receive $14.5 billion this year from [mostly illegal] migrant workers in the United States.
Posted on 10/28/2003 7:09:27 AM PST by harpu
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| Jaime Martinez withdraws money at a transfer service in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Mexicans are expected to receive $14.5 billion this year from [mostly illegal] migrant workers in the United States.
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MEXICO CITY - Nearly one Mexican in five regularly gets money from relatives employed in the United States, making Mexico the largest repository of such remittances in the world, according to a poll sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank.
The pollster, Sergio Bendixen, estimated the payments help feed, house and educate at least a quarter of Mexico's 100 million people.
The poll was part of a report Monday by the bank that said money sent home by Mexican immigrants will soar to $14.5 billion this year, exceeding tourism and direct foreign investment to become this country's second-largest source of income. Oil remains No. 1.
Bendixen said the poll offered forceful evidence that remittances not only sustained this country's rural poor but had also become important to urban working-class households.
Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, estimated that annual remittances to Mexico and Central America could reach $25 billion by the end of the decade, a vast sum made of countless tiny payments by America's lowest-paid workers.
"This is not necessarily something to celebrate," said Don Terry, manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund. "It means that the Mexican economy is not expanding, and so people have had to leave."
Velia Rivas, a legal immigrant from Mexico who lives in Haltom City, said many Mexicans continue to come to the United States in search of economic opportunities. Many come from rural regions where well-paying jobs are hard to come by, she said.
"Mexico's entire economy needs to improve," she said in Spanish.
Many immigrant families send money to their relatives in their respective homelands. It is common practice among the documented and the undocumented.
The workers often labor in construction jobs such as painting, roofing or laying asphalt.
In addition to showing a significant jump in remittances, the bank report opened a window onto the shifts in immigration to the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
After the attacks, the United States almost immediately dispatched more staff members and machinery to bolster law enforcement operations on its border with Mexico, and it was believed that the heightened security would discourage immigrants from crossing illegally.
With fewer immigrants heading north, experts on both sides of the border predicted, remittances to Latin America would sharply decline. And the shrinking American economy was expected to force immigrants out of work, leaving them less money to send home.
Those forecasts, according to the Inter-American Development Bank and immigration experts, have proved wrong.
Despite the increased risks of crossing the border, U.S. population estimates show that the northward flow continued to surge, and experts said the immigrant laborers proved resistant to a stormy economic climate.
Mexican immigration experts, including Rodolfo Garcia Zamora of the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, estimated that some 450,000 Mexicans entered the United States illegally last year. Suro said other evidence indicated that the U.S. population grew last year by nearly 1 million people from Latin America. More than half, he estimated, had no legal status.
"For most Mexicans the increased risks of crossing the border has had no impact on their willingness to migrate," Suro said.
The $14.5 billion in remittances reported by the bank marked a significant increase over the estimated $9 billion that [mostly illegal] immigrants reportedly sent home three years ago. The Mexican government estimated that remittances this year would reach $12 billion, but officials at the bank said they adjusted their figures to include money that came into Mexico through informal channels.
Most of the money is spent on food, clothing and housing. But Suro said a growing portion is invested in small businesses or used to help pay for high school and college educations.
Across much of central Mexico, where men and women have migrated to the United States for so many decades that crossing the border has become more a rite of passage than an escape from poverty, remittances exceed state budgets and pay to build roads, schools, water systems and baseball stadiums.
In recent years, the United States and Mexico made it easier for immigrants to transfer money home. Companies such as Western Union cut the amount of money they charged for wire transfers, halving the cost of transferring money, and American banks have begun allowing undocumented immigrants to open savings accounts so relatives at home can withdraw funds from automated teller machines.
These changes have begun to ease the negative attitudes that Mexicans have long held toward financial institutions. Some 45 percent of people polled by the bank said they received their remittances from a bank or other credit institution, compared with only 7 percent in Guatemala and 17 percent in Ecuador.
$14.5 BILLION
The amount of money Mexican [mostly illegal] immigrants working in the United States are expected to send back home to relatives this year.
Facts about Texas immigrants
• The foreign-born population of Texas grew by 90 percent between 1990 and 2000, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank that studies immigration trends. During that period, the foreign-born population in Texas increased from 1.5 million to 2.9 million.
• According to Census 2000, the top three countries of birth for the foreign-born in Texas were Mexico, Vietnam and El Salvador.
© 2003 Star Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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Offset by a measly $73 Million in estimated tax revenues from illegals, mostly sales and Federal Excise Taxes.
Just Dam.
More like a triple whammy when you consider many are paid under the table to avoid local, state, federal taxes, state workers ins. costs, etc. This not only takes jobs from legals, it drives legitimate businesses that follow the law out of business, and of course there is less tax revenue, but more demand for taxpayer funded services.
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