Study says Latin American migrants will send home record amount

WASHINGTON — Latin American migrants in the United States this year will send a record $45 billion to support relatives back home, according to a study released Wednesday that sheds light on the powerful economic forces driving migrants — both legal and illegal — to America's labor-hungry regions.

With 12.6 million migrants born in Latin America now sending home an average of $300 every month, remittances from the United States will grow by 51 percent since 2004, according to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the biggest official lender to the region.

Based on interviews with hundreds of Latino migrants, the IDB survey also revealed a darker side of the phenomenon: Many Latin American nations are unable to create attractive jobs to keep their young populations from leaving. Most interview subjects said they were either unemployed or made little money in their home nations and that they quickly found jobs once they came to America.

Top states for remittances


California topped all states in remittances with $13.2 billion, a 37 percent increase over 2004, followed by Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and Georgia — the traditional seven states with large Hispanic populations. The IDB study also showed that states with the fastest-growing remittances were in places as diverse as Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee.

States with the highest growth rates were New Mexico with a 260 percent increase over 2004, to $370 million, and Louisiana with a 241 percent rise, to $208 million. The latter was related to Hurricane Katrina reconstruction.

The bulk of the money is coming from traditional immigrant gateway states such as Florida and California. But remittance growth is fastest in such divergent states as New Mexico, Louisiana and Virginia, underscoring the dynamic link between the U.S. economy and Latino immigrants, who tend to be younger and more mobile than the overall U.S. population.

Hispanics, IDB president Luis Alberto Moreno said, are "ready and willing" to move wherever the jobs are, "contributing to the U.S. strength."

The IDB commissioned the polling firm Bendixen and Associates to interview 2,511 adults about their economic realities in the United States and in Latin America. The results were cross-checked with data from the Federal Reserve and central banks in Latin America.

IDB officials noted that the immigration benefits weren't a one-way street: About 90 percent, or about $460 billion, of the income generated by Latin American-born migrants stays in the United States. Bendixen warned that if the United States shut its doors to Hispanic immigrants, as Congress is attempting to do, the U.S. economy would be "close to collapse."

About 20 million households in Latin America — or 80 million people — receive more than $60 billion annually from remittances worldwide, a number that dwarfs what countries receive in aid from the U.S. government and development institutions like the World Bank.

"You can see in these numbers the changing map of migration in the United States," said Donald Terry, who heads the Multilateral Investment Fund, the private-lending arm of the IDB that has been tracking remittance trends for seven years.

He noted that one in every 10 U.S. adults was born in Latin America or the Caribbean and that the trend is likely to continue in the future.

"Latin Americans need jobs, and Americans need workers," he said. "That's the reality of the future."

Latin American migrants tend to be poor by U.S. standards: Three out of every five earn annual incomes of less than $30,000.

But the economic magnet is still a powerful one. Migrants earned an average of $150 a month in Latin America. Their first jobs in the United States on average paid six times more.

Also, 56 percent of migrants didn't have full-time jobs before coming to America; slightly more than half had jobs less than a month after arriving.

The report also revealed that poorer and newer arrivals are more likely to send money home.