Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances and the Changing Family in Asia

L. Hoang, B. Yeoh, L. Hoang, B. Yeoh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137506863
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

The contributors investigate the inter-relationships between migrant remittances and the family in Asia. They argue that, in the context of Asian transnational labour migration where remittances tend to become a primary currency of care, the making or breaking of the family unit is mainly contingent on how individuals handle remittance processes.

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Introduction: Migration, Remittances and the Family

Lan Anh Hoang and Brenda S. A. Yeoh

The unprecedented rise in both the volume and the velocity of transnational labour migration in and from Asia in recent decades has led to significant social and economic changes not just on the scale of nation-states and communities but also within the most immediate core of human experience, the family. As people become increasingly mobile in response to the restructuring of the global economy, the family – and the accompanying processes of formation, maintenance and dissolution – continually adapts itself to changing or emerging livelihood strategies and the resultant shifts in living arrangements. New concepts such as the “transnational family” and “global householding” have been developed within migration scholarship to capture ongoing transformations of the Asian family as a result of migration. The “transnational family” is broadly defined by the notion that the family continues to share strong bonds of collective welfare and unity even though core members are distributed between two or more nation-states (Yeoh, 2009), while “global householding” emphasises the view that the formation and sustenance of households are increasingly reliant on the international movement of people and transactions among household members who reside in more than one national territory (Douglass, 2006). These concepts demonstrate the resilience and flexibility of the family in coping with structural changes that are brought about by migration in an increasingly globalised world.

Asian migration is characterised by two salient features that distinguish it from other migratory systems in the world: (a) the majority of migrants in the region migrate on a short-term fixed-contract basis under restrictive admission regimes that do not allow migrants to either bring dependents or obtain long-term residency status in destination countries; and (b) a large proportion of labour migration movements from Asian countries are intraregional.¹ The Middle East and countries with advanced economies in East and Southeast Asia are the main magnets for Asian migrant workers. East Asia (Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, China and South Korea) and Southeast Asia (Malaysia and Singapore) host around 6.5 million and 4.4 million migrants, respectively, most of whom come from South Asia and less-developed Southeast Asian countries. South and Southeast Asia also claim a large proportion of the total stock of 15.1 million migrants in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain) (IOM, 2010: 169). Remittances from migrant workers are undoubtedly substantial. Asia claimed 39 per cent of the total global remittances in 2009 (USD 162.5 billion), and five countries in the region – India, China, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Pakistan – are among the top-ten remittance receiving countries worldwide (IOM, 2010: 168).

In this volume we are concerned with inter-relationships between migrant remittances and the family in Asia. By treating remittances not simply as economic activities but as complex and nuanced transnational processes that embody values and relations transcending national boundaries, we reveal how remittances reconstitute and/or reinforce the family structures and relations in which they are embedded. The intellectual contributions that we are making through this volume are significant for two reasons. First, given its magnitude and continued growth across the region, in-depth analyses of Asian labour migration will help us to understand better important social transformations that are under way in some of the most populous countries in the world. In this book, we shift the focus on settler migrants in remittance and transnational studies to “transient” low-waged labourers whose circular mobility entails unique sets of meanings and expectations. Second, by engaging with different social contexts of major labour-sending countries in Asia, this book offers comparative insights into the diverse ways in which the family is being reconstituted by transnational remittance relationships. The chapters add valuable empirical substance to the conceptualisation of “family” – a fluid social construct that necessitates in-depth and comparative analyses across varied transnational social fields.

Bringing together scholars of different parts of Asia, we look into three interrelated dimensions of migrant remittances: (a) how broader social values shape the meaning and purpose of remittances; (b) how family relations and structures mediate the control, use and distribution of remittances; and (c) how remittances reinforce or reconstitute gender/generational norms and ideologies. In examining practices and meanings of remittances across transnational social fields, we consider the family as a site of both cooperation and conflict. Bryceson and Vuorela (2002: 10) argue that the family is an imagined community where the sense of membership can be a matter of choice and negotiation. We establish that, in the context of Asian transnational labour migration where remittances tend to become a primary currency of care, the making or breaking of the family unit is essentially contingent on how individuals handle remittance processes. In what follows, we first provide a selective review of the global literature on migrant remittances and the family, before discussing the diverse ways in which chapters in this book engage with such scholarly debates.

