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Immigrants asking for money from home

FAIRVIEW, NJ: For five years, immigrant day labourer Leo Chamale wired money twice a month from New Jersey to his family in Guatemala. Recently, he stepped up to the money transfer window for a different purpose — to ask that his family send some of his savings back to him.

With the US economy in a ditch, money transfer agencies have been reporting a decline in the wages immigrants are sending back to their home countries. Now, it appears some immigrants are going a step further — asking their relatives to wire them money back.

It is not clear how much money is being sent back to the US or how widespread the phenomenon is. Large money transfer agencies, such as Western Union, said they do not disclose how much money is sent or received by their field offices. Banks in foreign countries often track only money sent into the country by their citizens living abroad.

But clearly, these ‘reverse remittances’ — as the money wired back to the US is called — are extremely small when compared to the money immigrants send home.

Immigrants working in the US sent more than $50 billion back to their native countries last year, according to the World Bank, which predicts the amount will drop five percent in 2009. Mexico’s central bank said remittances sent to that country are down more than 18 percent in the past year, and registered their biggest decline on record in April.

World Bank economist Dilip Ratha said he devised his own measure of how much money is sent back to immigrants living in the US and other countries. Analysing foreign currency deposits in the Dominican Republic, Mexico and India from February 2008 to January 2009, Ratha found that immigrants from those countries tapped into their savings accounts — money they had previously wired home — at an accelerated rate as the global economy worsened. The amount of foreign currency on deposit declined seven percent in the Dominican Republic, 12 percent in India, and six percent in Mexico during the 12-month period, Ratha said. Nevertheless, “people are sending far, far, far more back home than what they are taking out,” he said. ap

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