Kind of interesting that the Census Bureau did a study on money transmittal! Here’s link to the paper http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0087/twps0087.html; and I posted a few of the key findings below.
- Of the 5.9 million households that reported sending monetary transfers abroad, 84 percent were foreign born.
- On average, households sent monetary transfers 6 to 7 times during the previous 12 months. Considerable differences exist between the remitting patterns of native and foreign-born households.
- 53 percent sent less than $1,000, including 34 percent that sent less than $500
- Foreign-born households are more likely than native households to remit annual amounts greater than $500 – while 43 percent of native households reported sending more than $500, 71 percent of foreign-born households did so.
- Data from the CPS Migration Supplement suggest that households sent an estimated $11.7 billion to relatives and friends outside the United States during the 12 months before the survey.
The paper also includes some data from other surveys on money transmittal (and numbers vary greatly)…
– U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) is the government agency responsible for publishing the Annual Revision of the U.S. International Accounts (Bai and Hoang, 2010) which includes an estimate of personal transfers of the foreign-born population resident in the United States to households abroad. The BEA defines “personal transfers” as all transfers in cash or in-kind made or received by resident households to or from nonresident households. Using a model-based approach and data from the American Community Survey, the BEA estimated personal transfers by the foreign-born population resident in the United States to households abroad to be $36.9 billion in 2007, $38.5 billion in 2008, and $37.6 billion in 2009
– A second study by the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) focused on remittances sent by immigrants in the United States to Latin America and the Caribbean. The MIF commissioned Bendixen and Associates, a polling and research firm based in Miami, Florida, to interview 2,511 adult immigrants from Latin America by telephone in Spanish from May 3-25, 2006 (IDB, 2006). Based on these data, IDB estimated that Latin American migrants working in the United States sent $45 billion to their home countries, up from approximately $30 billion estimated by a similar study done in 2004.