Migrant remittances and the family

Remittance as both an antecedent and an outcome of migration has attracted considerable attention from academics, policy-makers and development agencies alike. The two most important concerns in the classic literature on remittances (as opposed to more recent transnational studies that move beyond the exclusive focus on economics) are (a) the inter-relationships between remittances and (under)development; and (b) migrants’ remittance motivations and behaviours. In general, studies have shown that remittances work as a double-edged sword: while they possess development potential for migrant-sending communities, they also have the tendency to perpetuate various forms of inequality and dependency within these communities (Lipton, 1980; Rubenstein, 1992; Taylor, 1999; Binford, 2003; Ratha, 2003; Haas, 2005; World Bank, 2006). At the macro level, remittances are highly valued as an important source of foreign exchange earnings that is much less volatile and procyclical than other capital flows, such as revenues from exports, foreign aid and foreign direct investment (Gammeltoft, 2003; Ratha, 2003; World Bank, 2006). At the micro level, however, many studies have expressed concerns about the fact that a major proportion of remittances is spent on daily necessities while very little is allocated to local investments, suggesting that remittances are unlikely to have a sustainable impact on long-term development (Papademetriou and Martin, 1991; Gultiano and Xenos, 2004: 16; Haas, 2005). These inconclusive debates about the impact of remittances on economic development notwithstanding, there is some consensus that remittances have contributed to poverty alleviation in many parts of the developing world, particularly in labour-sending contexts with low levels of investment and economic development (Hugo, 2002; Kapur, 2003; Koc and Onan, 2004; Deshingkar, 2006). In more specific terms, the everyday diet, access to basic education and health services of many poor households have been significantly improved with an additional source of income from labour migration. There is also evidence, albeit limited, of increased household consumption and local investments in poor rural areas in Asia, thanks to migrant remittances (Hugo, 2002; ILO, 2004; Pham and Hill, 2008; Deshingkar, 2009).

The question of why migrants remit money has been examined by scholars from different disciplines. In their pioneering article on migrants’ motivations to remit in Botswana, Lucas and Stark (1985) argue that migrants’ remittance motives range from pure altruism to pure self-interest, with intermediate motivations being tempered altruism or enlightened self-interest, which represent contractual agreements between the migrant and the family at the place of origin. In recent years, scholars have started to move beyond both the developmentalist tradition of the field and economic models such as Lucas and Stark’s towards situating remittances in broader sociocultural contexts, showing how social values of different cultures shape remittance behaviours and vice versa. For example, studies from the Dominican Republic (de la Briere et al., 2002), Thailand (Curran and Saguy, 2001) and the Philippines (Trager, 1988; Tacoli, 1999) note that the perception of daughters as being more altruistic remitters than sons leads parents to encourage the former’s migration. This contrasts with findings from patrilineal China where the greater expectation of sons to provide for parents is associated with the fact that male migrants are more likely to remit than their female counterparts (Cai, 2003: 478; Murphy, 2009: 64). Along the same vein, King et al. (2006: 423) found that male Albanian migrants in London are more likely to remit money to their parents than their female counterparts because in the Albanian patriarchal tradition the latter have no economic responsibility towards their parents, but only towards their husbands’ families. These findings lend further support to Goldring’s (2004: 812) position that transnational remittance flows are intimately bound up with, and regulated by, conceptions of and responsibilities associated with being a mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, godparent, godchild and so on, and with claims to varying forms of membership in specific communities, including the locality, transnational community and nation-state.

