Transnational Corporations of Football Kin: Migration,Labor Flow,and the American Samoa MIRAB Economy

Proem

Some 5,000 miles (8,046 km) from the U.S. mainland shores, deep in the heart of the South Pacific, lies the 76-square-mile (179 km²) U.S. territory of American Samoa—an island ¹ with a population of just 55,519 that produces more National Football League (NFL) players per capita than anywhere else in the world. Just how much football ² talent does American Samoa produce? It is estimated by CBS News that a young boy born to Samoan parents is as much as 56 times more likely to make it to the NFL than any other kid in the United States (Pelley, 2010). At the collegiate level, Sports Illustrated estimated years ago that of the 800 boys who graduated from high school on the island between 2002 and 2003, an estimated 97 left to play football at a 2- or 4-year college or university in the United States—one out of every eight high school football players (Syken, 2003). It was estimated that there were over 200 amateur footballers of Samoan descent honing their talents at colleges and universities in college football in 2015, from a pool of less than 500,000 self-identified Samoans around the world—only half of whom reside in locations where American football is accessible (Sager, 2015). The establishment of Field House 100, a nonprofit organization designed to help football players in American Samoa secure college scholarships through sports, helped place more than 100 American Samoan football players in U.S. colleges and universities from 2011 to 2013 (Hayner, 2012, 2013). In the professional ranks, it has been calculated that American Samoa has the highest per capita ratio of NFL players of anywhere in the world—a per capita ratio of one NFL player per 5,047 people—a rate that is more than 12 times greater than the next closest U.S. state or territory (Beissel, 2015). If we digress from the pursuit of a definitive statistic, and think about the emergent pattern in general, one thing becomes clear: American Samoa is the most prolific gridiron football talent–producing place in the world. Once a great secret of untapped football potential in the world, American Samoa has become the “Dominican of the NFL” (Carter, 2004), a global football talent marketplace for U.S. football programs, coaches, and recruiters seeking the next wave of emergent gridiron football talent.

Despite still long odds, the emergence of American Samoan as a gridiron football producing is part of a wider “Polynesian pipeline” (Beissel, 2018) of Pacific Islander football migration to the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) and eventually the NFL. Indeed, many dedicated consumers of the American gridiron spectacle(s) have become familiar with the vowel-laden names of prominent gridiron playing Pacific Islanders in the NFL, including NFL Hall of Famer and 10-time NFL All-Pro Linebacker Junior Seau; 5-time NFL Pro Bowler and Super Bowl XLVII Champion Defensive Tackle Haloti Ngata; and 2-time Super Bowl Champion, 2010 NFL Defensive Player of the year, and 8-time Pro Bowl Safety Troy Polamalu. When the scope is expanded to include all players of Pacific Island origin, it is approximated that there are 70 in the NFL and another 500 in college football, hailing from places such as American Samoa, Western Samoa, Tonga, Hawaii, Fiji, and the U.S. mainland. In the NFL’s 2015 draft, five of the first 66 players selected were of Pacific Islander heritage, including the first overall pick, Quarterback from the University of Oregon, Marcus Mariota. The emergence of prominent Pacific Islanders in NFL football and the steady migration of elite gridiron football talent from the Pacific Islands to professional, major college, and small college (Division II, III and junior colleges) and high school levels on the U.S. mainland constitute a contemporary sporting phenomenon.

The aim of this article is to make sense of the increase in American Samoan gridiron football migration operating within the wider contexts and constraints of a Migration, Remittances, Aid and Bureaucracy (MIRAB) economy (Bertram, 1999, 2006; Bertram & Watters, 1985, 1986). The MIRAB model introduced by Bertram and Watters (1985) in their seminal paper, “The MIRAB Economy in South Pacific Microstates,” proposed an alternate view of development for South Pacific economies in which migration, remittances, aid, and bureaucracy determined the evolution of local Pacific Island economies. Bertram and Watters (1985) argued that migration from the Pacific is shaped by the collective decision-making of family units—what they termed transnational corporations of kin—working collectively to maximize resources and opportunities among its family members for the benefit of the wider family unit. In the case of American Samoa, sport, particularly gridiron football, has emerged as an important driver of a stock-flow relationship in which the stock of overseas-resident migrant laborers and their descendants have migrated to foreign destinations to sustain the flow of remittances to their extended family in their homeland and the wider American Samoan economy. First, I detail the characteristics and contexts of Bertram and Watters’s (1985, 1986) MIRAB economic framework. Following a brief analysis of the American Samoa MIRAB economy, I explore prominent migration patterns of American Samoan families in the contemporary Pacific. After a brief discussion on the methods of data collection involved in this project, I examine the individual motivations and decision-making processes of those close to the football phenomenon that might lead to MIRAB relations. Based on a series of interviews conducted with players, coaches, and league officials associated with American Samoan High School football programs, and senior directors of gridiron athlete development and recruitment in American Samoa, I examine the individual and collective decision-making involved in the migration of gridiron football players from the territory. I find family units in American Samoa operate as, to rephrase Bertram and Watters (1985, 1986), transnational corporations of football kin, working collectively to develop and train skilled migrant football talent toward the accumulation of various forms of economic, social, and cultural capital for the benefit of the extended family unit.

Remittances and the MIRAB Model

For more than 30 years, the MIRAB model by Bertram and Watters (1985, 1986) has been a significant contribution toward understanding the economic and social development of Pacific Island economies. The MIRAB model proposed a view of development for South Pacific economies based on the particular constellation of such forces as MIRAB that characterized some small island Pacific states. The formulation of the MIRAB model originated as Bertram and Watters were attempting to capture the modern economic development of small island nations emerging from the colonial era with a variety of constitutional arrangements, but with a common heritage of colonial welfarism and economic dependency on “mainland countries.” As Bertram (1999) explains, the MIRAB economy

signified an economic situation in which current-account transfer payments (remittances, dividends, interest earnings, social welfare payments, government budgetary subventions, and a wide variety of other official transfers generically categorized as “aid” and non-tradeable production (generally dominated by government, hence the term bureaucracy), function as the leading sectors of economic development, in place of the World Bank’s preferred mix of export-led tradable production and private-sector investment. (p. 105, emphasis in original)

Of the five island economies they studied (Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, Kiribati, and Tuvalu), all had a long history of public sector–led investment in both infrastructure assets and so-called “development projects” aimed at supporting local, sustainable economic growth, which later led to economic independence through private investment down the line.

