I came in today thinking, "wow, what a range of takes on the new World Bank study (pdf) on Latin American remittances released yesterday." We reported last week on the IADB remittance report and the reaction from CNN and Lou Dobbs, in which an immigration and values debate provided the frame for a fundamentally fact-based study of remittances volume. The same thing is happening with the World Bank study. Both FT and Wall Street Journal have published articles in the past 24 hours. The Financial Times emphasizes the negative parts of what is essentially a mildly positive study by the World Bank - namely that remittances aren't 'manna from heaven' nor a substitute for sound macro- and micro-economic policies in the recipient countries. The Wall Street Journal takes the negative impacts downstream, and with their usual good reporting, talk a lot about economic dependency and crime that, they suggest, are results of remittances.

In my view, these press reports are serving to cloud, not clarify the issues. Remittances are not the cause of economic migration, brain drain, economic dependency, or crime. All these predated remittances, and the press is setting up straw men to knock down. Nobody I know of is claiming that remittances are a panacea or cure-all, only that they exist, they are large, they are important both to the senders and recipients, and they have development potential that is under-explored.

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