The struggle to support faraway families
A week after her high school prom in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Karin moved to the United States. She lives in Hialeah, a sprawling city outside Miami filled with Spanish-speaking immigrants, pawnshops, and little diners serving café con leche.
She has been here six months, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with her mom, uncle, aunt, and two baby cousins, ducking when she sees the landlady - who does not know she lives there - and biting her lip when waves of homesickness come crashing. She has not been to the movies, or made friends, or even heard of nearby South Beach, with its Art Deco buildings and stylish crowds.
What Karin (whose last name is not included because she is in the US illegally) has done is find work and start sending money home to her father and two brothers back in Honduras. Of the approximately $460 a month she makes working as a waitress and moonlighting as a baby sitter, she sends $300 home through a local envois, or money-wiring service. Most of the rest goes toward her share of the rent, toiletries, and bus fare for rainy days.
She often wears the same outfit for days in a row, always pulls her hair back in a simple ponytail, and never applies makeup. Last month she bought herself a pair of sensible work shoes. This month she plans to go out to a nice meal with her aunt. She has not saved a penny.
Before Karin came to the US, she burned all her childhood trinkets, gave away most of her clothes to her cousins, and presented her portable CD player and Air Supply collection to her dad. "The idea was to come and work - not bring stuff here," she explains. "My life ended there and now begins again."
Across the US, about 42 percent of the approximately 6 million immigrants - legal and illegal - from Latin America and the Caribbean dispatch remittances home on a regular basis. Their individual generosities, according to new statistics released by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank, added up to about $30 billion in 2002.
As a source of capital, these remittances eclipse all investment by foreigners and foreign firms for most of the recipient countries; they count for more than 10 percent of the gross domestic product in six of the countries (11.5 percent, for example, in Honduras and 30 percent in Nicaragua). And they are growing dramatically, as immigration to the US from that part of the world continues to boom.
Those sending remittances are bound emotionally and culturally to those left behind, says the study, but otherwise they are a very diverse bunch: They are old and young, men and women, legal and illegal, and new and old immigrants - although the most recently arrived can be counted on to send money most regularly.
For some - those with more means - sending off hard-earned money every week or month is no big sacrifice. For others, like Karin, it is a struggle. Close to half of the men and women sending remittances make less than $30,000 a year, according to the study - and many make much less. This means that these immigrants work day in and out and live modestly so that faraway parents, siblings, or children they may not have seen for years can live a little better.
