The often quoted number of legal gringo residents in Mexico has unofficially fluctuated between a hundred thousand and more than a million.
Recently the Instituto Nacional de Migración, Mexico´s immigration service, posted some official statistics for the first 11 months of 2009. I extrapolated some yearly (12 months) figures:
1 - total original FM2, FM3 and inmigrado documents issued -57,858.
2 - total renewals of FM2 and FM3 - 127,788
3 - Total US citizens receiving their first FM2, FM3 or inmigrado - 10,052 or 17.4 por cent.
I applied the percentage of gringos receiving their first documents to the number of renewals -22,235.
Total legal US nationals in Mexico 32,287.
That number seems extraordinarily low, I had thought more than that lived just in Mexico City.
http://www.inm.gob.mx/index.php?page/Documentacin_y_legal_
