DraeZ said:
Hes just a smart ass critic. Im sure most illegal immigrants arent living a luxorious life with their so called free health care and tax free lives. Hes in a position to analyze the situation because he makes well above the poverty line in income. Illegals dont generally make 72,000 dollars a year and have a lot of money to just burn. So the 2000 dollar fine and backowed taxes is a lot to people who are in that position working in this country.
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Remittances to Mexico:</font size><font size="6"> $24 Billion </font size></center>
Web Posted: 10/18/2006 07:38 PM CDT
Hernán Rozemberg
Express-News Immigration Writer
Though they're able to make a modest living off their ranch, Juan León's parents back in Mexico probably would join the ranks of the poor were it not for the precious dollars sent from their children working in the United States.
León, owner of La Taquería Huentitán Jalisco on the near Northwest Side along with his brother Anselmo, sends between $500 and $1,000 to his parents back in Jalisco about four times a year.
"They really count on that money," León said. "Especially if the growing season is not going so well, they depend on those dollars to keep the ranch running."
Their remesas, or remittances, are part of a staggering $24 billion infusion that Mexican immigrants — legal and illegal — will give their homeland this year, according to projections in a report released Wednesday by the Inter-American Development Bank, a lending institution akin to a World Bank for Latin America.
Mexico's chunk is the largest of a total of $63 billion that Latin American migrants all over the world are expected to send home this year, according to the report — more than $45 billion sent from the United States, home to more than 17 million of the estimated 20 million Latin American expatriates.
Don Terry, an administrator with the bank who spearheaded the remittance study, said the issue wasn't analyzed much until a few years ago. The bank's own examinations, dating to 2001, prove that the quantity of migrants and the volume of the money they send home has skyrocketed, and projections show the trend is likely to continue.
"People are flabbergasted when they realize the impact of this issue," Terry said. "For Latin American countries, remittances from abroad add up higher than direct foreign aid."
The remittance influx to Mexico now matches oil as the country's top revenue source. And for smaller countries such as Honduras and El Salvador, a cut in remittances would usher a dive into bankruptcy, said Sergio Bendixen, a Miami-based pollster who conducted a survey of 2,511 U.S-based migrants as well as 30 focus groups throughout Latin America for the IDB report.
The money from abroad is so crucial for many of these countries that it keeps 20 million Latin American families from falling into poverty, Terry said.
In the United States, the money transfers are coming from a wider geographical base than ever — the report lacked figures only for West Virginia and Montana — but the traditional destination states still dominate the tally.
Migrants in Texas will send $5.2 billion this year, second only to California's $13.3 billion. Contributions from Louisiana ballooned from $61 million in 2004 to an estimated $208 million this year, a product of the labor of thousands of migrants who moved to the state for hurricane reconstruction jobs.
In the past five years, based on the poll and the focus groups, Bendixen concluded that the number of migrants sending money home increased from 59 percent to 73 percent — most now dispatching dollars monthly rather than quarterly.
The average transfer went up from $200 to $300, Bendixen said.
Confirming past studies, the IDB report noted that more than half of migrants leave their homelands in search of work in the United States because they couldn't find jobs at home.
Migrants typically find jobs within two weeks to a month, with average earnings of $900 per month.
Readily acknowledging the remittance issue has created political controversy over the issue of illegal immigration, Terry dismissed what he deemed as myths about migrants not contributing to the U.S. economy.
Most migrants, in fact, pay taxes and send only 10 percent of their earnings back home, he said.
But even that amount equates to millions that should remain within U.S. borders, said Jack Martin, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the country's largest immigration-restriction lobbying organization.
"It's a net reduction on our economy. It negatively impacts on our balance-of-payment deficit," Martin said.
The IDB hopes the money going to Latin America can help turn around its economies. Families back home shouldn't be the only ones benefiting from remittances, the report concluded. A system needs to be developed so the money could be used to help Latin American economies prosper.
If they had decent jobs at home, many migrants would stay put, Terry said. A good first step, he noted, would be for the receiving families to look to invest instead of just cashing in — depositing cash into bank accounts instead of taking a wad of bills home, for example.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/stories/MYSA101906.01E.BIZmexico.money.262c016.html
