One of the best ways to measure the effect of the historic U.S. recession on immigrants living in the United States is to track the amount of remittances they send back to their homelands.

According to research released by the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), a member of the Inter-American Development Bank Group, immigrant workers in the United States are still trying to get back to the income levels they had before the U.S.

Great Recession started to take hold late in 2007.

Most of U.S. remittances are sent south to Latin America and the Caribbean. Those nations received a historic high of $65 billion in 2008, the overwhelming majority of it from the United States. By 2009, remittances had plunged 15%.

The MIF says that the region’s incoming money has stabilized, receiving $61.3 billion last year, but still down 6% from the all-time pre-recession high. Between 2002 and 2008, the annual growth of remittances to the region averaged about 17%, according to the researchers, then took a steep drop when the recession hit.

“Remittances inflow trends varied among countries in Latin America and the Caribbean,” the MIF report said. “While remittances to South American countries and Mexico decreased by 1.1 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively, the countries in the Caribbean displayed modest growth and Central American nations experienced a significant increase of 6.5 percent in the total remittances received. This increase helped offset decreases in bigger countries, allowing for the region as a whole to end the year with slight growth.”

U.S. immigration policy played an important role in determining the flow of remittances to the region. Mexico and Haiti are two important examples.

Remittances to Mexico hit a high of $27 billion in 2008. Then President Obama came to office intent on cracking down on illegal immigration with increased border security and deportations as a political precondition to passing comprehensive immigration reform.

The Obama administration broke all records for deportations, sending a record 1.5 million immigrants, most of them from Mexico, back to their homelands. Immigration from Mexico has fallen the last six years, declining 3% in January 2013 from the previous year, while immigration to the U.S. was creeping up elsewhere in the region.

From the high of $27 billion in Mexican remittances in 2008, the amount workers sent home fell to $22.4 billion in 2012, off as much as 12% year over year.

For Haiti, remittances from the United States account for the largest part of the national economy. U.S. immigration officials were ramping up the deportation of Haitians who were living illegally in the United States, when the devastating earthquake struck Port-au-Prince in 2010.

In response to the disaster, the Obama administration granted Haitians living in the United States illegally or those with expiring visas “temporary protected status.” The designation allowed about 200,000 Haitian immigrant workers to remain in the country and continue sending remittances back home.

As a result, in 2012 Haitian remittances hit an all-time high of $1.9 billion, up roughly 5% from the previous year. Besides Haiti, remittances constitute more than 10% of the gross domestic product in Guyana, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Jamaica and Guatemala. U.S. immigration policy plays a significant role in dictating the size of these remittances.

“These flows also represent an important source of income for the millions of families in the region that receive the transfers to cover basic needs and invest in education, health, housing, and small businesses,” according to the MIF report.

Founded in 1959, the Inter-American Bank Group is the leading source of development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean. The group includes 48 member countries, including 26 Latin American and Caribbean borrowing members.