Santo Domingo.- Yania Marcelino was a six-year-old girl living near Dajabon when her mother left their family to find work. She went first to Puerto Rico, then to New York City to work as a seamstress and began sending money back to Marcelino and her three siblings and four cousins. They had to travel by burro to pick up the payments, and sometimes the money sent was lost.

When she was 24, and finally got a visa, she had a two-year old baby to support. “I thought it would be the same as with Mami, that if something bad happens, if he gets sick, they won’t tell me so that I won’t worry,” she says of her decision to leave. “But my choice was to leave him, or to stay and watch him starve.” She cried every day for three months. “It took me three months to find work. And I started to send money.”

Today Marcelino works for a community organization in Providence, Rhode Island and has helped created a local chapter of TIGRA – Transnational Institute for Grassroots Research and Action – a network of immigrants throughout the world who want to use the power of remesas (remittances) to change the conditions that force people to migrate in the first place.

For individuals, sending money home can be the only way to claim dignity from the experience of migration, explains Gladys Gould, another Dominican emigrant involved in TIGRA. “Your life changes, your values change. People want the life of the ones they leave behind to be better in order to feel like it was worth it.”

For nations like the DR, remittances are an urgent response to the economic devastation caused by decades of economic and military intervention by rich countries, especially the U.S. According to DominicanToday, remittances to the country in 2007 totaled nearly US$3 billion, representing approximately 20% of the gross domestic product (GDP).

“The greatest irony is that migrants, fruit of the expulsion that the economic model of capitalist production and exploitation produces, are concentrated in the countries whose policies have obligated them to leave their own homes to be doubly exploited,” explains Gustavo Castro Soto, of the Centro de Investigaciones Económicas y Políticas de Acción Comunitaria in Chiapas Mexico.

This “double exploitation” is carried out in part by an industry that reaped over US$30 billion in profits from immigrants around the world in 2005 alone, according to the World Bank. Led by Western Union, whose net profits exceed US$1 billion a year, the major companies use a combination of high fees and abusive exchange rates to extract as much as 8-20% from each transaction. For a low wage immigrant worker in the U.S., this can equal more than one week's salary every year, money that could be spent on basic needs or more time with family. For family

Members back home, that same amount lost could have been a significant investment in health care, education, or basic household expenses.

TIGRA's network of immigrant groups in the U.S., Latin America, Asia and Africa, has chosen the giant of the industry – Western Union – as a focus of its organizing campaign. Activists protested at the Western Union shareholders meeting in New York City last May, collected thousands of postcards to CEO Christina Gold, and launched a boycott of the company last September. While migrant workers from some countries, particularly in Africa and parts of Asia have few if any choices aside from Western Union, Dominicans living in U.S. cities like New York, Providence and Boston have significantly greater options.

Yet still, Western Union has a great hold on the Dominican market, and according TIGRA activist Fior Viñas, it's also important to stand in solidarity with the rest of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the world: “We have more options now, but many other Latinos don't, and it's about a better quality of life, a better future for them too.”

The better future that Viñas refers to could be financed by a Transnational Community Reinvestment Fund, a global fund controlled by remitters and their families, and financed by money reclaimed from Western Union and companies like it. “We see this as a kind of reparations,” explains TIGRA Director Francis Calpotura. “Western Union has made its profits off the backs of migrant families, and has an obligation to reinvest in our communities, in a way that is directed by those same immigrants and our families.” He cites Western Union's dismal record of community support, totaling only US 49¢ for every $100 of profit, with little if any of that money going directly to immigrant-run organizations.

In the short term, TIGRA's work has already brought some reductions in Western Union fees. The emphasis of the current boycott campaign, which involves pickets at Western Union outlets in cities around the U.S. is to pressure the company to give back to the immigrants who made it rich by returning $1 for every transaction to the Fund. This work will be guided by La Liga Global de Sostenedores Comunitarios, an organization made up of migrant workers and their families around the globe. La Liga will hold its founding assembly in Mexico City this May. Ultimately, according to Calpotura, the group hopes to build a people's economic system that “will facilitate globalization from below, and make migration a choice, not a necessity.”