When times were good, migrant workers from Mexico who have found employment in the United States would send home hundreds of dollars a month to support their family back home.  Unfortunately, economic conditions have made jobs scarce in the United States, and many are finding it hard to stay employed, let alone send money back home.

In an unprecedented move, families from Mexico are now sending money north to help support their relatives who have not been employed in a while and are in danger of ending up on the streets.  Even down-and-out Mexican families are scraping together what they can to send money north to prop up their unemployed loved ones in the US.

Sadly, some Mexican workers who find themselves unable to secure employment are so depleted that they do not even have enough money to head back home to Mexico.  Without the periodic reverse remittances, the Mexican workers would not even have enough to buy food.

Understandably, with about half of its population living at or below the poverty line, Mexico is not exactly able to afford to send money to help its troubled loved ones in the US.  Yet, they manage to scrape what they can and send it on north.  Often, they sell what they have or what they can produce in order to generate the additional income that they send up north to their downtrodden relatives.

Some Mexican migrant workers are tempted to return to Mexico, but because they have sunk enormous amounts of money to pay for the trip to get them to the US, they are reluctant to do so.  An estimated 5.9 percent of Mexican households, some 1.8 million families, receive remittances from abroad.  When those remittances stop, a major source of their total income, estimated at anywhere from 19 to 27 percent, is lost.  When a reverse remittance has to be made, then that adds to an already difficult situation.