The characterization of Polynesia and Micronesia as “dependent” and “unsustainable” among aid-development economists and international agencies leads to the proposition that resources and policy support should be allocated away from, rather than toward, strengthening and developing public-sector industrial assets. The MIRAB model challenged the hegemony of aid donors and international agencies’ efforts to drive small island economies away from what seemed to be their natural and preferred pattern of resource allocation based on aid and remittances (Bertram & Watters, 2006) and to force them into an economic development model that emphasized export-led growth fueled by private foreign investment. Bertram and Watters’s (1985, 1986) findings turned developmentalist orthodoxy of then and now on its head. Based upon their case study analysis, Bertram and Watters soon identified the inherent paradox whereby “traditionally ‘productive’ capital was unproductive, and ‘unproductive’ capital was productive” (Bertram, 2006, p. 2). Whereas public-sector investments were sustained as long-term pillars of small island economies, the numerous private-sector and export-led development projects had short lives, low returns, and were virtually never sustained beyond the life of the original assets. The authors demonstrated that a development strategy was not only composed of migration, remittances, and aid preferable for small island economies but also proved to be durable and sustainable toward economic growth.

What was also unique about the MIRAB model—and distinguished it from the deterministic dependency theory models that dominated the Pacific Island economic literature in the 1970s (see: Connell, 1980)—was that it stressed the importance of social relationships and personal agency among residents in Pacific economies. Bertram and Watters argued that migration from the Pacific was shaped by the individual and collective decision-making of family units working cooperatively to maximize resources and opportunities among its members in several places (including overseas locations). Drawing on earlier work on Tonga by George Marcus (1981), they used the term “transnational corporations of kin” to describe the social context of the economic activities wherein Pacific households dispatched members of family to the far corners of the globe to work (Bertram & Watters, 1985, p. 501). This arrangement depended on the steady flow of remittances from migrant to the home community, reinforced by reciprocal visits between geographically extended kin groups (Bertram & Watters, 1985). Extended family units entered into implicit contracts with migrant laborers to remit at least a part of their earnings to sustain those family members who remained at “home” and to allow the “transnational corporation of kin” to invest in the new generations of migrants. Individual Pacific Island households embraced the migration and remittance parts of the small island economies. Migration is part of a “profitable allocation of household resources, potentially of long-run benefit to the growth of living standards in the sending community” (Bertram & Watters, 1985, p. 498).

The sustainability of MIRAB economies has generated considerable debate among scholars in the 1970s regarding the sustainability of remittance and aid-based economies of small Pacific states. One position is that remittance dependence is unsustainable and hinders the expansion of the local economy. The key argument based largely on dependency theory was that remittances were a form of underdevelopment and greatly contributed to growing inequality as they were used primarily for consumption and therefore acted as a disincentive to investment and local production. This led Connell (1980) to conclude that “remittances on the smaller islands tend to foster dependence rather than inequality; on the largest islands they generate inequality rather than dependence. But both trends are ubiquitous” (p. 51). The other view is characterized by the MIRAB model, which sees such economies as sustainable so long as migration, remittances, and aid continue, thus viewing self-sustainability impossible. Given what they observed as long-standing economic and social systems of a sustainable nature, Bertram and Watters concluded that the MIRAB’s sustainability was based on the preservation of a “stock-flow relationships”: (a) the stock of overseas-resident migrant laborers and their descendants who sustained the flow of remittances and migrants, and (b) the stock of domestic supply of public-sector work sustained from the flow of foreign aid (Bertram, 2006, p. 2). This stock-flow relationship forged the foundations of the MIRAB small island economy which

relied upon the continuing operation of stabilising negative feedback loops which kept the aid flowing, the migrants moving, the bureaucrats operating and the remittance networks alive, while the islanders’ society and culture were reproduced through time and across transnational space. (Bertram, 2006, p. 2)

Bertram and Watters (1985, 1986) argue that this system is sustainable as long as “kin corporations” continue to operate and there is a continuing flow of migrants to overseas locations and remittances back to the homeland.

Although the MIRAB model met initial resistance, it gained considerable acceptance as a model of the development process for small Pacific Island nation-states. From the mid-1980s, much of the work on the reliance of remittances in the Pacific began to draw on Bertram and Watters’s “MIRAB model” (see Cook & Kirkpatrick, 1995; Hayes, 1993; Poirine, 1994). More recent models of small island economies such as SITE (McElroy, 2006), which identifies the potential of tourism in small island economies, and PROFIT (Baldacchino, 2006), which emphasizes domestic policy flexibility and a dynamic private sector, have extended the MIRAB’s core tenants toward the creation of a three-way taxonomy of small island socioeconomic formations—all of which are potentially sustainable based on the continuation of path-dependent networks and political stability (Bertram, 2006). To paraphrase Bertram and Watters (1985), like the economies they attempted to model, the MIRAB model has “prove[n] more durable and sustainable than some observers expect[ed]” (p. 497).

