Funny, funny, funny, what money can do. Having just a little more of it than you need for everyday expenses puts a whole different complexion on the phrase “managing your money.” To most New Yorkers that means staying current with one’s bank account and insurance premiums and keeping an eye on how the stocks, bonds, mutual funds and/or other investments in one’s portfolio are performing. In many other places around the world, though, it means nothing more than stretching the few coins in your pocket so that your children won’t go hungry while you wait for your next payday. It should surprise no one that many of the people who live in those places want to move away, to go someplace where “making ends meet” is less of a struggle. It’s what motivates a great many immigrants to our shores.

When they get here these immigrants are happy to leave much behind, including many of their old ways of thinking, to open themselves to participate in what is known as the American dream. There are many definitions of that dream. For some it means owning the house they live in, for others it means a chance to get an education and a better job, while for still others it means going into business for themselves. But these are all just means to an end. To live the American dream means making sure that your children have more and better opportunities for living the good life than you yourself enjoyed.

The social scientists call this “upward mobility,” and it’s a persistent theme in America’s history and development. Starting with the Pilgrims, wave after wave of immigrants have come here in search of a better life, if not for themselves then certainly for their offspring. And most of them succeeded; generation after generation, they watched their horizons expand as their families moved up into what is called the propertied class.

Through the 18th, 19th and most of the 20th centuries, a large percentage of America’s immigrants came from Europe, where the country’s original settlers had come from, and so in many ways they resembled those who had arrived earlier. They had relatively little difficulty assimilating into the population and buying into the prevailing value system. A significant exception was the Africans, who were brought here in chains, to be sold as slaves. Even after they were emancipated during the Civil War, they were kept down by segregation laws that were to persist for more than a century.

In recent years, though, quite a few Africans have come to this country of their own volition, along with even larger numbers of people from other places where only a tiny minority of the people have enough money to worry about its management – places such as Southern and Eastern Asia, and Central and South America.

These newer immigrants not only differ from most Americans in the language they speak or the color of their skin; many of them face culture shock when they come here because the places they are coming from are still struggling to emerge from the pre-industrial era. Still, they resemble the earlier immigrants in that they are willing to work, interested in advancement, and no less entrepreneurial in spirit. What’s more, even though many have moved away from places where poverty is rampant, they are doing what they can to help improve the lives of the people they left behind. They not only save and invest and plan for their own futures. The remittances they send regularly to their families in “the old country” have a bigger impact on people’s lives there than all of the official foreign aid provided by the U.S. government. It’s estimated that those remittances from the U.S. to developing countries amount to more than $90 billion a year, or roughly six times as much as the “official development assistance” provided by Washington.

And there’s nothing funny about that.