Miami as a Gateway to Latin America
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Trevor L Taylor, a Miami private investor and the founder of Fortius Capital, lives in a city that companies have used for decades as the gateway between the United States and Latin America. The phrase is a cliché of local boosterism, but it describes something measurable: who lives in Miami, which companies keep regional offices here, and how goods, flights and money move between the city and the countries to its south.
People and language
The foundation is demographic. According to the county’s economic development agency, 54 percent of Miami Dade residents were born outside the United States1, 69.1 percent are Hispanic or Latino, and about two thirds speak Spanish at home. For a company that needs to sell in Bogotá, Lima and Mexico City, hiring staff who already speak the language and understand the markets is easier here than in most US cities.
That population also makes Miami a test market. A communications executive told Miami Today that the city had become the epicenter for national brands2 launching products for Latino consumers, because Spanish language media such as Univision and CNN en Español produce and distribute content from here. He noted that Latinos in Miami are the general market rather than a niche, and that campaigns still have to be tailored to different countries of origin.
Regional headquarters
Multinationals have long treated Miami as the place to run the region. Bloomberg reported more than a decade ago that more than 700 multinational companies3 had been drawn to the area over the preceding quarter century by its proximity to Latin America and the Caribbean and its multilingual workforce, with the largest setting up regional headquarters such as a FedEx hub. The same report opened with a Brazilian digital marketing company that had just set up in the financial district, and noted that county officials were courting such firms partly because local unemployment then ran above the state and national rates.
Retail followed the same logic. When Walmart opened its Latin America regional headquarters in the city, its regional chief called Miami a city which some describe as a gateway to Latin America4 and said the office would help stores in nine countries, from Mexico to Argentina, make decisions faster.
Recent arrivals
The pattern continues with newer industries. Fujifilm made Miami the focus of its expansion into Latin America as it shifted from film toward health care and optics, and its local general manager told Miami Today that the city was the obvious choice5 because customers could fly in, visit the facility near the airport and stay nearby. He described Miami as a gateway for Latin American countries.
More recently, the Swiss dermatology company Galderma opened a headquarters for the Americas in Brickell. Bloomberg reported that the firm took a full floor with room for about 200 employees, drawn by the city’s mix of high income spenders6 and a cosmetic surgery industry that attracts patients from around the hemisphere. The finance side of this movement is covered in the entry on finance firms moving to Miami.
Trade by the numbers
Goods tell the same story as offices. The Beacon Council reports that the Miami Customs District handled $137 billion in trade in 20237, more than two thirds of Florida’s two way trade, with leading goods including telephones, gold, aircraft parts and computers. The agency cites about 8 million maritime containers a year and 263 million square feet of warehouse space in the region, much of it oriented to shipping to and from Latin America and the Caribbean.
That flow runs through two public assets, the seaport and the airport, each described in its own entry: PortMiami and Miami International Airport and trade.
Duty free warehouses
A less visible part of the gateway is legal rather than physical. WLRN visited a Miami Dade warehouse designated as a foreign trade zone, where a sign on the door marks the point at which visitors leave the commerce of the United States. Goods stored there, from tools to bathroom fixtures, are bound mostly for the Caribbean, Central America and South America, so no American tariff is due8 as long as they stay in the zone before moving on. When US tariffs rise, that arrangement becomes more valuable to distributors serving the region. A Miami logistics executive quoted in the piece described stepping through the door as entering foreign territory for customs purposes, and the report showed a similar zone at a Broward warehouse that ships vehicle parts to more than two dozen countries in the Caribbean and Latin America.
Air links
Flights matter as much as ships. The director of Miami International Airport told the American Journal of Transportation that the airport has more flights to Latin America9 than any other US airport, with 39 nonstop daily flights to the region and 15 of its top 25 international markets there. For executives who travel monthly to subsidiaries, those schedules can decide where a regional office goes.
Startup capital flowing south
The newest version of the gateway is financial. WLRN reported that Latin American technology startups, many founded during the pandemic, were getting big investment bucks from Miami10, and that much of the city’s own tech energy was being fed by founders from the region. One Colombian training platform it profiled operated in eight Latin American countries with 350 employees, and its cofounder argued that the region faces the widest workforce skills gap in the world, a problem investors in Miami were willing to fund. That overlap ties this entry to the Miami technology sector and to the family offices in Miami that back regional ventures.
Infrastructure, tax rules and office towers can be copied by other cities, and some have tried. The harder thing to replicate is the population itself, which is why the bilingual population remains the one Latin America gateway asset rival cities cannot build.
