Italy: Immigrant workers send home fortunes
The Eurostat has published a report that reveals the global money flows generated by immigrant workers working in Europe. The results are suprising.
di Staff
Last year foreign workers living and working in the European Union sent home a total of 27 billion euros, five billion more than 2005. This is what emerges from a survey commissioned by Eurostat, the European Commission?s statistical office.
Most money is sent out from Spain, the UK and Italy, which is an interesting trend seeing as once upon a time it Italy was the country that received the most money sent from migrant workers abroad back home, says an Italian website dedicated to immigrant entrepreneurship, impresaetnica.it.
This is the first time that Brussels has laid out a map of money flows that identifies where money is being sent from and where to. Italy takes third place among EU States with a total of 4.4 billion euros being sent abroad. According to the report, Albanian immigrants working in Italy sent about 660 million euros back home in 2006.
Of the 27 million euros that are sent from EU countries, 19.2 billion euros go to non EU countries -4.4 billion to North Africa, 3.2 billion to sub-Saharan Africa, 2.9 billion to Latin America and 2.4 billion to Asia. The remaining 6.8 billion go to countries within the EU.
These figures were collected using the official channels provided by member States, and thus do not take into account money that travels across the world through acquaintances and friends going back to their countries of origin.
