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words, the longer that immigrants stay in the United States, the more likelythey are to send money for education and public projects. This is a veryencouraging item of news, because it shows that the long-term prospectsof development due to emigration are very promising even if the currentsupport for education or public projects may be modest, and even ifimmigrants may decide to stay permanently in the United States. We alsonote that the use of remittances for education and public projects declines ifthe cost of emigration is high. In households where the dependency ratio ishigher, immigrants are less likely to spend remittances on local educationand public projects, probably because the money has to be used to maintainbasic household living.In Table 8, we estimate models of whether remittances were used for housingversus other choices. Again, the duration of stay in the United States is oneof the most important predictors. Across all three tables (Tables 6–8), onlyone community-level variable marginally shows statistical significance at0.10: agrarian population density (proportion of local population employedin agriculture). The results suggest quite consistently that people in theseclose-knit rural communities tend to have a strong sense of communityidentity, such that they are willing to start businesses, contribute to localeducation and public projects, and build houses using remittances. The caseis similar to a recent study by Fussell and Massey (2004), who found thatMexicans from rural areas are more likely to rely on migration networksthan Mexicans from urban areas. Our results suggest that rural and urbanindividuals not only have a different degree of using migration networks,but also differ in remittance patterns.9. Summary and Conclusion286Since the late 1970s, emigration from China has been on the rise. FujianProvince is currently the most important province in shaping the trend ofemigration from China. So far, the main destinations among Fujianeseemigrants are the United States, Japan, Taiwan, and Europe. UnitedStates is by far the most favorite country of destination. The primary aimof this paper is to provide a systematic assessment of how internationalmigration in roughly the last twenty years has influenced developmentin Fujian Province. In particular, we focus on remittances and examinehow individual, household, and community-level characteristics affectremittance behavior, such as the amount remitted and how remittances areused.Three main findings from this study are worth noting. One is that the totalamount of remittances is especially large, both in terms of the amount of