The American Samoan MIRAB Economy

American Samoa is, in many ways, a classic MIRAB economy due to the importance of widespread migration and the return flow of remittances, and high levels foreign aid from the U.S. Federal Government (Ehounou & McElroy, 2008; Oberst & McElroy, 2007). In American Samoa, the prospects for social and economic mobility are relatively small compared with the mainland United States. The 2010 U.S. census reported that American Samoa’s median household income fell well below that of the United States, and its poverty rate well above. American Samoa’s 2009 median household income of US$23,892 was 47% of that of the United States, with a per capita income of US$6,311—about one fifth of that of the United States (US$28,051). American Samoa has the lowest per capita income in the entire U.S. system including 3,141 counties, 50 states, and other U.S. territories. American Samoa’s 2009 poverty rate of 57.8% far exceeded the U.S. rate of 15.1%. The limited opportunities in the Territory impact heavily the decision of young American Samoans to migrate overseas in pursuit of work and opportunities and the return flow of remittances back home. As American Samoans are considered U.S. Nationals, migration is easy to the United States, with this status conferring the right to travel, access, and work in the United States, and immediate access to social welfare and other benefits there. There are long-established Samoan communities in the United States and a long tradition of American Samoans participating in the U.S. workforce.

The pattern of migration in American Samoa, which has persisted for at least five decades, is unusual to say the least. It is as if American Samoa is a revolving door, with relatively large numbers of people entering the territory (mostly from Western Samoa and other Pacific Islands) and exiting at the same time (mainly to the United States). Indeed, the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) census group, of which Samoans are a detailed category, is among the most concentrated, diverse, and fastest growing populations in the United States. According to the 2010 U.S. census, 1.2 million people, or roughly half of 1% of all people living in the United States, identified as NHPI, either alone or in combination with one or more other races. The NHPI population is both among the most racially diverse racial groupings in the United States; more than half (56%) reported multiple races, and the second fastest growing racial population in the United States, quadrupling that of the total U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). More than half of all NHPI live in one of the two states—Hawai‘i (356,000) and California (286,000). Among the growing numbers of NHPIs residing in the United States, Samoans accounted for the second largest detailed NHPI group, with 109,637 reporting only Samoan and a further 74,803 reporting Samoan in combination with one or more other races. This totals 184,440 people who reported Samoan alone or in any combination, far outnumbering the comparatively smaller population of 55,519 persons in American Samoa (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). In other words, there are more Samoans now living in the United States (184,440) than in their homeland of American Samoa (55,519) according to the most recent U.S. census data (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012).

Although the overall number of Samoans residing in the United States is not very large by U.S. standards, the impact on the homeland has been substantial. From 2000 to 2010, of American Samoa’s total population of 55,519 persons, an estimated 15,642 persons, roughly 27% of American Samoa’s entire population, opted to leave the island during the past decade (“American Samoa Statistical Yearbook,” 2012). For many Pacific Islander migrants, they are motivated by a desire, if not obligation, to support kin and family in the homeland (Connell, 1980). The importance of outward migration from American Samoa has grown due to the substantial amounts of return remittances to the island in recent decades. Although not all Pacific migrants maintain close ties to kin in the homeland, strong transnational networks are developed and preserved as a result of the central importance of kin to Pacific people. And the desire to migrate and remit to family back home is particularly strong in American Samoa. Indeed, Ahlburg and Levin (1990) found that the largest migration flow to, and return migration flow from, the United States was from American Samoa.

The impact of remittances in the Pacific Islands is generally felt at the individual and family level of society. It is generally understood that in the Pacific Islands, as in many other remittance-dependent economies, remittances make little contribution to savings and investment (Ahlburg, 1991). According to Ahlburg (1991), it is commonly believed that migrants’ remittances are used exclusively for supporting the consumption needs of the recipients (i.e., disposable income) and are spent primarily on imported consumer goods. In Ahlburg’s analysis of Pacific Island migration to American Samoa, he found that remittances are used primarily for immediate consumption. Although general consumption clearly remains the central purpose of remittances in the Pacific today, they are being used for a wide range of purposes, particularly for families entirely reliant on remittances for income. The purposes of remittances are as “varied as paying debts, purchasing airfares, paying school fees and church donations, building homes and business premises, contributing to the costs of events such as weddings and funerals, and facilitating investment in business” (Lee, 2009, p. 20). Not only are remittances sent for the benefit of family members, but also for the migrant laborers: as a means to maintain land rights, as personal invest and retirement planning, and as a form of accumulating social capital within the community through donations and charitable contributions conferring the family with social and cultural capital (Lee, 2009).

Given the steady growth in overseas migration over the past decade, and the return flow of overseas migrants to family members, remittances have emerged as a prominent feature of the American Samoan local economy. American Samoa, like many Pacific Island economies, is dependent upon the millions of dollars remitted annually to improve their standard of living and to encourage agricultural and business development. Unfortunately, detailed remittance data are not available for American Samoa from either The World Bank or the 2010 U.S. Census as it is not a category on the 2010 U.S. Census. As Connell and Brown (2005) noted, there is very little contemporary information in American Samoa on this matter despite the prevalence of migration and remittances. Whereas Ahlburg and Levin (1990) noted that while sizable, remittances were at the time dwarfed by other sources of income in the territory. Yet, with the proliferation of American Samoan migration to the United States over the past decade, and the more than 150,000 Samoans now residing and working in the United States, remittances have grown significantly as a percentage of the territory’s GDP. So while there is no concrete date on specific remittances in American Samoa, as Barringer, Gardner, Levin, & National Committee for Research on the 1980 Census (1993) write, “the tradition of remittances among Pacific Islanders has been most prominent among the Samoans, whose strong family ties remain unbroken by separations due to military enlistment or migration for work or sub-family unification” (p. 310).

Whereas the stock-flow relationship of migration remittances is an important source of income for the island, so too is the sustained flow of foreign aid from the U.S. Federal Government. American Samoa’s local economy is dominated by state-sector employment whose 6,650 employees constituted 38.6% of total employment in the territory, and federal government grants total US$114 million or 40.1% of labor income (McPhee, Conway, & Wolman, 2008). Foreign aid and grants are used to support the operations of the American Samoa Government (ASG) and government authorities. The large size of the government is largely due to the government control of public services, usually managed and controlled by the private sector, such as electric service, telecommunications, and some health care provisions. Two thirds of the government costs are funded by foreign aid and federal appropriations, with the remaining one third coming from local appropriations and enterprise revenues. As the report concluded, “this implied that without federal aid, American Samoa per capita income would only be one-half its actual level” (McPhee et al., 2008, p. 5). Another significant source of income is transfer payments, which consist largely of government retirement and disability payments. In 2002, for example, transfer payments amounted to US$39.5 million and indirectly generated 1,605 jobs or 9.0% of American Samoa employment.

