Remittances aid families of immigrants

TIRANA, Albania (AP) — One sweaty wad of bills or $200 Western Union wire transfer at a time, millions of immigrants around the world form what could be called Immigration Inc. — one of the biggest businesses on the planet.

Globally, remittances — the cash that immigrants send home — totaled nearly $276 billion in 2006, according to the World Bank. Remittances have more than doubled since 2000, and with globalization increasing the number of people on the move, there’s no end in sight.

If these workers incorporated as a company, their migrant multinational would rank third on the Fortune 500 list, trailing only Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobil in annual revenue.

Analysts tracking the phenomenon said they have gotten a much clearer picture since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when authorities trying to cut the flow of cash to jihadists began taking a harder look at how immigrants move their money around.

Mass migration, they say, has spawned an underground economy of staggering proportions.

Take Josif Poro in Albania. He pats his new sofa, points with pride to his carpets and runs a wrinkled hand over a gleaming white refrigerator.

He and his wife barely scrape by on their $220 monthly pension. They would have to do without many of the items in their cramped apartment if their son, a factory worker in Greece, didn’t faithfully send home part of his earnings.

“We call him our golden boy,” said Mr. Poro, 83, a retired textile-mill worker.

Remittances “are larger than direct foreign investment in Mexico, tea exports in Sri Lanka, tourism revenue in Morocco, and revenue from the Suez Canal in Egypt,” World Bank economist Dilip Ratha said in a recent report.

Unlike the conventional economy, more cash tends to change hands in an economic downturn, political crisis, natural disaster, famine or war.

Counterterrorism officials say al Qaeda and other groups are financed in part through informal money-transfer networks called hawalas. Governments and the International Monetary Fund have been working to regulate those.

There are other downsides: fears of brain drains and a vast permanent army of economic exiles, and the untaxed earnings flowing out of host nations.

The U.S. lost $41.1 billion in 2005, according to the World Bank, while Switzerland watched $13.2 billion trickle out of the country that year.

But Giuseppina Iampietro, a Swiss Economics Ministry spokeswoman, says little can be done: “Immigrants have no obligation to invest their money in Switzerland.”

Keeping home afloat

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