Remembering home: white most immigrants come to the U.S. to start new lives, many of them continue to support their families--and sometimes entire towns--in their home countries.

• Author: Becker, Elizabeth
• Position: National

Avenamar Cruz grew up in Atopoltitlan (Ah-toh-poh-tee-TLAHN), a little town in the Mexican state of Puebla that he left when he was 17. Cruz, 36, now lives in New York and works in a wholesale produce market in the Bronx, but he continues to take an active part in the life of Atopoltitlan, helping to raise money for town festivals, a basketball court, streetlights, and a water system. "Here one gets used to turning on the tap and having water," Cruz says. "Over there, there's barely water to drink, let alone take a shower."

The money Cruz sends home is just a tiny part of the $30 billion that Latin American and Caribbean immigrants will send back to their home countries this year (even as they spend almost $420 billion, or 93 percent of their earnings, in the U.S.), according to a recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington.

While most of the money they send home goes to families and friends, the villages they came from also benefit. Mexican immigrants in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, for example, are getting together with others from their hometowns and chipping in as much as they can afford--$50 here, $100 there--to improve conditions in the poor rural towns they've left behind. These hometown associations support projects ranging from sprucing up the town church to expensive public works.

THE OLD COUNTRY

Nicolas Sanchez has joined with other migrants from San Miguel Comitlipa, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, to pay for painting the town's church, and furniture and computers for the school. "I can do something for the place I was born," says Sanchez, 32, whose mother still lives in the town. "It makes you feel good, like you have a purpose."

Immigrants to America have been sending money to "the old country" for hundreds of years. Entire villages in Poland and Greece, for example, lived off such remittances in the 1950s. Today, many Latin American and Caribbean families have made immigration part of their survival strategy, sending at least one relative to the U.S. to earn money, legally or illegally.

The small bundles of remittance money they send home add up to one of the biggest transfers of wealth from rich countries to poor ones. One of every four adults in Central America now receives remittance money from a relative in the United States.

The second largest source of foreign revenue for Mexico, after oil, is an estimated $14 billion a year in remittances from the 10 million Mexicans in the U.S. And the...