For more than half a century, the only major private-sector employment in American Samoa centered on the fish processing industry. Tuna canneries, a mainstay of American Samoa since the 1950s, maintained a relatively constant flow of exports to the United States and contributed significantly to the local economy. In 2010, fishing processing accounted for US$438.3 million of the US$449.0 million worth of total exports, or 97% of the total value of American Samoa’s commodity exports (“American Samoa Statistical Yearbook,” 2012). In terms of employment, it is estimated that when taking into account the multiplier effect, the tuna canneries supported an estimated 8,118 jobs (wage and salary employees and proprietors) in the American Samoa economy. This constituted 45.6% of total employment, or roughly one of every two jobs in the territory (McPhee, Conway, & Wolman, 2008). However, recent changes to the U.S. federal minimum wage laws, corporate tax exemptions, and international trade agreements nearly eliminated its only major source of private-sector employment and export commodities. In 2007, the United States enacted a law incrementally raising the minimum wages in American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marina Islands (CNMI) until they equal the U.S. minimum wage (Sagapolutele, 2014). As a result of these coalescing factors, Chicken of the Sea International, which operated one of the two canneries in American Samoa, closed its cannery operations in the territory at the end of September 2009, relocating to the U.S. state of Georgia while outsourcing the more labor-intensive processes (e.g., cleaning and cooking the fish), to countries with lower labor costs. The remaining tuna cannery, StarKist, took cost-cutting actions that included labor-saving strategies, reduced overtime, and made redundant more than 50% of its workforce. The impact on the entire American Samoa economy of the tuna cannery closures is significant. According to a report to congress by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (2014), 58% of all hourly wage jobs in the tuna canning were lost from 2007 to 2010.

The tuna cannery crisis acts as a strong push-factor with many young American Samoans having fled the territory recently in pursuit of economic opportunity and the chance at a better life. At the same time, families have become increasingly reliant on the remittances from overseas migrants as the local economic crisis deepens, and the wider American Samoan economy is increasingly dependent on remittance income that flows into the territory. One of the primary pull factors for young American Samoan males is the attraction of gridiron football to improve their social mobility and secure their economic futures for themselves and their families. It is here where gridiron football both reflects and reproduces the MIRAB economy of the outward flow of skilled labor to the United States and the inward flow of remittances to support the transnational corporations of kin. In what follows, I explore the relationship between football, migration, and the flow of remittances and aid with the American Samoa economy. More specifically, how key figures within the production of American Samoan football perceive the sport as an important cultural formation in the stock-flow relationship: the stock of Samoan labor power to global football markets, and the return flow of remittances and aid for families and kin in their homeland. Moreover, I will offer critical insights on how football as a popular cultural formation is both product and producer of the MIRAB economy in American Samoa.

Methods for Understanding the American Samoa Football Experience

In an attempt to answer these questions, this project uses a qualitative inductive framework for collecting and analyzing empirical information to present an interpretive, naturalistic understanding of the social world. I draw upon Denzin’s (1997) interpretive ethnography framework as methodological practice to “situate” the phenomenon under investigation within its context and to articulate the shared meanings, practices, and experiences of multiple material realities for American Samoan footballers. As Denzin (1997) writes, ethnography is a “form of inquiry and writing that produces descriptions and accounts about the ways of life of the writer and those written about” (p. xi). While recognizing the open, flexible, and permissible boundaries of interpretive ethnography, the goal is to map the social context and to generate “thick descriptions and accounts” of the networks of shared meanings and “interworked system of constructible signs” (Gertz, 1973, p. 14) that constitute reality in a particular community based on voices heard, and observations recorded, in the field.

To study the American Samoan gridiron football spectacle, I became a situated observer of the phenomenon to fully experience the interrelated political, social, cultural, and economic forces contributing to it. More specifically, Coach Paul, the head football coach of the Eastern High School Raiders (both pseudonyms), invited me to serve as a volunteer assistant high school football coach for an entire football season after extensive conversations regarding my research. As a participant-observer within the cultural production of the American Samoan football spectacle, I was provided unique and unprecedented access to interpret the lived experience within the community through multimethod approaches for studying the naturalistic world. Throughout the duration of my fieldwork, I used a multimethod approach of collecting empirical materials: participant observation; structured/semi-structured interviews: detailed field notes; daily journal entries; photos/video/audio recordings; and informal dialogues and research collaborations with knowledgeable individuals. These manifold methods of empirical material collection allowed for a maximum variation sampling of texts that could cut across a vast array of experiences, performances, and subjectivities related to the American Samoan football.

During extended stay in the field, I had the opportunity to interview high school football players (n = 40) between the ages of 15 and 18 years on the Eastern football team, always in groups, as well as speak with more than a dozen coaches, parents, educator, and directors associated with the production of American Samoan High School football. Following Patton’s (2002) “interview guide approach,” I outlined a broad set of topics or issues to be covered, but was free to vary the wording and order of the questions to some extent. During these semi-structured interviews, I asked open-ended questions generally related to their experiences participating in high school football and how they saw the phenomenon. Given that many research participants saw their futures as lying off island, I inquired about the motivations and decision-making process behind American Samoan (football) labor migration and the role that football played in this decision. All interviews were recorded, selectively transcribed manually, and later analyzed. Following loosely the work of Corbin and Strauss (1990), and later Charmaz (2005), I utilized a grounded theory approach to develop theory inductively based on empirical data. It was only upon this analysis stage that Bertram and Watters’s (1985, 1986) research on MIRAB economies was identified as a useful way of theoretically framing the empirical data.

