Living in El Salvador

Earnings in El Salvador sit on the lower side of the world, while the cost of getting by lands nearer the middle. Tax is not heavy, but with pay and prices pulling against each other, the end of the month comes out thin. Work is not easy to walk into, since hiring rests on familiarity and English carries only within certain trades, so a move here tends to make sense for reasons beyond the paycheck.

El Salvador's diaspora points overwhelmingly in one direction: of the roughly 1.8M Salvadorans living abroad, about 1.6M are in the United States, dwarfing Mexico and Canada. That diaspora is many times the small foreign-born population at home, and the number living abroad has grown 19% over the past decade.