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Documents: Illegal Immigrants Sending Billions Back to Home Countries
8 Jul 2014,
Central American nations may have no incentive to prevent migrants from flooding across the U.S.-Mexico border because of the billions of dollars of remittances that illegal immigrants who are able to stay in the United States are sending back home.
As the number of illegal immigrants from Central America has been increasing over the last three years, so have the remittances that Central American nations have received.
According to a leaked June 4, 2014 internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that Breitbart Texas obtained, remittances from those in the United States to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras make up at least 10% of each country's GDP.
The report estimates that remittances to El Salvador from those in the United States totaled $3 billion in 2010 but ballooned to an estimated $4.2 billion in 2013, which is 16% of El Salvador's GDP.
Remittances to Guatemala from those in the United States totaled $3.76 billion in 2010 and increased to $4.4 billion in 2012, which is 10% of Guatemala's GDP.
And remittances to Honduras from those in the United States totaled $2.3 billion in 2010 and increased to $3.2 billion in 2013, which equaled 20% of Honduras's GDP.
The White House recently gave nearly $250 million in taxpayer funds in foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and critics have said the U.S. government should cut off all aid until those nations take steps to stem the tide of migrants making the trek to America.
Do you have the number of how much legal immigrants send back to their home countries?
Honest question, I genuinely want to know.
You have issues with people who made money here sending in where they like? Commie.
They made, and spent, a lot more here than they sent home to mom...
Deporting Customers Hurts the Economy | Cato Institute
Do you have the number of how much legal immigrants send back to their home countries?
Honest question, I genuinely want to know.
Then read the OP.!!! It gives the numbers.
A survey by Inter-American Dialogue of remittances to Mexico found that a majority, 67 percent in 2013, were sent by “undocumented” individuals living in the U.S. Of all of the remittances sent to 11 countries in Latin America from the U.S. in 2015, Mexico received the largest share by far at 36 percent – four times more than the closest competitor, Guatemala, at 9 percent, the survey found. “Remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), which exceeded US$70 billion dollars in 2015, are playing a key role in the region's economic development,” according to the institute’s 2016 “Remittances scorecard.” The majority of remittances to Mexico, 88.2 percent, are sent using the services of companies like MoneyGram and Western Union, the institute found. It said the cash transfer industry has “expanded dramatically,” and now helps migrants in the U.S. pay their bills in Latin America. But while services have expanded, the cost of sending money to Latin America and the Caribbean has dropped to below 5 percent of the transfer amount.
Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, says the cash transfers reveal a “hidden cost of illegal immigration because you have millions of dollars being taken out of local communities.” “Remittances being sent out of the country represent a substantial economic impact on local communities because that money is not circulating in those communities,” Mehlman told CNSNews.com. “On top of that, a lot of the people generating this money are working off the books and there are no payroll taxes being taken,” he added. In remarks published in the Inter-American Dialogue’s “Remittance Industry Observatory” newsletter last November, Manuel Orozco, a member of the institute’s Financial Services Advisor board, said that “at least” $130 billion is transferred out of the U.S. each year by more than 35 million migrants.
Data gathered by the Mexican government and BBVA Research shows that in 2015, nearly one-third (29.6 percent) of all of the remittances sent from the U.S. to Mexico originated in California. Just over 14 percent was sent from Texas, and 5.1 percent from Illinois. In 2015, remittances sent to Mexico totaled 2.3 percent of the country’s GDP, the data showed. Forbes has reported that the money sent from the U.S. to Mexico by migrants “replaced oil revenues as Mexico’s number one source of foreign income” in late 2015. Some 90 percent of all remittances sent worldwide are in cash, rather than by electronic or bank transfer, according to Alix Murphy, director of mobile partnerships at the remittances company WorldRemit, which operates in 47 states of the U.S. She said the market for money transfer services in the U.S. was “very diversified.” “We’re talking hundreds of companies that are regulated by the states.”