As many of these interviews were with participants below the age of consent, all questions were to be submitted and approved by the international review board (IRB) under the university’s “category B classification—consent of minors” to ensure the dignity of these vulnerable persons was protected. Parents or guardians were provided with the list of interview questions and granted written, free, and informed consent for their children to participate in the interviews, acknowledging the right to withdrawal at any time. Accordingly, all names and identifiers that appear in text, whether those of adults, young people, and so on, were given pseudonyms to ensure privacy and confidentiality. Research participants were provided the option to review interview transcriptions for approval, ensuring their responses were captured accurately and represented fairly.

The Economic and Sociocultural Dimensions of American Samoan Football Migration

Following sustained conversations and semi-structured interviews with the members of the Eastern football program, one thing became clear: the vast majority of the Eastern players saw football as an important means of social and economic mobility in the territory. As the vast majority of the players on the Eastern team lack the financial resources to afford college on their own, they are instead reliant on their football labor as currency for trans-Pacific migration. Indeed, an informal polling of the Eastern football players suggests approximately 80% plan to pursue football after high school graduation, primarily as a way “to go to the mainland and get an education” (Michael, personal communication). Among the many commenting on how they planned to use football to increase their life chances was the Eastern’s starting quarterback, who was already in possession of several scholarship offers from mainland colleges to play football:

I am planning on using football to get me a scholarship so I can get my education. If I make it up there at least I get a degree to come back with. Get a type of education with a degree to be successful. (Richard, personal communication)

Similarly, another Eastern player perceived football as his opportunity to move to the mainland and obtain a college education:

My plans are to use [football] to get a scholarship for a JC college (junior college) pretty much go from there. I could get a scholarship or anything to get me to the mainland. (Vance, personal communication)

The team’s most decorated player, who would later win the 2010 ASHSAA Defensive Player of the Year as one of the most exceptional players in the 2011 recruiting class, had open offers to several major Division I programs and universities on the U.S. mainland. He, like many of his teammates, saw football as a logical career path given the downsizing of the tuna cannery industry:

Down here it’s hard to get a job now. Nobody has a job so it’s better to make that decision to go off island and be successful. [Football is] an opportunity. Maybe you will get something out of it and come back and help your family. (Benedict, personal communication)

It immediately became apparent that the economic crisis caused by the closure and downsizing of the island’s tuna canning industry had a profound and significant influence on how much of the population saw economic future in the territory. When asked about the social and economic impact of the tuna cannery closures, one Eastern player illuminated the impact of the economic crisis on future opportunities for the players:

There were two companies here that used to build up our economy, and the people that used to work there, but right now [opportunity] is kind of low cause all the jobs are gone. Like those two companies everyone used to work there, but not anymore. (Jeremiah, personal communication)

The view that football equates to opportunity echoes in the public pedagogy in American Samoa. As the success stories of former players who “made it” in the NFL circulate in the community, parents have sought about enabling their own children to follow in the footsteps of those who came before. The parents of one player on the squad clearly saw how playing football as part of the amateur-based American collegiate athletic system in that football “gets them a scholarship to go off island for their future” (Amanda, personal communication). When asked about what opportunities exist for her child in the territory, she encouraged her son to pursue football to improve the standing in his life:

After high school, they can go off island. There aren’t many careers though after high school. There’s really nothing here in Samoa. Football can get you a job. To get a better future, to go off island and it’s still the same but for them to achieve goals for the future. Not only in football, but an education. (Mary, personal communication)

Indeed, even the directors and coaches of American Samoan football recognize that football has become one of the major source of migration in the territory:

[Football] is an opportunity. Any sport, these young men and young ladies they get to play sports that they wanted, how do we take these sports and identify it as a plus for them. Cause if they’re good in sports, they need to be good in school, it will open a door. (Sam, personal communication)

The twin dynamics of the tuna closures and the lack of opportunities for employment have meant that football has emerged as an important contributor to the migration of American Samoans to the U.S. mainland. In 2011, more than 30 of the island’s most successful high school football players received scholarships to play off island in 2012 alone (Gasu, 2012). Although admittedly these numbers appear relatively small in the scope of the entire population of 55,519, it is important to consider that the amount of public high school graduates in a given year is 912 students in total—only 438 of whom are men (“ASDOE Student Enrollment”, 2019). Thus, around 12% of all male high school graduates in 2011 have used sport, in particular gridiron football, as a reason for migrating to the United States for the purpose of pursuing educational and career opportunities.

Although many young America Samoan males see opportunity for upward mobility existing within the global gridiron football economy, the stark reality of this mobility system is that success is still incredibly remote. The vast majority of American Samoans will never possess the extraordinary combination of athletic ability, academic success, and just plain good fortune needed to secure an NCAA collegiate scholarship to facilitate their movement off island. When the actual football futures of the Eastern football program played out, the tales of successful football migrants provide aspirational footballers with a sense of delusion and profound lack of reality. Among the more than 70 Eastern football players surveyed about their football futures—80% of whom identified as aspirational footballers—only five players from the squad actually made it to the mainland: three at NCAA-Division programs and two as nonscholarship players at Junior Colleges. Only one of these players, a defensive player who attended an NCAA DI university on the U.S. west coast, was actually drafted into the NFL, earning a nonguaranteed contract of US$600,000 as a sixth-round draft pick. And while the economic and social capital accumulated through this singular player’s achievement figures to present him with a lifetime of prestige and further success, the “football as opportunity pathway” is littered with whose aspirations fail to materialize. Yet, in a place with such limited opportunities as American Samoa, a success story like this circulates powerfully in the hearts and minds of young aspirant gridiron football laborers, with many believing they can overcome these remarkably slim odds, and working to reproduce the broader circuit of transnational football migration.

