Immigrants and Their International Money Flows

Introductory chapter | Table of Contents

This book consists of a series of studies on the topic of international migration with an emphasis on workers' remittances. Chapters cover the impact of remittances on economic development and the interplay of immigration policies with human capital acquisition and labor markets in out-migration areas. Included are:

• Migration and Remittances, by Susan Pozo. In her introductory chapter, Pozo discussues why remittances have become such an important topic to immigration researchers.
• International Migration and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries: Lessons from Recent Data, by Robert E.B. Lucas. Lucas contributes a general overview of international migration and notes that, while understanding the connections between poverty and migration is important for furthering our understanding of population movements and their effect on the receiving country, it is also important to understand the economic impacts of migration for those areas experiencing out-migration. This leads to a crucial point: the immigration policies of in-migration areas can and do significantly affect economic development in low-income areas of the world.
• The Effect of International Migration on Educated Employment, by Oded Stark and C. Simon Fan. Stark and Fan support the notion that immigration policies in high-income areas might have unintended consequences for the out-migration areas. Since the prospect of high earnings in foreign destinations induce potential emigrants to acquire more schooling and skills, a “brain gain” occurs in the developed destination countries. At the same time, this pushes up reservation wages among those seeking to emigrate even before they are able to do so. The disparity between wage expectations and wage offers in low-income areas, say the authors, leads to a state of “educated unemployment.”
• How Does Migration Affect Local Development? What Mexico’s Experience Tells Us, by Christopher Woodruff. Woodruff alerts us to the measurement issues inherent in attempting to analyze the impacts of migration, offers several methodologies for overcoming these issues, and then considers three possible impacts of Mexican migration to the United States: 1) its impact on business investments in Mexico, 2) its impact on the health status of children, and 3) its impact on educational attainment.
• Remittance Patterns of Latin American Immigrants in the United States, by Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes. Making use of the wealth of survey information found in the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP) and the Mexican Migration Project (MMP93), Amuedo-Dorantes provides a broad, comparative picture of the remittances that flow from the United States to six Latin American countries—Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, Peru, and Mexico. Her work sheds light on whether remittances are used by home-country families to finance consumption or to save and invest.
• Remittances in the Pacific, by David J. McKenzie. McKenzie accesses survey data found in the Pacific Island–New Zealand Migration Survey (PINZMS) to support an informative case study of the migration of Tongans to New Zealand. Since some one-third of Tongans have emigrated and their remittances comprise 39 percent of Tonga’s gross domestic product, this is an especially interesting case study that reveals several conclusions relating to the impacts of the long-term flow of remittances.

• The Power of Home: Remittances to Families and Communities, by Leah K. VanWey. VanWey identifies three of the most common types of migration-remittance systems: 1) male household heads migrating in order to remit home to support a wife and children, 2) children who migrate and remit to help parents, and 3) hometown associations of migrants that collectively remit to benefit the hometown community. Understanding the variations in these systems, she says, allows us to identify the likely impacts of remittances in the home community, since they help distinguish those that are channeled into private consumption versus public consumption.

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