Individuals using the cash transfer services are required to show identification, but not immigration status, Murphy said. Foreign-issued IDs, however, can be used, according to a 2016 analysis by the Congressional Research Service. The Remittance Status Verification Act, introduced by then-Senator David Vitter (R-La.) in 2014 but never passed into law, would have fined senders of international cash transfers seven percent of the transfer amount if they could not show “proof of status under U.S. immigration laws.” If enacted, such a law could slow the flow of remittances considerably, according to David Landsman, executive director of the National Money Transmitters Association. In remarks published in the “Remittance Industry Observatory” newsletter last November, Landsman said that “[f]orcing remittance companies to be immigration enforcement agents would make remittance volumes plummet in the best of times.” “Their transactions would then go through more informal methods, and become completely opaque to law enforcement.”
Survey: Most Mexico-Bound Cash Remittances Sent by Undocumented Workers
But they also caution that blocking or taxing the transfers – known as remittances – could face legal challenges and may force the annual flow of billions of dollars to Mexico underground, making the transfers harder to regulate. Trump said in a memo sent to the Washington Post last March – and subsequently reproduced on his campaign website – that he could threaten to block remittances sent to Mexico as a way to force the Mexican government to pay for a border wall. Trump said Mexico receives some $24 billion a year in remittances from Mexican nationals working in the U.S., with most that amount coming “from illegal aliens.” Should Mexico in response agree to pay $5-10 billion to fund the wall, he wrote, then the threat to block the remittances would not be carried out.
Remittances to Mexico shot up by nearly 25 percent after Trump was elected last November, compared to 2015, Reuters has reported. Mexico received $26.5 billion in remittances sent from the U.S. in 2016, according to the Washington policy institute, Inter-American Dialogue. “This is one promise Mr. Trump might really keep,” David Landsman, executive director of the National Money Transmitters Association, told the institute last year. Landsman pointed to the Remittance Status Verification Act, introduced by then-Senator David Vitter (R-La.) in 2014, which would have fined senders of international cash transfers seven percent of the transfer amount if they could not show “proof of status under U.S. immigration laws.” The bill never advanced out of committee.
In remarks published by the Inter-American Dialogue’s “Remittance Industry Observatory” newsletter, Landsman said two General Accounting Office reports had “raised no legal obstacles to status verification.” “There are some constitutional doubts about a remittance tax at the state level, but none at the federal level,” he noted. “Under one-party Republican rule, the Democrats will have to pick their battles, and undocumented remittance senders are non-voters.” Reached for comment, Manuel Orozco, director of the Migration, Remittances and Development Program at Inter-American Dialogue, drew CNSNews.com’s attention to his opposing comments, published in the same newsletter. “If migrants are required to pay taxes on their transactions, some would opt to use informal mechanisms. Others would also use informal mechanisms out of fear of being found living without legal status,” he commented. “Moreover, it would be difficult to apply the tax only to Mexicans and not to any foreign-born individual in the United States.” “A tax on remittances to pay for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border is technically and legally unfeasible,” Orozco said. “It would require not only the introduction of new taxes, but also an amendment to the Patriot Act to expect businesses to check immigrants’ legal status in the United States.”
However, according to a recent analysis of Trump’s proposal by The National Law Review, the Patriot Act has been updated to include companies that offer remittance services to immigrants in regulations related to the Bank Secrecy Act. The analysis also noted that Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, has said that using the Patriot Act to block the money transfers would likely be “challenged in court.” “If the new president establishes a tax on transfers, I think there would be years of lawsuits by companies and individuals,” predicted Alfredo Cuecuecha Mendoza, an economist at El Colegio de Tlaxcala, A.C., a university near Mexico City. “A tax would have to be applied to all transfers, not just transfers made by people of Mexican origin.”
Taxing the transfers could also force immigrants to use other, unregulated means, said Alix Murphy, director of mobile partnerships at the remittances company WorldRemit. “The fear is that more remittances will go underground,” she told CNSNews.com. Underground methods for sending cash abroad could include carrying it across the border or using unregistered remittances brokers who have networks of associates abroad. The brokers accept the cash in the U.S. and their associates make the payments overseas, Murphy said. Legal money transfers by immigrants are regulated by state laws, and while senders are required to show identification, they are not required to show their immigration status, she said. In fact, the U.S. Treasury Department allows remittance providers to accept foreign-issued IDs, and an ID issued in the US is not required, according to a 2016 analysis by the Congressional Research Service.
Experts Explore Feasibility of Using Remittances to Fund US-Mexico Border Wall
