Immigrants In The U.S. Send Billions Of Dollars Home

A large portion of immigrants all over the world set money aside and send it back home to help their families. When all of those payments are added together, the amount of money being moved every year is massive, competing with international aid as one of the biggest financial inflows to developing natons. Pew Research recently released data based on World Bank figures that shows the estimated collective sum of remittance payments in 2017. That year, the worldwide total was estimated at $625 billion, a seven percent increase on 2016 when the total is thought to have been $586 billion.

In the United States alone, the total amount of remittance payments is estimated to have been more than $148 billion in 2017. A study conducted in 2004 found that over 60 percent of the 16.5 million latin American-born adults living in the country that year were regularly sending money home. This still holds true according to Pew's new data which estimates total remittance payments to Mexico at over $30 billion. China came a distant second with $16.14 billion while India had the third-highest amount at $11.7 billion. Some of the world's biggest and most developed economies were high up on the remittance list as well with $2.83 billion sent back to South Korea and $2.80 sent to Germany in 2017.