Transnational moral economies: The value of monetary and social remittances in transnational families (original) (raw)
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The chapter looks into the experiences of reunification of Ukrainian care-workers in Italy with their children and contextualizes these experiences in highly politicized discourses on the “right” forms of motherhood and normative family models. Looking into the lived practices of the reunifications, I argue that migrants’ family rights are tightly connected not only to visa legislations and policy provisions allowing families to re-unite but to migrants’ labor conditions, migrants’ low incomes, strenuous housing conditions, long-hours at work, pre-carious employment contracts and the lack of social security in the receiving country. The limited opportunities to practice family rights by migrant care-workers often clash with high-soaring expectations of re-unification with their children and often lead to sense of disappointment and bitterness among the younger generation.
Remittances and Morality: Family Obligations, Development, and the Ethical Demands of Migration
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2021
Remittances have moral dimensions that, albeit implicitly addressed in migration literature, have not yet been the focus of explicit attention and analysis by social scientists. Building on recent developments in the anthropology of ethics and morality, this article proposes theoretical and analytical pathways to address this important but often neglected aspect of remittances. It does so mainly via a critical analysis of existing scholarship on remittances, and ethnographic data drawn from research among Cuban migrants in Cuba and Spain. The reflexive scrutiny of scholars' moral assumptions about remittances opens the way for the study of the moral dilemmas and ethical demands articulated by remittance senders and recipients. Family roles and obligations, and the uses of the money sent by migrants, are identified as key areas of moral difficulty. Their analysis shows how remittances inform moral reassessments of family relations, individual responsibility, economic practice, and development. The notion of 'moral remittances' is proposed as a heuristic comparative tool that serves to illuminate the moral aspects of remittances. This notion is put into perspective to complement and reconsider more metaphorical takes on remittances, notably the concept of 'social remittances', of which it helps reveal some epistemological limitations while opening future research avenues.
Geografie
Migration theory and international policy recognises that migrant remittances play significant roles in shaping economic, social, and political transformations in origins and destinations. However, nobody deals with how migrants experience and use values. To contribute to the development of migration theory we integrate insights from modernization, social remittance, and cleavage frameworks. We test three propositions, that values are experienced in comparative and relational ways, that values are selectively transferred in context specific ways, and that values are constitutive of social and economic structures. Our original empirical account is derived from a sample of 28 Moldovan migrants living and working in Czechia. We report three main findings, first, Moldovan migrants acquire values through a process of relating them to prior experiences in their daily life in their origin; second, social remittances appear, but to limited extent, and are transferred depending on the operat...
Burden, blessing or both? On the mixed role of transnational ties in migrant informal social support
International Sociology 30(3): 250-268 , 2015
This article revisits migrants’ informal social support by exploring their exchanges of material and immaterial resources with the family members left behind. The latter are typically constructed as net beneficiaries of migrants’ struggles for a livelihood abroad, and even as a potential constraint on their self-realization. Building on a qualitative study of Ecuadorian domestic workers in Italy, the author explores – instead – whether left-behind kin are also, potentially, a source of social support for them. In fact, transnational family relationships can facilitate the circulation of welfare-relevant resources from both sides. While migrants are expected to transnationally share the benefits of better life conditions abroad, ‘what’ they left behind contributes to their personal wellbeing in three respects: reverse remittances, emotional support and the provision of a locus for cultivating nostalgia, attachment and social status. The mixed influence of home-related family ties and obligations is assessed against the backdrop of migrants’ life course and patterns of integration. Overall, their interdependence with left-behinds is a source of benefits, and costs, which should not go unnoticed.
