| | |  Americas & Beyond | September 2009 
Economic Downturn Slows Migration Flows - Report
 Robin Pomeroy - Reuters
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September 08, 2009
London - The global economic downturn has drastically slowed migration flows, as once-booming countries provide would-be immigrants with fewer opportunities for a better life, a survey released on Tuesday showed.
Immigration from Mexico into the United States is close to a quarter of what it was four years ago and almost half of the 1.4 million eastern Europeans who migrated to Britain after European Union enlargement in 2004 have gone home, the report found.
Migration across the Mexican border fell to 175,000 in the 12 months to March 2009, from 653,000 in the same period in 2004-05, said the report, co-authored by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute thinktank and the BBC World Service.
As well as slowing flows of people, the downturn has also slashed the transfers of cash migrants send to families back home, the report, Migration and the Global Recession, found.
Since the start of 2008, the value of such remittances to Turkey has fallen by 43 percent.
Remittances make up one third of the GDP of Europe's poorest country, Moldova, so a 37 percent fall will badly hit the economy. Bangladesh bucked the trend: remittances there have risen 16 percent since 2008.
The report found that despite reduced job opportunities, the majority of immigrants were choosing to stay where they were rather than return home, hoping things pick up.
(Editing by Andrew Roche) |
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