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Waly Diabira pats the cover on his bed in the cramped fifth-floor room he shares with two men in a red-brick dormitory building for immigrants near Paris' Left Bank. "My father slept on this same bed, in this same room, for many years," he says. In 1950, his father, Mamadou Diabira, left their tiny village in Mali and caught a steamboat to Europe, where he worked as a street cleaner in Paris for about 25 years, receiving a certificate of thanks signed by then mayor Jacques Chirac. Waly, a 32-year-old building cleaner, only got to know his father when he sneaked into France at 18 on a boat from Morocco; he now works legally in France. A large photograph hangs above Waly's narrow bed, of his 2-year-old daughter, whom he has never met. The migrant tradition has continued into the next generation, fueled by the same force that kept his father rooted in France for decades — the need to send money home. Similar stories swell the immigrant population in Paris and other cities across France, and are multiplied millions of times across the world.

Such tales are nothing new. The color TV in a remote Turkish farmstead and the concrete-walled house amid shacks of corrugated iron have often been paid for by absent family members. Plenty of church halls in Ireland have been funded by passing the plate around congregations in Boston and New York. But the scale of money flows is new. Mass migration has produced a giant worldwide economy all its own, which has accelerated so fast during the past few years that the figures have astounded the experts. This year, remittances — the cash that migrants send home — is set to exceed $232 billion, nearly 60% higher than the number just four years ago, according to the World Bank, which tracks the figures. Of that, about $166.9 billion goes to poor countries, nearly double the amount in 2000. In many of those countries, the money from migrants has now overshot exports, and exceeds direct foreign aid from other governments. "The way these numbers have increased is mind-boggling," says Dilip Ratha, a senior economist for the World Bank and co-author of a new Bank report on remittances. Ratha says he was so struck by the figures that he rechecked his research several times, wondering if he might have miscalculated. Indeed, he believes the true figure for remittances this year is probably closer to $350 billion, since migrants are estimated to send one-third of their money using unofficial methods, including taking it home by hand. That money is never reported to tax officials, and appears on no records.

One reason for the growth in recorded remittances has its origins in the global war on terrorism. To stop terrorist networks using informal transfer systems like hawala in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia (where it's referred to as hundi), European and U.S. officials have cracked down on them. That has shifted payments to easier-to-track official channels. Some migrants, however, still use methods that elude the bean counters. In Hong Kong, Endang Muna Saroh, 35, works as a nanny to two children in a comfortable residential neighborhood, and sends $200 home every month to her mother and 10-year-old son in Surabaya, Indonesia, wiring the money to her brother-in-law's bank account. The country receives recorded remittances such as this worth a total of $1.8 billion a year. Yet like many migrants, Endang also saved hundreds of dollars to carry by hand to her family in August, when she flew home for her first visit in four years.

In Paris, Waly keeps a notebook on his bedside table, in which he writes lists of the cash amounts he gives each month to couriers. They fly to Mali — where remittances account for 3.2% of the country's national income — with wads of euros stuffed in their pockets and luggage. With about 300 people from his village of Ambadedi working in Paris — an estimated one-quarter of Ambadedi's entire population — the community has a well-organized network to transfer money, much of which is aimed at avoiding the hefty commissions from banks. "I write careful notes," Waly says. "'Here's €20 for my mother, €30 to my sister, and so on.'" Of the €1,000 he earns each month cleaning office buildings in Paris, he sends about €500 home, and then pays €240 for his share of the monthly rental. That experience is repeated across the world. The life of squirreling away money is grueling: it involves years-long separation from families, miserable living conditions, and the threat of deportation for the many who are working illegally. All the same, remittances play a vital role in recycling money from the rich world to the poor one. "Migration is going up," says Ratha. "We had better not wish it away, because it's very much there to stay."

On three continents, migrants and their families described how the transfers worked. Nine years ago, Cornelio Zamora left his home in Zacapoaxtla, Mexico, paying a smuggler $2,500 to take him across the Rio Grande into the U.S. He had been unable to support his wife and four children on the $7 a day he earned as a bus driver. Working as a house painter in San Jose, California, Zamora, 48, now sends about $700 a month home. His wife says she has based all family decisions — where to send the children to school, what house to live in — on Zamora's monthly earnings "on the other side."

