Follow The Money

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In Paris, Waly keeps a notebook on his bedside table, in which he writes lists of the cash amounts he gives each month to couriers. They fly to Mali — where remittances account for 3.2% of the country's national income — with wads of euros stuffed in their pockets and luggage. With about 300 people from his village of Ambadedi working in Paris — an estimated one-quarter of Ambadedi's entire population — the community has a well-organized network to transfer money, much of which is aimed at avoiding the hefty commissions from banks. "I write careful notes," Waly says. "'Here's €20 for my mother, €30 to my sister, and so on.'" Of the €1,000 he earns each month cleaning office buildings in Paris, he sends about €500 home, and then pays €240 for his share of the monthly rental. That experience is repeated across the world. The life of squirreling away money is grueling: it involves years-long separation from families, miserable living conditions, and the threat of deportation for the many who are working illegally. All the same, remittances play a vital role in recycling money from the rich world to the poor one. "Migration is going up," says Ratha. "We had better not wish it away, because it's very much there to stay."

On three continents, migrants and their families described how the transfers worked. Nine years ago, Cornelio Zamora left his home in Zacapoaxtla, Mexico, paying a smuggler $2,500 to take him across the Rio Grande into the U.S. He had been unable to support his wife and four children on the $7 a day he earned as a bus driver. Working as a house painter in San Jose, California, Zamora, 48, now sends about $700 a month home. His wife says she has based all family decisions — where to send the children to school, what house to live in — on Zamora's monthly earnings "on the other side."

In migrants' countries of origin, escalating desires — for things like better education and bigger homes — help drive the remittances. Ironically, economists calculate that the poorer the migrants are, the more money they dispatch. "There is enormous social pressure to send money home," says Khalid Koser, a geography professor at University College London, who in October co-authored a report for the Global Commission on International Migration in Geneva, which researches governments' immigration policies. Koser found that many migrants scrape by in first-world cities, depriving themselves of basic comforts in order to "keep people alive" back home. "There are many people sending 40% of their income in remittances," he says, adding that many families save to pay the passage of a migrant to richer parts of Asia, or to Europe or the U.S. Ruhel Daked, a 26-year-old Bangladeshi, earns €1,300 a month working as a chef in Paris. Yet despite his modestly comfortable salary, he bunks with two other Bangladeshis in a dormitory building for immigrants, with one toilet shared among many men, because he says he has one goal: "To save! Save as much as I can. That is why I am here."

In visits to migrants' hometowns, the impact on their families and communities is clear. Waly's village of Ambadedi has sent thousands of migrants to Paris since his father Mamadou first headed there. Set atop the steep northern bank of the Senegal River, the village at first glance looks like countless others in West Africa. Goats and donkeys meander down the dirt lanes, and women scrub clothes in the river. But Ambadedi has cherished luxuries that are absent from other remote parts of Mali. There is a generator that lights up most of the houses every night. A water tower feeds water to several collection points. And television antennas bristle from the rooftops of two-story concrete houses — a far cry from the mud hut in which old Mamadou was raised. Villagers have even started dreaming about building a bridge across the river to connect Ambadedi to the nearest highway, says Sekou Drame, Mamadou's brother-in-law, as he escorts a Time reporter back to the wooden pirogue that will ferry him across the river's muddy flow. "It depends on God," he says. "And our families in France."

In Mexico, the Zamora family home is another tangible indicator of the impact of remittances. Zamora's work in California has paid for a new three-bedroom house, the first his family has ever owned. The changes his cash have brought to his family within one generation are dizzying; one daughter has trained as a nurse, another as a teacher, and his son as a radio technician. "The first time I wore shoes, I was 14 years old," Zamora says. "I don't want my family to go through that." It's a similar story in Indonesia where Endang's monthly money transfers from four years' work as a nanny in Hong Kong finally paid off last July, when her 10-year-old son, her mother and several relatives moved into a renovated two-story concrete house in Surabaya, bought with Endang's savings for about $9,700. In Paris, Daked, the Bangladeshi chef, says his parents recently bought a family home with the funds he has sent home since sneaking into Europe in 1997; he estimated his total remittances at about €38,000 in eight years.