Posted on 10/28/2003 5:48:16 PM PST by yonif
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 that the payments help feed, house and educate at least a quarter of Mexico's 100 million people.
The poll was part of a report on Monday by the bank, which said money sent home by all Mexican immigrants would soar to $14.5 billion this year, exceeding tourism and direct foreign investment to become this country's second most important source of income. Oil remains No. 1.
Bendixen said the poll offered forceful evidence that remittances not only sustained Mexico'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 2010, a vast sum made of countless tiny payments by America's lowest-paid workers.
"This is not necessarily something to celebrate," said Donald Terry, manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund. "It means that the Mexican economy is not expanding, and so people have had to leave."
Indeed, in addition to showing a significant jump in remittances, the report opened a window onto the shifts in illegal immigration to the United States since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In the wake of 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 illegal crossing.
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 have shown that the northward flow continued to surge, and experts said that the immigrant laborers had proved themselves 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 of the Pew Hispanic Center said other evidence indicated that the U.S. population grew last year by nearly one million people from Latin America. More than half, he estimated, had no legal status.
"For most Mexicans the increased risk 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 immigrants reportedly sent home three years ago. The Mexican government estimated that remittances this year would reach $12 billion, but the authorities at the bank said that they had 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 was invested in small business or helped to 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 like Western Union cut the amount of money they charged for wire transfers, halving the cost of transferring money, and American banks have begun allowing illegal 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.
The opening of more formal channels have made it easier to measure the cash flow, said Terry, of the Multilateral Investment Fund. And he said that at least a part of the significant jump in remittances could be attributed to better accounting.
WOW!
Whats Bush doing about this?
And how can we expect 3 rd world Iran, Syria and Pakistan to secure its borders if the wealthiest, most powerful, most technologically savy nation cannot secure its borders?
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