ largest trading partner, its leading export market, and its largest source of imports.


Over the previous decade, Mexican companies also announced dozens of investment projects in the state, representing billions of dollars in capital and thousands of jobs.


The integration is demographic as well. Approximately 22% of Mexican immigrants living in the United States during the 2020–24 period resided in Texas, with major concentrations in metropolitan areas such as Houston and Dallas.


For many Mexican municipalities, Texas should therefore not be seen simply as foreign territory. It is part of an extended economic geography populated by consumers, suppliers, investors, and business leaders directly connected to Mexico.


Economic capital municipalities are failing to identify

The opportunity is not about asking the diaspora for more money.


It is about recognizing what it already knows.


A Mexican business owner in Dallas may know buyers interested in Mexican products. An entrepreneur in Houston may identify opportunities for industrial suppliers. A logistics operator in Laredo understands border requirements, timing, and bottlenecks. A professional in Austin may have access to technology sectors that would rarely appear on the radar of a small municipal economic development office.


That knowledge has economic value.


So do their contacts, reputation, commercial experience, and ability to understand two markets simultaneously.


Research on Mexican entrepreneurs in Texas shows the diversity of these profiles, ranging from small-business owners to highly skilled entrepreneurs involved in transnational business activity.


A municipality that only tracks how many migrants live abroad or how much money they send home is overlooking a far more strategic question:


What economic capabilities did those people build after they left?


Revista interAlcaldes Empresarios mexicanos en Texas. La oportunidad desaprovechada por muchos municipios

Migration and economic development should no longer operate separately

This is where an important institutional challenge emerges.


In many local governments, migrant affairs are approached primarily through a social-policy lens: documentation, family reunification, migrant clubs, community support, or government programs.


Economic development operates elsewhere, focusing on companies, investment, workforce development, trade, and territorial promotion.

That administrative separation is increasingly outdated.


A Mexican living in Texas can simultaneously be a migrant, entrepreneur, investor, buyer, distributor, and international business contact.


Municipal migrant-affairs and economic-development offices should therefore begin sharing information, strategies, and objectives.


An opt-in network of entrepreneurs and professionals connected to a municipality could organize participants by city, industry, expertise, and potential areas for collaboration. From that network, local governments could organize virtual business meetings, connect Mexican suppliers with U.S.

buyers, create mentoring programs for SMEs, and present specific investment opportunities.


Consulates, business chambers, universities, and Mexican organizations in the United States can become nodes within that infrastructure.


A municipality does not need to open an office in Texas to begin.


It needs to know who should be connected with whom.


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Texas builds relationships. Municipalities should too.

The institutional contrast matters.


Texas operates specific mechanisms to attract Mexican companies, facilitate investment, and connect Texas businesses with international markets. Its strategy is based on a simple premise: economic relationships do not emerge automatically. They must be cultivated.


Too many Mexican municipalities still operate as if the opposite were true.

They may organize migrant meetings, institutional visits, or official missions, but rarely turn those contacts into permanent economic networks with measurable outcomes.


Success should not be measured through photographs or signed agreements.

It should be measured through supplier connections, contracts, new exporters, investment projects, business mentoring, and commercial relationships that survive changes in municipal administrations.


“Texas builds institutions to attract Mexican capital; too many Mexican municipalities still lack a strategy for engaging the Mexican capital already living in Texas.”

From remittances to relational capital

Nearshoring is usually explained through factories, industrial parks, highways, energy, and border crossings.


But another form of economic infrastructure is far less visible: people who can operate between two markets.


Mexican entrepreneurs in Texas understand consumers, suppliers, regulations, business practices, and opportunities in the United States. At the same time, many continue to maintain family, cultural, and economic ties to Mexico.


For a small or midsize municipality, that network can represent an advantage that a conventional economic-development budget could rarely purchase.


interMayors Magazine infographic Mexican Entrepreneurs in Texas The Opportunity Many Municipalities Are Failing to Capture
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This is where the concept of Estado 33 acquires a deeper economic meaning.


The diaspora is not simply the population that left Mexico and continues sending money home. It can become an entrepreneurial extension of Mexican territory: a distributed network of contacts, knowledge, markets, and opportunities.


The basic infrastructure already exists.


The entrepreneurs are there. So are the professionals, consulates, chambers of commerce, universities, supply chains, and a Texas–Mexico economic relationship worth hundreds of billions of dollars every year.


What many municipalities still lack is the strategy to connect them.


How many economic opportunities could a municipality uncover if, instead of only counting the remittances it receives from Texas, it began identifying the companies, contacts, knowledge, and markets its own diaspora has already built across the border?


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