Immigrants' Cash Floods Homelands

Even though it is hard for her to send the money, Guardado can't imagine stopping.

"It's my obligation as a daughter," she said simply.

Many Latin American immigrants feel a similar obligation. In the District, nearly three-quarters send money home regularly, according to the survey. About 80 percent in Maryland and 84 percent in Virginia do so, the study says.

Those numbers are among the highest in the nation and reflect the high proportion of recent immigrants in the Washington area, according to those who study remittances. In contrast, the study found about 43 percent of Latin American immigrants in Texas send money to their countries of origin.

"The more recent the population, the less roots those people have put down. They're going to remit more," said B. Lindsay Lowell of the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University.

"That 10- to 15-year period [after arriving] is kind of magical," Lowell said.

Critics of large-scale immigration have expressed concerns that this financial outflow could hurt struggling neighborhoods here. Some analysts say that Cuban immigrants flourished in the United States in part because they couldn't send money to their nation after the Communist revolution and instead invested in their new land.

Academics say that little research has been done on the subject but that studies indicate that Latin American immigrants send home about 10 percent of their household income. Lowell said research has shown immigrants send back less money if they are truly strapped. And most immigrants decrease their payments home after a few years.

Juan Lazo, 49, is one of them. The mariachi musician used to send about $500 a month to El Salvador for the care of his three daughters. They are now grown. But the Columbia Heights resident said he still sends about $200 a month to help his elderly mother.

"It's the only thing she's living on," he said.

Donald Terry, who heads the Multilateral Investment Fund, the arm of the Inter-American Development Bank that sponsored the study, said in an interview he hopes it will entice financial institutions to reach out to Latin American immigrants, many of whom lack bank accounts. Fund officials hope that immigrants will be able to use their remittance records to qualify for credit and other bank benefits.

About one-third of those polled for the survey were illegal immigrants, and roughly one-quarter were U.S. citizens. The study did not include remittances to Haiti and the English-speaking Caribbean.