Living in Peru

Peru sits in the middle of the world for pay, and the tax system mostly leaves what you earn alone. Ordinary life costs about what that pay can cover, though, so what is left over stays slim rather than comfortable. Breaking into the job market is the real friction, since local employers favor people they can place, and a foreigner usually finds the open door is tourism and hospitality, where the work is steady and English is more useful than across the wider economy.

Peru's foreign-born population has exploded — up 900% over the past decade to 1.8M — in what is one of the fastest immigration surges anywhere. Almost all of it is one corridor: 1.6M arrivals from Venezuela, dwarfing every other origin. A comparably large Peruvian diaspora of 1.7M lives abroad, led by communities in the United States and Spain.