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In New York you will find more Ecuadorians than in Cuenca, the third largest city of Ecuador.

Surprising? Well, the truth is you could reckon the number of my countrymen who have immigrated to the United States in search of the “American Dream” not merely by decades but by generations.

In fact, I’ll bet you a million dollars you can’t find a single family in Ecuador that doesn’t have a relative living in the United States. This is especially true in the province of Azuay, where the fields are practically abandoned. Most of the farmers there left long ago to sow the seeds of their destinies in greener — as in dollars — valleys.

It’s not an exaggeration. To put it another way, if the amount of money Ecuadorians working in the U.S. sent to their relatives back home were measured as a part of Ecuador’s Gross Domestic Product it would rank second as a source of income for the country.

It’s all about the money, or “the benjamins” ($100 bills) as some Americans might say, or the verdes (greens) as we Latinos say. In any language the concept remains the same: Hispanics leave their homelands mainly to look for a better economic future.

But are they really better off in America? Do they contribute to making the United States a nation of diversity? Or do they compromise its progress?

Leobardo Estrada, a sociologist and associate professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is of Mexican descent, has pondered these issues for the last 30 years, collecting statistics and conducting research on what it means to be a Latino working and living in the United States.

According to his numbers, Hispanics comprised about 13% of the population of the United States in 2004 and accounted for around 80% of all immigration. Since 1970, Mexico has been the top country for sending immigrants to the United States.

California had the largest Latino population (10 million) followed by Texas (around 7 million.) In the future, Latin-Americans will represent 44% of all population growth in the United States, according to Estrada.

With such big numbers, one wonders what role Hispanic immigrants play in the U.S. economy and labor force. Professor Estrada had the answer: Latinos have one of the highest rates of work participation in this country.

“That has created the typical misconception that immigration takes jobs away from Americans,” he said. “But studies prove that if you take a state like California and compare it to a state that doesn’t have a lot of immigrants, like Missouri, unemployment is worse in Missouri. Supposedly it should be worse in California because of the immigrants, but it isn’t.”

Instead of a “job snatchers” stereotype, Latinos should be viewed as “people we didn’t pay anything for who do wonderful things for us,” Estrada added.

“We didn’t pay to raise them, we didn’t pay for their health (or) education. (When) they come they want to work and are ambitious. And when we put them to work they are very productive. We even take taxes out of their income,” he continued. “They do send money home, that’s what we lose. But for the most part we get a pretty good, well trained, well prepared, healthy person with a lot of skills and productivity. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Immigration is constant, but changing

Because many Latinos enter the United States illegally, they take whatever salary they can get. That may be the biggest downside of immigration, Estrada acknowledged.

“For all the good things immigrants do, they do reduce wage rates. Wherever you see lots of immigrants, wage-rate growth doesn’t happen in the same way,” he explained. “Right now the U.S. can’t pay less than the federal minimum wage ($5.15 an hour.) But in areas like San Antonio, Phoenix and Los Angeles, where there are a lot of immigrants, wages grow very slowly in relation to other parts of the country. That’s an impact they have on workers.”

In spite of the low wages, they keep on coming.

“Every year we predict immigration will go down somewhat because of the economy of the United States, but it doesn’t,” Estrada said. “When the government gets strict about the border, for about two months immigration does go down. But (the authorities) get tired of protecting every inch of land and it goes up again. There are too many ways to enter the U.S., that’s why immigration will never go down.”

In the 1900s, immigrants to the United States were white people from Ireland, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Russia. Today their skin is brown and they come from Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador. Whether they are welcomed — with a warm “Mi casa es su casa” or a cold “Adios” — it’s up to the American people.