While the motivation to improve one’s individual economic opportunities is indeed a power force in the stock of migrant football player on global labor markets, a second major factor in the decision-making process of aspirant footballers is the desire to provide for one’s family and community. Although the primary motivation of emigration to the United States among aspirant football was economically based, there were many social and cultural factors playing an important role as well. Thus, does the emergence of the American Samoan football phenomenon provide a social context behind the formation of Bertram and Watters’s (1985, 1986) transnational corporations of kin, or the use of the family as an economic entity to maximize resources in global markets. It is here where the traditions of fa’a Samoa, the Samoan cultural way of life, factor heavily in the decision-making process of young people in American Samoa to use football to achieve stable economic futures for themselves and their kinship networks.

The extended family is the single most important social unit in traditional Samoan culture. It is family and kinship that frame Samoan social organization and Samoan transnationalism in that it “defines the matrix within which people, capital, ideas and technologies move between the nodes of ‘transnational Samoa’” (Macpherson & Macpherson, 2009, p. 73). The recent emergence of football as a driving force of emigration from the territory has the potential to reshape traditional kinship networks and Samoan transnationalism. As Macpherson and Macpherson (2009, p. 75) argue,

If kinship is, in effect, the foundation of transnational Samoa, then anything that transforms the character of kinship has the potential to reconfigure Samoan transnationalism. Anything that weakens kinship bonds between origin and overseas communities, which are the “nodes” of transnational Samoa, has the potential to undermine it. Conversely, anything that strengthens those bonds ensures the survival of an active Samoan transnationalism. Therefore, any attempt to explain the condition of Samoan transnationalism must focus first on the conditions of kinship and the factors affecting it in any given node. (p. 73)

During interviews with Eastern players and the communities that support them, many saw the potential for sport migration as a means of providing for their extended family. Larry, a 17-year-old reserve defensive lineman on the team, stressed the importance of football to providing for his family:

providing for your family is important above all else. With football, I am able to do that. Even if I don’t make the NFL, I will be able to provide with them once I get to the mainland. Using my education and everything. (Larry, personal communication)

For Mike, football not only provided him an opportunity to get “off island,” but also was a means for repaying his parents for their support and sacrifice:

Right now, for the future, I want to get out there and see the world. Football will let me do that. Then I can look for a job [on the mainland], pay my parents back. It’s all about paying back my family and providing for them.

In American Samoa, football was viewed as a major factor in improving not just the lives of the parents and siblings but also of the ‘aiga extended community. This is because the family unit in Samoan culture is a communal living unit. Traditionally, the Samoan family is organized into a very identifiable extended family hierarchy. The Matai are the paramount leaders of the extended family (known as the ‘aiga) and are elected by a consensus of extended family members. The Matai have control over the labor and resources of the ‘aiga. Until recently, the Matai assigned work in the agricultural fields and allocated food to individual families of the ‘aiga. However, recent modernization has to some degree changed this traditional system of resource collection and allocation weakening the traditional role and power of the Matai. Yet, in some villages and areas, the Matai still retain a powerful role in all aspects of the Samoan family and the ‘aiga in shaping the contributions of individuals to Samoan society. When a young American Samoan male faces the decision to migrate to the United States, it is according to the traditions of supporting their entire ‘aiga. The monetary remittances they distribute are, in some cases, shared by the entire community or village. This matrix of exchange is the foundation of American Samoa as

it provided the potential for a transnational Samoa, and the practices gave it form. Commitment to kin, expressed in visits and participation in ceremonials, gifts and exchanges, creates, maintains and reflects an active transnationalism. Without these regular and affirming exchanges there is no active transnationalism. (Macpherson & Macpherson, 2009, p. 73)

Although the monetary remittances remain a powerful pull factor in transnational football migration, at no point did any of the aspirant footballers express concern over the physical and economics costs of transnational football migration. Indeed, a preponderance of evidence on heart disease, brain trauma, and the neurodegenerative disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), suggest a corporeal violence in gridiron football that poses deleterious effects on the human body. A recent study by the Boston University School of Medicine found that nearly every former NFL player who played at least one regular season game and whose brain then was donated for research was diagnosed postmortem with CTE (Mez et al., 2017). Ironically, among the many former NFL players diagnosed with CTE postmortem was American Samoan-born, former 10-time NFL All-Pro Junior Seau, whose degenerative brain disease CTE led to severe depression and eventuated in Seau taking his own life in 2012. The physical costs of playing in the NFL places a lifelong financial burden on former players as the NFL does not guarantee lifetime health care for its retired players. So even if the aspirant gridiron footballer reaps the financial largess of a career in the NFL required to sustain monetary remittances to their homeland, those resources will likely be necessary for long-term player health care and to ensure their personal well-being throughout their lifetime. The complete long-term economic and physical costs “making it in the NFL” were overlooked, if rarely discussed, by the aspirant gridiron footballers interviewed in this research.

When asked what flow of goods and money from football players who successfully migrate overseas are used for, one of the moms associated with the Eastern football program, whose son was expected to emigrate in the following months to the United States, responded,

The money from off-island is used to help with stuff like funerals, weddings, big things in the village. In my family, it’s not just me and my husband and kids. We have a big family, we share expenses for everything. Funeral, all big stuff. Like you guys make a $1000 for this and they get this money, we add up together and make the total needed. We share with each other. (Amanda, personal communication)

In a conversation with a highly respected village Matai, he communicated that extended families and communities of gridiron football players are becoming increasingly aware of the economic and social benefits that playing football has for the ‘aiga:

Some of the parents say that they didn’t understand much about the success of the game, but they do understand what the game could bring to the family. (Tim, personal communication)

Indeed, the view of football as an important career opportunity signals a major shift in the cultural values of serving the family. As one well-respected father of two Eastern players explained,

In the time that I was raised, my father said “our family don’t want nothing to do with your football. You are expected to come and do chores and prepare the dinner and peel the banana our family can eat.” However, that’s not what it is now. Now people are realizing that football can take you wherever you want to go. And what it can do for the family. (Thomas, personal communication,

