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 Editorials | Issues | March 2007 
Drawback to Money Sent to Mexico?
 Hernán Rozemberg - San Antonio Express-News
| | The money migrants send back to their villages ends up being less than what they were earning back home. |
It's a question many may have pondered but few have tried to study and answer: What would happen if thousands of U.S.-bound Mexicans planning to send money back home actually stayed put?
In what may seem a surprising conclusion, one Mexican scholar said that although the dollars Mexican immigrants send to Mexico — called remittances — certainly help their immediate families, the country would be better off economically if they didn't venture to the United States.
"They'd be better off without migrating," argued Agustín Escobar Latapí, director of the Center for Research in Social Anthropology in Guadalajara. "Their remittances help lower the country's income inequality, but they'd have more of an impact if they stayed home."
Escobar was one of several participants in a conference on remittances held at the downtown campus of the University of Texas at San Antonio on Thursday.
Escobar said most remittances go to the rural, poorest areas of Mexico — regions representing the 17 percent of Mexicans who live below the "food poverty line," meaning they don't have enough to eat — so essentially they keep the subsistence cycle going instead of boosting the overall economy.
The money migrants send back to their villages ends up being less than what they were earning back home and has made their relatives desperately dependent on remittances, which now make up 81 percent of total annual income for poor, rural Mexicans, Escobar said.
Agreeing with that provocative argument, Fernando Lozano Ascencio also challenged traditional assumptions about migrants and remittances.
Nobody paid much attention to the topic when he began researching it nearly two decades ago, said Lozano, of the Regional Center for Multidisciplinary Research at the Cuernavaca campus of the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Today, with global remittances having skyrocketed from $5 billion in 1995 to $130 billion in 2004 — Mexico's total alone went from $3 billion to $23 billion — it's a vastly different story, he said.
Lozano's analysis of Mexican migrants showed that, contrary to what other studies have found, those with established accounts in U.S. banks were more likely to send money home than those without such accounts. It also showed that over time more migrants opt to settle in their adopted country.
"They're staying and adapting," Lozano said. "Opening bank accounts is a good first step in establishing economic citizenship."
hrozemberg@express-news.net |
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