WASHINGTON (By Sergio Bustos, Republic Washington) May 18, 2004 - Each month, Juan Beriguette sends between $150 and $200 to his mother in the Dominican Republic. The money lets the 56-year-old woman afford costly prescription drugs for her high blood pressure and pay her monthly household bills.

"She really depends on the money I send her to pay all kinds of day-to-day expenses," said Beriguette, 39, who works 60 to 80 hours a week as a parking attendant in Washington, D.C.

Beriguette is among the estimated 10 million Latin American immigrants expected to send more than $30 billion to relatives back home this year, according to a report released Monday by the Inter-American Development Bank.

The report, the first state-by-state analysis of so-called remittances, found that most of the money sent to the region came from Latin American immigrants in 37 states and the District of Columbia.

The findings provide further evidence that Hispanic immigrants are settling in the far corners of the United States and reaffirm how dependent Latin American families are on their U.S. relatives.

"People are moving north by the millions and moving money south by the billions," said Donald Terry, who manages the Inter-American Development Bank's Multilateral Investment Fund.

The bank is calling attention to remittances to show their importance in boosting the economies of Latin American countries, Terry said.

The report found that remittances represent between 50 percent and 80 percent of a receiving family's total income in Latin America.

California leads all other states in the amount of remittance money sent home by Hispanic immigrants. This year, those immigrants in California will send a staggering $9.6 billion to families back home, the report said.

Hispanic immigrants from each of five other states - New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey - will send at least $1 billion. Hispanic immigrants in Arizona send about $606 million home. About 42 percent of the state's 535,000 Latin American immigrants regularly send money to relatives in the region.

The survey had a margin of error of plus-or-minus three percentage points. The margin was plus-or-minus five percentage points for data from individual states.

Some of the report's findings reflect new migration patterns for scores of Latin American immigrants. Immigrants in each of nine states, including Georgia, Nevada and Washington state, are projected to send between $350 million and $1 billion in remittances to hometowns in Latin America.

The report was based on U.S. Census data and telephone interviews with 3,802 Latin American immigrants in the United States, the largest survey of its kind. The survey was conducted by Bendixen & Associates, a Florida polling firm.

Sergio Bendixen, the company's president, said most of those sending money home reported earning less than $20,000 a year. They typically send 10 percent of their total U.S. income.