Migration And Remittances In Latin America And The Caribbean

Outward migration has been an important phenomenon for countries in Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC), particularly those in Central America and the Caribbean. This paper examines recent trends in outward migration from and remittances to LAC, as well as their costs and benefits. For the home country, the negative impact from emigration on labor resources and productivity seems to outweigh growth gains from remittances, notably for the Caribbean. However, given emigration, remittance flows play key financing and stabilizing roles in Central America and the Caribbean. They facilitate private consumption smoothing, support financial sector stability and fiscal revenues, and help reduce poverty and inequality, without strong evidence for harmful competitiveness effects through shifts in the real exchange rate.

Workers' remittances have become a major source of financing for developing countries and are especially important in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is at the top of the ranking of remittance receiving regions in the world. While there has been a recent surge in analytical work on the topic, this book is motivated by the large heterogeneity in migration and remittance patterns across countries and regions, and by the fact that existing evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean is restricted to only a few countries, such as Mexico and El Salvador. Because the nature of the phenomenon varies across countries, its development impact and policy implications are also likely to differ in ways that are still largely unknown. This book helps fill the gap by exploring, in the specific context of Latin America and Caribbean countries, some of the main questions faced by policymakers when trying to respond to increasing remittances flows. The book relies on cross-country panel data and household surveys for 11 Latin American countries to explore the development impact of remittance flows along several dimensions: growth, poverty, inequality, schooling, health, labor supply, financial development, and real exchange rates.

"The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) was a manifestation of widespread public concern over the volume of undocumented immigration into the United States. The principal innovation of this legislation-the provision to impose penalties on employers who knowingly hire undocumented immigrants-was a response to this concern. This effort at restriction was tempered in IRCA by other provisions permitting the legalization of two types of undocumented immigrantsthose who had resided in the United States since January 1, 1982; and what were called special agricultural workers (SAWs), persons who had worked in perishable crop agriculture for at least 90 days during specified periods from 1983 to 1986. Approximately 3.1 million persons sought legalization (what is popularly referred to as amnesty) under these two provisions. The breakdown was roughly 1.8 million under the regular program and 1.3 million as SAWs. Mexicans made up 75 percent of the combined legalization requests."

Includes statistics.

In this paper we survey the recent literature assessing the development impact of international migrant remittances. We begin by arguing that international migration should be fully incorporated in ongoing debates on the impact of globalization. We show that, despite methodological challenges, there is an emerging body of evidence suggesting that migrant remittances can have an important impact on development and household welfare. Remittances appear to help in poverty reduction, accumulation of human capital, investment and saving. Finally, we offer an account of existing policies and recommendations to facilitate remittance flows and to take advantage of their developmental potential.

Examines the role of money transferred by migrant workers to their home country. Focuses on how the remittances meet the basic needs of family members there, whilst also generating opportunities for local communities and national economies. Considers the impacts in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and Asia.

In this paper, we present evidence indicating that international migrant remittances lead to improved developmental outcomes. Using a cross-section of all Mexican municipalities (over 2400) in the year 2000, we show that an increase in the fraction of households receiving international remittances is correlated with better schooling and health indicators and with reductions in poverty, even after controlling for the likely endogeneity between remittances and developmental outcome variables. Our findings have important policy implications as they suggest that national governments and the international community should adopt measures that facilitate remittance flows.

Emigration from the countries of Central America has evolved since the 1960s from small numbers of largely intra-regional emigrants to substantial numbers of people, emigrating in large part to the United States. For example, in 1960, 69 percent of emigrants from El Salvador resided in Honduras and only 12 percent lived in the United States. By 2000, 88 percent of Salvadoran emigrants in the world lived in the United States.