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Those who are able to make the trip south almost always come ”loaded down with gifts and money, to help meet the many needs of the people here,” said Eduardo Quintero, a Catholic priest and deputy director of the Casa del Migrante (Immigrant House) in Guatemala City. The Casa del Migrante is a Catholic church-sponsored non-governmental organisation devoted to defending the rights of migrants. ”Some of them are almost like tourists when they come back, because they hardly know their own countries anymore,” Quintero told IPS. In fact, some have had to wait many years before making this journey home. In order to leave U.S. territory with the hope of returning, Latin American immigrants must be living in the United States legally, with all the relevant paperwork in order. For the millions of undocumented immigrants living there, leaving is far too great a risk to take. In order to go back, they would have to cross the border illegally, something that is becoming increasingly difficult thanks to the tightened security measures adopted by the U.S. government since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. There are 39.9 million people of Latin American birth or descent living in the United States, out of a total population of 290.8 million, and it is estimated that roughly five million of them are undocumented immigrants. Those who have their papers in order, and are thus able to travel to their homelands, are welcomed with open arms: not only by their families and friends, but also by the region's authorities. ”The governments know that emigrants who come home for the holidays bring a lot of dollars, which is good for the economy, so there are programmes designed to help them,” said Quintero in a telephone interview from his office in Guatemala City. ”They come back like Santa Claus fattened up by Uncle Sam,” he commented. Every year, Latin American immigrants send around 30 billion dollars to their countries of birth, and a large part of that money is sent in December. For countries like Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, remittances sent home by emigrants represent between 10 and 14 percent of their total gross domestic product. The most well-developed programme to welcome back émigrés for the Christmas holidays is the one implemented in Mexico. This year, around 1.7 million Mexican-Americans are expected to arrive between late November and December and return to the United States in early January. They will be received at Mexico's airports, seaports and border crossings by a veritable army of white-clad officials and billboards proclaiming ”Bienvenidos paisanos” (Welcome compatriots). Both form part of the Paisano Programme, aimed at ensuring the safe and orderly arrival of emigrés, many of whom complain about being asked for bribes or even robbed by Mexican customs officials. In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, additional staff will be assigned to customs and immigration posts to deal with the greater influx of visitors. There will also be a heightened police presence on roads and highways to prevent assaults and robberies of travellers. ”When our compatriots come home, they're welcomed with big celebrations, and that's only natural, since they come loaded down with appliances, shoes, clothes, and everything imaginable,” said Beatriz Amaya, director of S.O.S. Immigrants, a Salvadoran non-governmental organisation. Salvadorans living in the United States typically bring gifts for almost everyone in the communities they come from, Amaya told IPS. ”They really are like Santa Claus,” she said. ”Some of them come back very 'Americanised' and their relatives are kind of taken aback, but others continue to be very Salvadoran, and they feel deeply attached to their communities,” she added. Between December 1 and January 15, the Salvadoran authorities allow visitors to bring up to 3,000 dollars worth of merchandise each into the country, which is 2,000 dollars more than during the rest of the year. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has stated that money transfers from emigrants are ”vital” to the Central American nations. If this money was to stop flowing in, the region's economies would collapse in a matter of three months, the agency claims. A report on migration released by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) on Monday agrees that migrant remittances are an important source of income for the countries that receive them. The report also stresses that immigrants do not take away jobs or bring down salaries in destination countries. In fact, destination countries benefit just as much as the home countries of migrants, yet immigration policies are becoming increasingly strict around the world. The result is ”a tremendous loss of efficiency,” said José Antonio Ocampo, the under-secretary-general of DESA. ”The number of governments adopting measures to restrict migration has increased significantly in recent decades: in 2003, one-third of all countries had policies to lower immigration, compared with only seven percent in 1976,” according to the U.N. report. And one of the countries with the tightest restrictions is the United States, the primary destination for Latin American immigrants.