This is not always the case, however, and the decision to emigrate based on football does, at times, produce conflict and tensions within some family and kinship groups. In some cases, parents are reluctant to allow passage for various reasons. In others, they simply cannot afford it. When asked about how he personally would resolve the tension of staying home to support his family and the community through domestic service work on the plantation with his own individual aspirations of using the game for a better life himself, one player on the Eastern squad replied,

If I was faced with that decision I would probably stay playing ball. Cause down here its hard to get a job now. Everybody has no job so it’s better to take that decision to go off island and be successful. It’s an opportunity. Maybe you will get something out of it and come back and help your family. (Benedict, personal communication)

In Benedict’s view, emigrating to the United States to play football for individual reasons would still directly or indirectly benefit his ‘aiga in the long term. For others I spoke with, they did not so easily dismiss obligations to the extended family that bound them to the island. In my travels, I crossed paths with several young adults, some of whom lived in village that hosted me, who were unwilling or unable to accept open scholarship offers to attend college and play football overseas because of the immediate duties of supporting the family. As one player, now 3 years graduated from high school, explained to me,

I have an offer from San Diego State. But I have to help support my family. They need me here. (Daniel, personal communication)

The way he spoke about his collegiate scholarship offer in our conversation was as if this existed in perpetuity. And his decision to put family before football was a temporary detour in his mind, even if the stark reality was that this opportunity was probably no longer there. The decision to place family before football, even if the two were mutually beneficial, was echoed by many football players on the island due to the central importance of the family. To the question of how important is your family in your life, one player answered,

They say you’re first school is in your family. Your first teachers are your parents. So you learn those things like respect, manners everything in your family. So if you’re brought up by those standards, you will be good you will know what it takes. Family is everything. (Richard, personal communication)

Following many conversations on the island, it was generally understood that the income generated through the gridiron football pipeline would be sent back to support their family which, at the same time, confers a degree of social capital upon the overseas footballers (Uperesa, 2010). The cultural attitudes and views toward football migration are being constantly (re)shaped by stories, advice, and experiences of those who have gone before. The stories of those who have made it circulate as public pedagogy on the island. One player pointed to the ways in which the success of Jonathan Fenene, a professional football player at the time playing for the Cincinnati Bengals NFL franchise, is understood locally as a way to support his family:

Yeah, like Jonathan Fanene. I think it’s a 3-story house for his parents. Before, they had a regular house. In American Samoa they didn’t have that before. (Amanda, personal communication)

The personal success story of Jonathan Fanene, as well as countless others, is understood to commensurate with providing for the family, often in material and economic ways—a bigger house, a nicer car, a seemingly endless source of income.

It was also found that transnational football migration confers a degree of social capital to the extended family meaning benefits of the social still maintain an important and measurable influence on how football players see their own future in addition to individual economic mobility. In this way, migrant footballers remit more than just economic capital to their homeland and kin. Their transnational migration reflect what is known as social remittances (Levitt, 1998) back to their homeland ascribing both them and their family social status on the island. As Uperesa (2010) found, the social capital generated from gridiron football contributes to a reshaping of the traditional Samoan Matai system in American Samoa. Although transnational football migration and the public notoriety it engenders confer social and economic capital to the individual himself, the benefits to the ‘aiga are understood to be more significant. Indeed, the economic and social-cultural dimensions of American Samoan football migration are mutually constitutive of one another. One player summed up the ways in which individual migration decisions are influenced by kinship networks (helping the family), and at the same time what it means to support the family by earning wealthy salaries and status by playing football overseas:

If I help myself, I’m helping my family. (Michael, personal communication)

Throughout these interviewers, however, neither precious few aspirant footballers nor their extended family members problematized social costs of the gridiron football economy. Specifically, that the transnational football migration pathway to the NFL requires the gridiron footballer to enter into the NCAA’s system of exploitation, that as a corporate cartel of university presidents, makes billions for universities and private companies by extracting monopsony rents from football laborers that exchange labor value for price fixed compensation (i.e., a scholarship) and denying labor the fundamental economic rights and freedoms under amateurism restrictions (Branch, 2011). As Hawkins (2013) argues, the intercollegiate athletic industrial complex is (a) guided by an “internal colonialism” in which subordinate migrant groups are transplanted in a foreign land at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) and (b) produces transplanted athlete experiences resembling those of “oscillating migrant labourers” who sell their labor to the international market and leave their communities with “hopes of improving their financial conditions back at home” (p. 126). Elsewhere, it has been argued that NCAA football coaches and recruiters engage in a highly secretive, immoral, unethical, and exploitative practices involved in American Samoan gridiron football player recruitment (Beissel, 2018). These international recruiting networks position athletes as commodities for capital accumulation, coaches as international marketers with portfolios of human capital for sale, and intercollegiate institutions as corporate firms scouring the globe for the next unexploited and underdeveloped talent market to outsource labor. The NCAA neither provides precious little guidance or oversight on the international recruitment process, nor does it ensure basic support elements for international student athletes (ISAs) once they arrive at colleges and universities on the U.S. mainland. These structural and institutional relations and forces complicate the experiences of American Samoan transnational football migration and make their successful movement to the NFL through gridiron football pipeline an even more improbable proposition.