In migrants' countries of origin, escalating desires — for things like better education and bigger homes — help drive the remittances. Ironically, economists calculate that the poorer the migrants are, the more money they dispatch. "There is enormous social pressure to send money home," says Khalid Koser, a geography professor at University College London, who in October co-authored a report for the Global Commission on International Migration in Geneva, which researches governments' immigration policies. Koser found that many migrants scrape by in first-world cities, depriving themselves of basic comforts in order to "keep people alive" back home. "There are many people sending 40% of their income in remittances," he says, adding that many families save to pay the passage of a migrant to richer parts of Asia, or to Europe or the U.S. Ruhel Daked, a 26-year-old Bangladeshi, earns €1,300 a month working as a chef in Paris. Yet despite his modestly comfortable salary, he bunks with two other Bangladeshis in a dormitory building for immigrants, with one toilet shared among many men, because he says he has one goal: "To save! Save as much as I can. That is why I am here."

In visits to migrants' hometowns, the impact on their families and communities is clear. Waly's village of Ambadedi has sent thousands of migrants to Paris since his father Mamadou first headed there. Set atop the steep northern bank of the Senegal River, the village at first glance looks like countless others in West Africa. Goats and donkeys meander down the dirt lanes, and women scrub clothes in the river. But Ambadedi has cherished luxuries that are absent from other remote parts of Mali. There is a generator that lights up most of the houses every night. A water tower feeds water to several collection points. And television antennas bristle from the rooftops of two-story concrete houses — a far cry from the mud hut in which old Mamadou was raised. Villagers have even started dreaming about building a bridge across the river to connect Ambadedi to the nearest highway, says Sekou Drame, Mamadou's brother-in-law, as he escorts a Time reporter back to the wooden pirogue that will ferry him across the river's muddy flow. "It depends on God," he says. "And our families in France."

In Mexico, the Zamora family home is another tangible indicator of the impact of remittances. Zamora's work in California has paid for a new three-bedroom house, the first his family has ever owned. The changes his cash have brought to his family within one generation are dizzying; one daughter has trained as a nurse, another as a teacher, and his son as a radio technician. "The first time I wore shoes, I was 14 years old," Zamora says. "I don't want my family to go through that." It's a similar story in Indonesia where Endang's monthly money transfers from four years' work as a nanny in Hong Kong finally paid off last July, when her 10-year-old son, her mother and several relatives moved into a renovated two-story concrete house in Surabaya, bought with Endang's savings for about $9,700. In Paris, Daked, the Bangladeshi chef, says his parents recently bought a family home with the funds he has sent home since sneaking into Europe in 1997; he estimated his total remittances at about €38,000 in eight years.

Vital though the flow of remittances may be, it cannot, on its own, lift entire nations out of poverty. Those who study the impact of remittances argue that the money allows poor countries to put off basic decisions of economic management, like reforming their tax-collection systems and building decent schools. "Everyone loves money that flows in with no fiscal implications," says Devesh Kapur, a specialist on migration and professor of government at the University of Texas in Austin. "They see it as a silver bullet." But bullets wound; and skilled workers often understandably put the interests of their families before those of their countries, choosing to work abroad so they can send remittances back home. About eight out of 10 college graduates from Haiti and Jamaica live outside their countries, and about half the college graduates of Sierra Leone and Ghana have also emigrated, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Remittances to poor countries can also mask the fact that they don't produce much at home. In the western Mali district of Kayes — where Waly's village of Ambadedi is located and where most migrants hail from — the region has done so well that farmers use remittances as a crutch. Studies have shown that they spend less time on their land than farmers in other parts of Mali: there is more money to be made by migrating to Europe. "You see poverty other places, but here, you see money," says Abdel Kader Coulibaly, a bank manager in Kayes. He says migrants' families spend all they get, rather than investing it to generate income locally. "All the money ends up with shopkeepers and traders from Bamako [the capital]," he says.

The trick now is to find programs that maximize the benefits of remitted cash while avoiding some of its downside. Some migrants are now using their economic clout to perform work usually done by big aid organizations. Ambadedi's workers' association in Paris, for example, funds some village projects with its members' own earnings. But the association also solicits help from the French government and the European Union. "We have a project under way to purify the village water supply," says Ibrahim Diabira, 55, a relative of Waly, who works in Paris as a building cleaner and helps run the village association in the French capital. Elsewhere, host nations have created temporary legal work programs, in which migrants earn legal wages with benefits, before returning home. That way, migrants retain close links to their countries while developing skills abroad. "When they go back, they will take augmented skills, savings and networks," says Kapur. (He himself left his native India 22 years ago and settled in the U.S.) In Paris, Waly is planning to return home in January to see his 2-year-old daughter for the first time, and to spend time with his wife. But he won't stay long. "Frankly, people would die there if we didn't work here," he says. Come spring, he will be back in Paris, cleaning offices, and changing the way the world spreads its wealth around.

• VIVIENNE WALT
• The practice of migrant workers sending cash to families back home is increasing. A look at how the money flows impact the developing world