More and more people are sending money from places like the United States to places like the Dominican Republic, according to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center.
Last month, my blogmate Kat Chow wrote about a New Jersey lottery winner named Pedro Quezada who sent a staggering $57 million of his winnings back to the Dominican Republic, where his family lives. Let's ignore the sheer dollar amount for a second to look at the larger global trend that Quezada represents: the growing amount of money flowing from high-income nations to what the World Bank classifies as "middle-income" nations.
Seventy percent of all "remittances" — the money that migrants send back to their countries of origin — goes to middle-income nations like the Dominican Republic, India and Mexico, according to a newly released Pew study that crunched numbers from the World Bank. (The World Bank classifies countries as middle-income if their per capita annual incomes fall between $1,036 and $12,615.) There are a few reasons for this: there are more middle-income nations in the world than before; those nations have more people in them; and more of those people are migrating to wealthier places.
Those immigrants are also heading to new destinations. In 1990, nations like Ukraine and India were among the countries with the world's largest immigrant populations. But they're not in the top 10 today, having been supplanted by places like the United Arab Emirates and Australia. (The United States had a far larger immigrant population than any country in the world, both then and now.)