B runo Ferretti, peering out through inch-thick, bullet-proof glass, could see this coming months ago.

Two national studies on immigration only put numbers to what Ferretti already knew in his gut. ``I saw it. Definitely. I told my friends. They didn't want to hear it.''

It wasn't who he saw, from his walk-up window at SAFE-$-Transfer.

It was who he didn't see.

Steady customers, old friends and familiar faces disappeared. So many of the regulars who had transformed an unremarkable Pompano Beach shopping center into a Brazilian village were gone.

The informal labor pool across the way, near the Madaria Brasil Bakery, where men would gather in the pre-dawn darkness to catch a day job with a construction crew, faded away. The bosses stopped coming. The workers gave up.

The number of weary men lined up at SAFE-$-Transfer to wire a portion of their paychecks home dwindled by two-thirds over the last year. ''They can't find work. They can't afford to live here. They're going back to home,'' he said.

POOR, HERE OR THERE

By home, Ferretti meant Brazil, where he was born 20 years ago. Departing immigrants, headed back to Latin America and the Caribbean, have become a national phenomenon. The Pew Hispanic Center released findings Thursday that the once steady increase of undocumented immigrants into the United States has lurched to a stop.

Last month, a study by the Center for Immigration Studies claimed that 1.3 million undocumented immigrants have returned to their home countries.

Merchants in the shopping center a mile west of Interstate 95 on Sample Road, anchored by the Brazilian-flavored Seabra Supermarket, offered their own microcosm of the two national studies. They described an out-flow among their immigrant customers that has been escalating in proportion with the decline in the U.S. economy.

If these immigrants were going to be poor, said Rithza Harrison, 23, who runs the Number One Beauty Supply shop, ``they decided that they can be poor back home.''

''It doesn't make you feel so good,'' said Esmeralda Villareal, who works at the J&H Dry Cleaners. Villareal, an immigrant from Mexico, talked about how many members of her church, dominated by Mexican immigrants, had gone back. ``You don't know if you'll ever see them again.''

CREDIT TO WALL STREET

Along with their meager belongings and the little money they might have saved, the immigrants are also taking away what had been one of the most volatile issues in American politics. The much celebrated fence along the Mexican border that the nativists demanded to keep immigrants out has now become as much of an impediment for discouraged immigrants wanting to go home.

''There's no work. The value of the dollar has fallen until it's not worth sending money home. And now the economy is getting worse every day,'' said Ferretti. ``So they're leaving.''

Credit the Wall Street bankers, who've replaced illegal immigrants as the kicked dog of American politics, with one major accomplishment. Their dodgy sub-prime credit schemes may have devastated the U.S. economy, but they did the one thing xenophobe politicians never could. Wall Street solved the illegal immigration problem.

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