1
Migrant workers sending more money home
Migrant farm workers from Mexico finish a long day of harvesting organic vegetables at Grant Family Farms on September 3, 2010 in Wellington, Colo.
To view this content, Javascript must be enabled and Adobe Flash Player must be installed.
Migrant workers have managed to keep sending cash back to their home countries, in spite of the tough economy.
Cash remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean countries were up 8 percent from 2010 to 2011. That’s according to the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank. It says remittances are now almost back to pre-recession levels.
Why? Unemployment among foreign–born workers in the U.S. is down 2 percent. And the workers who are here tend to be more established.
"We’re not just talking about people who are nannies, or doing maintenance work or things like that," says Marc Chandler, head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers, Harriman. "We’re talking about people who are already embedded into society."
The Inter-American Dialogue says half of all migrant workers are women; they’re more likely to send money home than men.
Plus technology has made it easier than ever to get money back to home countries. Natural disasters in Mexico and other Central American countries have made migrants even more generous. There's at least one major disaster in Mexico and Central America every year.
It is important in an article like this to balance it with what will be the American worker's situation in the coming decade if the corporate politicians are left to create the 'New Economy'. Your children and grandchildren will be living just as these families in this article if globalization continues. Right now we have Third Way corporate Democrats in the leadership who are moving us in this direction so it is important to vote your democratic incumbent out of office so we can start rebuilding our middle-class here in the US!
There is good news for workers as this massive systemic fraud in our financial system appears to have killed free-market and with it globalization. As the US loses all its trading partners it will be forced to downsize and work domestically as before. We need the right politicians to make sure that happens.