Transnational Economic Spaces, Moral Economy, and Remittances
2017
When studying remittances, one needs to integrate the micro dynamics of remittances while equally shining a spotlight on the entire macro flow. Both levels can be combined in a spatial perspective on economic spaces that emerge out of the flow of remittances. Processes of deterritorialization as well as of reterritorialization thus nourish, complement, and even conflict with each other in the provision of remittances. Two aspects of this observation are crucial for our project, in order to research emerging transnational economic spatial formats: firstly, on a micro level, moral economies between migrants and their families at home evolve, which combine translocal and transnational scales of social action. These moral economies, as will be discussed in more detail in this paper, are complex fields of negotiation and a particular socioeconomic ensemble. They are dominated by reciprocal patterns of communication, moral obligations, the struggle for social recognition, as well as feelings of guilt and shame. These moral economies are a building block of an emerging transnational economic space, since they evolve out of their underlying contradiction between a tendency towards transnationalization and the maintenance of localized influence. Secondly, and on a macro level, these moral economies form part of an arising transnational economic space, which transgresses traditional modes of institutionalization, control, and governance. This transnational economic space extends from peripheral economies of today’s Global South well into developed economies in the Global North. Using remittances as a topical background, this project addresses the following questions: how remittances arise out of a translocal relationship — that is, real movements of people, commodities, ideas, and symbols — and cross spatial distances and borders with a certain regularity; how these remittances create arenas in which the processes of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization take place and are negotiated; and whether transnational economic spaces emerge out of these negotiations as a spatial format.
“Careers” Transnational Links: The Ambivalence of Immigrant Remittances
Recent studies on international migration have paid special attention to the transnational perspective, a new branch of the sociology of migration studying the process through which migrants build social fields that link the countries of origin and destination. The economic transnationalism connected to the great phenomenon of remittances—financial, material or immaterial—is one relevant aspect of this field of study. Remittances are ambivalent because they can be interpreted either as a medium of consolidation of transnational ties or as a bond linking migrant women to the country of origin. Our target is, in fact, those migrant women who carry out in Italy a particular work of care: the badanti, or informal caregivers. As such, they constitute an important resource of the Italian welfare system, characterized as it is by an important family component. Any migratory phenomenon is, by nature, complex and dynamic, with different historical, economic and social characteristics. Moreover, it operates changes at many levels. The caring work done by badanti, as well as the transnational links represented by cross-border remittances, takes place and must be read within this broader dynamics. The research question for this paper is (exactly) that whether remittances are mainly bonds or mainly ties for badanti, relative to other migrant workers employed in the care sector. We use qualitative and quantitative data from the Prin 2004 research project1 concerning nationality, gender and class in new house holding work in Italy. After describing this phenomenon and its peculiarities, we shall analyze the mechanisms that originate it, and establish correlations with the surrounding context.
The Human Dynamics of Migrant Transnationalism
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2008
How is migrant transnationalism shaped by the human dynamics of relationships between migrants and non-migrants? This question is addressed through an analysis of asymmetries between migrants and non-migrants in three spheres of transnational life: the moralities of transnationalism, information and imagination in transnational relations, and transnational resource inequalities. Understanding transnational practices such as sending remittances and facilitating migration, it is argued, requires attention to the dynamics of the relationships between individuals. Fieldwork material from Cape Verde and the Netherlands is combined with secondary literature from other parts of the world in order to develop an analytical framework for comparative research. The downloadable file is my copy of the final manuscript (Green Open Access). The link takes you to the publisher's site where you can download the final, published article (subscription required).
This article draws a conceptual map of the mechanisms, dynamics and consequences of transnational social protection (TSP) for low-skilled labour migrants and their family members. While migrants' social needs have also a transnational side, the responses of welfare institutions, if available at all, are typically territorialised. This brings to the fore the prospects for TSP of those affected by migration – most notably, here, migrants' dear ones in home societies. TSP can be analysed as a field of evolving interactions between a formal, thinner dimension and a more substantive, informal one. The latter builds on the circulation of remittances and transnational care practices, primarily within migrants' kinship networks. Informal TSP is then discussed as a privileged terrain to assess, first, the promises and pitfalls of migration as social protection and, second, the social consequences of emigration on welfare arrangements in home communities. An analytical framework is eventually advanced, with a view to systematising research on migration-driven transnational needs, on the ways of addressing them, on the dilemmas of informal social protection across state borders.