ìImmigrants Spend Earnings in U.S.: Latin American Workers Send Most Money Home? Not According to Study,î by Joel Millman, Wall Street Journal, 17 May, p. A8.

This is a great article that debunks a key criticism of immigrant labor. A point a lot of peopleóincluding me in my bookólike to make about immigrants is that the money they remit (or send) to relatives back in the home country is actually a very important flow of resources that helps shrink the Gap. For example, Latin American ex-pats send home in remittances roughly five times as much money as the Core gives that regionís poorer states in terms of foreign aid.

Some anti-immigrant types will flip that argument on its heads and say, ìAha, so theyíre taking money out of America!î What this article describes is research that says over 90% of the money earned by immigrants stays in this country. Last year almost 17m Latinos working in the U.S. earned almost a half a trillion dollars (if you can believe it!), and 93% of that $450b was spent here. Meanwhile, Latinos working in the top six states (CA, NY, TX, FL, IL and NJ) sent home more than $1b last year from each state.

Thatís the equivalent of saying that each state send over $1B in foreign aid to Latin America last year, or more than the U.S. sent the entire Gap last year. That is an amazingly important flow of resources that does a tremendous amount of good in the Gap. And it basically occurs with no effort or significant cost on our side. Meanwhile, we get the cheap immigrant labor in the bargain.

This is why I worry about news suggesting that Latinos expected to immigrate to this country arenít doing so in the numbers projected since 9/11 because of new border-control and immigration restrictions. In effect, this is America cutting off its nose to spite its face in this Global War on Terrorism.