Despite these social realities, what it means to support the family has shifted from harvesting the plantation, to laboring in the tuna canning industry, and finally to emigrating to the United States for the benefit of monetary and social remittances; football plays an increasingly important role in reshaping and transforming Samoan kinship and transnationalism. Bertram (1986) has suggested that the extended households of migrants are characterized “by remittance transfers among various component parts of the ‘transnational corporations of kin’ which direct the allocation of each island’s family labour around the regional economy” (p. 820), and in so doing not only help to maintain the family and communal networks but even enlarge their fields of interaction, incorporating them into global networks of support. In this way, the emigration of football labor, on the contrary, reproduces existing social and cultural precepts of the traditional Matai structure informing the decision-making of aspirant football migrants. Success is shared by the ‘aiga whose economic and social capital circulate in public discourse as a powerful reinforcement of what football can provide for the family and what status it ultimately confers to the family. By the same token, trans-Pacific gridiron football migration threatens to rework Samoan transnationalism as remittances are sometimes not redistributed and allocated by the family’s elected Matai to the benefit of broader Samoan society. In most cases, remittances are held privately in the hands of the individuals and the immediate family, conferring social and cultural capital to a closed network of Samoan kin—not shared collectively in the extended family or wider Samoan community. The inherent tension as demonstrated in the social and cultural dimensions of transnational football corporations of kin between the accumulation of capital for the individual and for the collective good of Samoan society is a powerful force in the re-making of Samoan transnationalism and kinship in contemporary American Samoa.

Conclusion: Transnational Corporations of Football Kinship

The American Samoa economy is a classic example of a MIRAB economy with its heavy dependence on migration, remittances, and foreign aid. A significant portion of the islands-born labor force now live and work overseas, and regularly send back to their home communities remittances in cash and kind which financed a substantial part of consumption expenditure and the purchase of imported consumer goods. Sport, and more specifically gridiron football, has emerged as a/the primary opportunity for young Samoan males to migrate offshore. Bertram and Watters’s (1985, 1986) original concept of “transnational corporations of kin” provides a useful framework for understanding how American Samoan families work in harmony to maximize resources and opportunities among its members by moving to overseas locations through the networks of gridiron football.

At the family level, the microeconomic foundations of a/the migration and remittances economy suggest that family units in the American Samoa operate as what might be termed transnational corporations of football kin, working collectively to maximize its seemingly ever-abundant resource of skilled football labor toward the accumulation of various forms of economic, social, and cultural capital for the benefit of the individual and extended family unit. In this way, the Samoan gridiron football laborer is seen as a strategic resource of the family that is produced on the island for export in U.S. labor markets. Empirical evidence suggests that the decision-making process of American Samoan footballers to migrate overseas is influenced by economic factors in the territory and the pursuit of wealth and prosperity for themselves and their families. At the same time, the notion of caring and providing for the family unit above all else is a significant sociocultural determinant in the decision-making for elite Samoan gridiron football athletes and their families. The social and cultural motivations in the decision-making process are both a product and producer of deeply embedded Samoan cultural values that place supporting the family above all else. Yet, simultaneously migration and the return flow of remittances create tensions within extended family units that at times reconfigures Samoan transnationalism and kinship arrangements, suggesting that the decision-making process is not wholly harmonious where success is seen to be exclusively for the benefit of the extended family unit. In this way, gridiron football migration to the United States continues to (re-)shape Samoan transnationalism and familial kinship in the contemporary Pacific.

At another level, transnational corporations of football kinship have become a major contributor in stock-flow relationship of the MIRAB economy. The American Samoan MIRAB economy has become increasingly affected by the stock of trans-Pacific migrant footballers and the return flow of remittances and aid back to the island. The twin dynamics of limited economic opportunities and global demand for Samoan athletic labor in gridiron football have created a unique set of conditions within which the Samoan gridiron footballer is viewed as currency for the American Samoan economy in the global marketplace. Whereas American Samoa once manufactured tuna for trade in international markets, today it is perhaps best known for its manufacturing of skilled football labor for export on U.S. markets. In the case of gridiron football, a stock of Samoan gridiron footballers migrates to U.S. colleges and universities in hopes of one day signing a professional contract to support the flow of remittances and aid and sustains the island’s MIRAB economy. The success stories of American Samoa’s gridiron footballers echo in the public pedagogy, encouraging economic investment in, and elevating the social importance of, gridiron football in the American Samoa MIRAB economy. At the same time, American Samoan gridiron footballers have become a highly sought-after athletic-labor commodity in the global marketplace, thereby reproducing a cycle of trans-Pacific migration and the flow of remittances and aid to the homeland.

Critical issues regarding about the material and social realities of gridiron football’s centrality within the American Samoan MIRAB economy remain unconsidered by aspirant gridiron footballers and their families. First, the chances of success for the aspirant American Samoan gridiron football transnational football migration are incredibly remote, and the mythologized success stories of a select few obscure the harsh realities of success in the global football economy. Second, precious little attention is paid to the true physical and economic costs of transnational football migration with many aspirant football laborers unaware or willfully ignorant of the long-term deleterious health effects involved in this system of exchange. Finally, many do not realize the social costs involved in transnational football migration that stem from the exploitative practices of the NCAA and unethical recruitment of international student athletes by collegiate football programs. The pivotal question is whether or not these physical, social, and economic costs are worth it for individuals and their families in American Samoa faced with limited economic opportunities and upward mobility. Furthermore, are these true costs and long odds worth it for American Samoa as a whole, given how small these football remittances matter in the scale of the entire American Samoan MIRAB economy?

What this study demonstrates are the economic and sociocultural factors involved in the decision-making process of American Samoa gridiron footballers migration to the United States. Remittances have emerged as a key factor in the decision to migrate overseas. However, the collection of empirical materials for this project did not specifically set out to measure the size of remittances themselves. Moreover, in interviewing aspirant gridiron footballers, we did not yet know the perspectives and experiences of those successful trans-Pacific gridiron migrants toward migration decisions and their thoughts on remittances. Based on these limitations and others, future research on MIRAB economies should be focused on three primary concerns. First, and most germane to gridiron football in American Samoa, interviews should be conducted with those successful gridiron football migrants. Second, further research is needed to understand the role of sport in reproducing and challenging MIRAB relations and forces of production across the Pacific and elsewhere. Finally, researchers should explore remittances in general within the MIRAB economy and attempt to quantify the flow of remittances from overseas migrant laborers in MIRAB economics. This final research is among the most crucially important as only then can one begin to critically appraise whether the true physical, economic, and social costs of transnational football migration can be justified by the monetary and social remittances contributed to the wider American Samoan MIRAB economy.