More Dominicans taking financial help from home

THE STORY usually goes like this: Immigrants leave their country for better lives in the U.S. They work hard and send money to their families back home.
But in these hard economic times, that one-way flow of support is often changing direction.
More struggling immigrants in New York - especially from the Dominican Republic - are getting money from their families abroad.
"They're receiving back what they have sent all those years," said Reny Peña, a supervisor at Manhattan-based money transfer company Envios De Valores La Nacional Corp. The company has branches all over the city.
La Nacional began seeing more reverse remittances in the beginning of 2007, Peña said. It became more noticeable as the economy got worse.
The company, which used to handle 80 to 120 money transfers from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. a month, is now doing up to 150 a day, Peña said.
It's so busy that La Nacional has expanded the department handling reverse remittances. But they still account for only a fraction of the company's business.
But Western Union hasn't seen evidence of a trend toward reverse remittances.
"It's been pretty consistent over the last two years," Duany said of the flow of money from the Dominican Republic. "We haven't seen a major shift."
But Elvia Barco, a cashier at a La Nacional branch on Roosevelt Ave. in Corona, might disagree.
"We are seeing this phenomenon, especially as of November of last year," she said through a translator. "We see a lot of it."
LI: This is along the lines of the story that we saw a few weeks ago about payments from India. Note the different perceptions of two of the larger money transfer operators in the Dominican Republic market.