It may be new to American newsmedia, but this stuff is certainly not new to the economic departments of the rest of the world. It is actually a part of their developmental strategy.

Most other countries of the world whose emmigrants end up in countries with more or better employment than theirs are forced to take this into careful consideration. These countries include the poorest of the poor as well as richer countries such as the UK or India and Pakistan, Taiwan. Most of these countries have to question the economics of a problem we don't face here, namely the economics of the brain drain. This because all these countries spend a significant percentage of their GDP educating their brightest and best only to see these take off for the US as soon after graduation as possible.

This ouflow however is balanced by the inflow of money being sent back home by these migrants in the form of remittances, and eventually many of them do in fact return home along with their comparatively sizeable pensions and yes, US social security entitlements. These are barely enough to live on here, but with a favorable exchange rate and in a depressed economy where they come from it makes for easy living abroad. This to the extent that many US born residents are taking their pensions and entitlements overseas in order to make ends meet.

So remittances have always been figured into the economic calculations of nations abroad, as an important part of not Gross Domestic Product, (GDP) but Gross National Product, (GNP), which includes money earned overseas by a country's nationals and national enterprises.

Less anyone figure that this is a grossly unfair equation between us and the rest of the world, with our SS entitlements going to boost their economies, we need to reflect that many of these people have been educated most of their school lives with foreign dollars, then they come and either spend more of their dollars paying for an education here, like Obama's father, or spend the rest of their working lives producing goods and services here to bolster our economy using their partially foreign subsidised educations, usually both.

Finally, smaller nations emigrate people to boost their GNP, we on the other hand emigrate more and more companies to boost our GNP. So its 'evensteven' all around, but it's only recently that the balance of payments (now you see how apt the term is) has actually turned against us. I contend however that this is our fault for resting on our economic laurels and not upgrading our economic policies. (I must warn you however I haven't looked at any academic paper for more than a decade, but I believe that most of what I have said is nevertheless substantially true.)