Abstract
If you have noticed how much money immigrants currently send back to their home countries, you might be lured into thinking that this is a viable mechanism to reduce global poverty and inequality. The World Bank estimates that global remittances reached $550 million in 2013, with over $400 million going to developing nations. Analysts expect the numbers to increase, and some claim the money positively affects the everyday lives of home country residents. Of course, numbers do not always tell the whole story.
How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands is a useful collection of case studies that shifts our focus from what happens in receiving nations to what is happening in the sending ones. This includes the effects of money, but also some of the less conspicuous outcomes. Ultimately, the book is convincing that remittances warrant more attention. It also prompts us to imagine a more humane kind of migration. But the disparities in starting points between successful and not-so-successful cases are many, leaving one to wonder about the possibility of real change.
Susan Eckstein begins with an overview of migration patterns and the range of impacts immigrants can have back home: 75 percent of all migrants are from the undeveloped South and move to the wealthier global North; they may be unskilled laborers, or skilled professionals; reasons for migrating can be economic or political, and may change over time; some stay, while others return home or cycle back and forth. And technology, we are reminded, facilitates a particular kind of transnationalism that allows immigrants to impact their homelands economically, but also socially and culturally.
In Chapter Two, Alejandro Portes connects the dots between immigration types, background, and outcomes. Permanent emigration among low-skilled laborers is risky for homelands as it leads to depopulation, brain drain, and weakened infrastructures, especially where the flow of monetary remittances declines over time. Transnational organizations can make small improvements, though their potential increases among skilled professionals and where unique opportunities exist. In contrast, cyclical migration creates more opportunities for transferring skills and other resources back home, strengthens local productive structures, and preserves human resources. As government support increases, so too does the likelihood that positive impacts on the homeland persist. Portes ultimately invites readers to consider migration a potential change agent. Rather than “globalization from below,” where individual remittances and local organizations channel resources sent by emigrants with minimal impact, he lobbies for sending and receiving governments to organize focused immigration cycles with broad investment programs that keep the well-being of sending nations in mind.
Chapters Three, Four, and Eight highlight desirable outcomes and the circumstances that facilitate them. China and India are the greatest contributors to increasing immigrant investments and cash remittances among developing nations. For both countries, skilled migrants who maintained ties or eventually returned back home worked with their respective governments to channel investments into economic growth. For China, the entrepreneurial class that fled to nearby Taiwan after the communist revolution worked with pro-business party leaders, paving the way to that country’s “economic miracle.” In India, workers obtained temporary visas to work in Silicon Valley, then returned to recreate segments of the tech industry at home. And in Morocco, where emigrants are economically poorer and unskilled, the state-run bank worked with migrants to establish a money-transfer system, including support services that promoted cultural acclimation and financial literacy. This client-centered approach increased the amount of money being sent through the bank, allowing the Moroccan government to borrow cash for developmental projects.
The centralized Moroccan strategy contrasts with Cuba and Mexico. In the former, low wages and excessive remittance fees drove Cubans away from state institutions and into the informal economy. But disparate access to both off-the-books remittances and work has created distinct socio-economic classes between those who have and those who do not—quite a quandary for socialism. In Mexico, most efforts to channel remittances require money to be turned over to local hometown associations (HTAs). Seemingly, this is less enticing and, in a country so big and diverse, the lack of policy and participation uniformity results in inconsistent development patterns. Moreover, while HTAs cultivate transnational bonds, disagreements over how to use the money highlight the problem of dissimilation: the cultural differences that emerge between Americanized emigrants and those still back home.
The concept of cultural dissimilation is a unique contribution of the book, but Riva Kastoryano shows that such conflict is not inevitable. In Europe, Turkish cultural organizations were able to consolidate “Turks Abroad” within the already trans-nationalized context of the European Union (EU). Europeanization reverberates back to transnationalize Turkish identity at home in a way that supports ongoing desires to affirm Turkey’s position in the Union.
Things get discouraging in the last part of the book with chapters on the Philippines, Mozambique, and El Salvador, where social and cultural remittances yield violence, family and gender conflicts, and a health crisis. José Miguel Cruz describes how Salvadoran immigrants with U.S. gang affiliations transport gang culture when they are deported back home. Though monetary remittances to this small, poor country have increased, there is little infrastructure to channel the resources or temper the gang activity. Meanwhile, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas reminds us that the North’s demand for domestic labor has lured women into migration without their families. While this trend might yield a sense of optimism and liberation for women, men often sabotage it by not helping with familial obligations. And because children believe the gendered division of labor that assigns women as caretakers is so natural, they blame mothers for their sense of abandonment. Finally, Victor Agadjanian, Cecilia Menjivar, and Boaventura Cau focus on “the impact male migration has on marital relations in the context of the diffusion of a deadly health epidemic” (p. 264). Migrant laborers travel to South Africa, where they often have relations with commercial sex workers and contract HIV. The disease is transmitted to wives, some of whom participate in affairs with other men at home. In a context where discussions about sexuality are uncommon, the bit of hope is that women eventually will generate trust networks in which they begin to have informal discussions about strategies for managing HIV.
In the end, many of the ideas in this collection are not terribly new. Peggy Levitt and scholars abroad have chronicled social remittances for some time now. However, the cases cover a lot of geography, bringing together a wide range of new, graspable examples into one volume. Virtually all the chapters give a concise look at the structural conditions that shape outcomes, making this a useful text for sociology courses on globalization, migration, diaspora studies, or even a lesson in comparative methods.
How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands should also raise interesting questions and provoke theoretical discussions that weave more of this material together. Given our understanding of globalization and wealth distribution, how do so-called advances affect overall inequality within nations and between them? What are the gender dynamics among skilled migrants? And can a nation the size of Mexico possibly replicate what took place in Morocco? Finally, even if it were possible to replicate successes, is it appropriate to advocate for migration as a solution to poverty and inequality? It is, after all, a lot to ask of the global South and, in some ways, still lets the global North off the hook.