ESCONDIDO -- Every few weeks, Maria Jauregui saves about $100 and sends it through an Escondido money-wiring service to her elderly parents in her native Michoacan, Mexico.

"My parents are old and they can't work, so we send them money to help them survive," Jauregui said, while leaving the Giromex office on Center City Parkway, one of a growing number of money-wiring businesses in North County. She is a laborer at a book-binding company and earns minimum wages, $6.75 an hour.

Jauregui, who lives in San Pasqual, is among the millions of Latin American-born immigrants who sent a total of $30 billion to their home countries last year, according to a report released this week by the Inter-American Development Bank, a major lender to Caribbean and Latin American governments.

California, which is home to one in four of the nation's 32.5 million immigrants, ranked first among the states, with immigrants here sending $9.6 billion to Latin America, according to the report. New York ranked a distant second with $3.6 billion being sent to Latin American countries.

Immigrants say the money pays for food, shelter, education, home construction, furniture and appliances for family members left behind.

But some critics of immigrant remittances, the money sent home usually through wiring services, say the money also encourages a "culture of migration" from these countries and drains money from the U.S. economy.

"It would be one thing if the money being sent abroad was being invested to create economic opportunity in Mexico and Latin America," said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based organization that advocates curbing immigration levels. "On the contrary, most of it is spent on consumption or to bring additional family members to the U.S."

Fernando Lozano, a visiting research fellow at UC San Diego specializing in remittances, said the relationship between the United States and Mexico is much more complex than just the push-and-pull effect of economics.

"We can no longer consider immigration between the two countries in simply positive and negative terms. Our economic, cultural and social ties are a reality," Lozano said. "There is a market not just for merchandise, but for labor, too. Beyond the question of whether this is good or bad, it's a reality."

According to the survey, 24 percent of those sending remittances are U.S. citizens, 39 percent are legal immigrants and 32 percent are undocumented migrants.

Lozano said that while $30 billion sounds to be a huge amount of money, the effect of the influx in cash varies from region to region in Latin America. For example, the $13 billion sent by immigrants to Mexico represents about 1 percent of the country's gross domestic product. On the other hand, the $2.3 billion sent to El Salvador represents about 15 percent of its annual gross domestic product.

"Even within Mexico, remittances tend to benefit only those regions where large numbers of people migrate," Lozano said. "These are central and western states in Mexico, such as, Michoacan, Jalisco Guanajuato and Zacatecas."

The Inter-American Bank study was based largely on a survey of 3,802 people in 37 states, which indicated that about 64 percent of immigrants sent money regularly to their home countries.

According to the survey, these immigrants sent money at least four times a year, sending an average of $235 with each remittance.

"(The large amounts of money being sent) is not a cause for celebration, because it means economies (in Latin America and the Caribbean) are not generating enough jobs," said Donald Terry, manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank.

But in countries where banks don't serve the poor, remittances provide limited "financial democracy," Terry said. That is because the money transfers are helping to pay not only for basic needs, but also for helping to start small businesses, and are paying for public projects such as roads and community plazas.

Lozano said he was not surprised by the report's findings. He said a growing number of new immigrants means that the total amount sent to Latin America will continue to increase as long as immigration continues to grow.

Given the demand for immigrant labor, remittances are unlikely to diminish soon, he said.

The survey also seems to bear out Lozano's assertion that newer immigrants send more money home than more established immigrants. For example, 80 percent of immigrants in southern states -- such as Georgia and Virginia, who are drawn there recently by jobs in meat-packing and poultry industries -- sent money home at least four times a year.

In California and Texas, where immigrants have lived longer periods of time, those figures dropped to 64 percent and 43 percent respectively, according to the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Knight Ridder-Tribune contributed to this report. Contact staff writer Edward Sifuentes at (760) 740-5426 or esifuentes@nctimes.com.