Development experts love to compare remittances (the portion of the wages of labor migrants going to their families abroad) with foreign aid, and foreign direct investment to point to how large remittances are.
Mexicans in the U.S. sent at least $25 billion dollars in 2008. Yet the remittances of these millions of workers pales in comparison to the $50 billion dollars that Bernie Madoff himself accepts to have stolen. That is around 2 years of remittances from around 7 million workers. Remittances numbers pale even more when compared to bail-out figures. Now that is a comparison that you will not see graphed in World Bank reports, etc.
Mexicans in the U.S. sent at least $25 billion dollars in 2008. Yet the remittances of these millions of workers pales in comparison to the $50 billion dollars that Bernie Madoff himself accepts to have stolen. That is around 2 years of remittances from around 7 million workers. Remittances numbers pale even more when compared to bail-out figures. Now that is a comparison that you will not see graphed in World Bank reports, etc.
Look here for great visualizations of internal migration within the U.S. (of U.S. born individuals) from the Pew Research Center. A much less common visualization than that of (the still interesting) international immigration into the U.S. (see links bellow). This Pew report shows the immobility of large proportion of Americans, as well as the great mobility of another.
Other visualization of US Immigration to the U.S.
Flowing Data: Other Visualization of Immigration
27 Visualizations on the Financial Crisis
Article on Wall Street Quants
And here good graphic explanation of the home mortgage-based investments from the NYT.
But as the article rightly concludes, “Recent events have invalidated all the models we had,” said Emanuel Derman, a Columbia University professor and former Goldman Sachs quant.
