A survey estimates 6 million in the United States are regularly dispatching remittances to relatives in Latin America and the Caribbean.

  SERGIO BUSTOS
  Gannett News Service

  Every payday Martha Padilla heads to her local money wiring station in Tucson to send a
  good chunk of her check south of the border to her sick parents in Sonora.

  "They need it bad, that's why I'm here working," the 52-year-old housekeeper said.

  She has been sending the money for 12 or 13 years, she said.

  The money sent by Padilla and other Hispanics here to relatives in Latin America and the
  Caribbean could top $30 billion this year and encourage more Hispanics, especially
  Mexicans, to immigrate to the United States to lift their families from poverty, a new
  exhaustive survey re-leased yesterday shows.

  The survey estimates that 6 million Hispanics in the United States were regularly sending
  money home, called remittances, and that millions of families rely on the dollars to pay for
  food, rent and other basic needs.

  The United States is home to about 39 million Hispanics.

  The survey also revealed a significant percentage of Hispanics were interested in moving
  to the United States. That was certainly true with Mexicans. It found 19 percent of
  Mexican adults, which translates into roughly 13.5 million people, said they were
  "thinking" of migrating here.

  The survey, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.41 percentage points, was based
  on interviews conducted this year with more than 11,000 Hispanics in the United States,
  Ecuador, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico.

  The amount of money flowing across borders is so high it will likely surpass total foreign
  direct investment this year to Latin America and the Caribbean. And it far exceeds the
  annual amount of U.S. foreign aid sent to the region, the authors said.

  "This is a river of gold coming from the United States that could dramatically help
  improve the economic development of this region," said Sergio Bendixen, a Florida-based
  pollster who carried out the survey along with other groups.

  But Bendixen and others said that Latin American and Caribbean countries are paying
  little attention to remittances, ignoring the positive impact on their economies.

  "The numbers are staggering under any scenario," said Multilateral Investment Fund
  Manager Donald Terry.

  The Fund is part of the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank, which is
  pushing U.S. financial institutions to enter the remittance business to help drive down
  the high transactions costs of sending money abroad.

  Such fees range from $10 to $30 to send $200.

  Padilla said she sent $150 to Mexico two weeks ago and it cost her about $10, which
  she said is fair.

  Wire transfer companies, including Western Union or Money Gram, dominate the
  remittance market, according to the survey, which found about 70 percent reported
  using such companies to send money home. About 11 percent use banks; 17 percent
  use informal means like the mail or having someone deliver the money by hand.

  The bank released the survey at a conference on remittances held here yesterday with
  top U.S. and Latin American and Caribbean officials.

  The percentage of people who receive remittances from relatives in the U.S. was
  especially high in Central America. Twenty-eight percent of adults surveyed in El Salvador
  reported receiving remittances; 24 percent of Guatemalans, the survey found.

  In Mexico, 18 percent of those interviewed said they received money from family
  members in the United States. Families in five Mexican states - Guanajuato, Jalisco,
  Michoacan, San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas - receive a disproportionate share of the
  remittances. Those five states have long been the primary source of immigrants to the
  United States and have received the most in remittances.

  But that trend is beginning to change, the survey's authors said. They found 56 percent
  of those receiving remittances in Mexico lived in other parts of the country.

  "These remittances represent a new kind of integration among nations undertaken not
  by trade negotiators but by ordinary folk to assuage their economic woes," said Roberto
  Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, which also helped carry out the survey.

  "Migration is now not only an escape valve; it is also a fuel pump" for Latin American
  economies, Suro said.

  Doris Meissner, the former commissioner of the former Immigration and Naturalization
  Service during the Clinton administration, said the high number of Mexicans wanting to
  emigrate raise serious questions about the debate in Congress over pending immigration
  legislation that would legalize illegal immigrants and create guestworker programs.

  "Should we go down the path of a (migration) agreement that again may not work?"
  asked Meissner, who said a formal migration agreement with Mexico was needed to help
  cope with the issue of legal and illegal immigration.

  Tucson Citizen Staff Writer Luke Turf contributed to this report.