Since the early 1990s the emergence of transnationalism as a conceptual framework in migration studies has brought forth an important shift in remittance research. In transnational studies, migration is seen as “on-going social processes linking together countries of origin and destination rather than as a permanent rupture with home societies” (cf. Schiller et al., 1992; Basch et al., 1994; Schiller et al., 1995; Vertovec, 1999). Within this new conceptual paradigm, remittances become a central concern in analyses of transnational relationships. Thai’s (2010, 2014) research on low-wage Vietnamese American migrants, for example, shows that for many people living across transnational social fields, social ties are often inextricably constituted by flows of money, and that monetary circulation in transnational families is embedded in complex systems of cultural expectations, self worth and emotional economies. In a similar context, Wong (2006) describes how Ghanaian women make every effort to live up to matrilineal expectations of them as mothers, daughters, sisters and wives by maintaining remittance flows to their families in the homeland despite their precarious economic conditions in Canada. The scholarship on Latin America and Asia also draws our attention to the monetisation/commodification of relationships between migrant parents and children who are left behind at origin. For example, research in Guatemala shows that children begin to prefer money over intimacy from their migrant mothers over time and become disappointed with their mothers when they fail to send money home (Moran-Taylor, 2008: 89).

In this book we seek to advance the position that remittances are constantly renegotiated processes that constitute social relationships across social fields (Wong, 2006: 356; Thai, 2014: 35). In so doing, we not only critically engage with ongoing debates around the notions of “transnational family” and “global householding” but also expand our understanding of social meanings of monetary circulation across national borders. Drawing on cases of The Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, China, Vietnam and Thailand, the authors examine remittances as being underwritten by transnational migration regimes and politics in the labour-sending country. We pay particular attention to the ways in which remittances feature in gender and intergenerational relations within the transnational family and vice versa. While the chapters share some common features, such as the thematic focus on low-waged migrant workers and qualitative methods of inquiry, they showcase highly heterogeneous cultural and political contexts across Asia. Distinctive specificities of the studied contexts will be highlighted in the discussion of three main themes pursued by the book in the next part of this introduction under the headings “Remittances as gendered processes”, “Remittances and generational dynamics of change” and “(Non-)remittances and the family in crisis”.

Remittances as gendered processes

As mentioned earlier, it is well established that remittance behaviours are largely shaped by gender norms and relations. There is abundant empirical evidence across the developing world that suggests that migrant men – who usually earn more than women – tend to send larger sums while women appear to be more consistent and reliable remitters who send larger percentages of their earnings (de la Cruz, 1995; Vanwey, 2004; Semyonov and Gorodzeisky, 2005; UNFPA, 2006; Orozco and Castillo, 2008). With very few exceptions (such as the case of Moroccan women in Barcelona who rarely remit money home, as documented by Zontini (2010)), research in very different contexts such as Tonga (Vete, 1995), Thailand (Osaki, 1999) and Cuba (Blue, 2004) consistently shows that female migrants have greater moral obligations to send remittances home. Migrant mothers who leave their families behind are expected to willingly practice self-denial and self-sacrifice in the name of their families and especially their children, while social norms have made it less reprehensible, if not more acceptable, for migrant fathers to neglect the support of their children (Chant and Craske, 2003; Blue, 2004; Abrego, 2009: 1070; Akesson, 2009: 391; Dreby, 2010). This may explain an observation that mother-away families are more likely to thrive economically. Abrego (2009: 1077), for instance, concludes from 130 in-depth interviews with Salvadoran immigrants in the USA that 54 per cent of mother-away families were thriving compared with only 38 per cent of father-away families, and that a greater proportion of children in father-away families than mother-away families faced financial difficulties. Women’s ability to remit also appears to have positive effects on their status and decision-making power in the household, and contributes to changes in gender ideologies in China (Murphy, 2009: 64), Latin America (Conway and Cohen, 1998) and Southeast Asia (Elmhirst, 2002; Suksomboon, 2008; Zontini, 2010).

The scholarship focused on the management and distribution of remittances in labour-sending areas reveals interesting gender differences in various contexts. Studies in Asia, for example, show that remittances are often under the control of women – the wife (when the migrant is a married man) or the grandmother and eldest daughter (when the migrant is a married woman) (Momsen, 1999; Elmhirst, 2002; Parreñas, 2005). Apart from the fact that men are stigmatised as bad money-managers (cf. Pinnawala, 2008), the general preference for women to manage remittances also derives from the widespread perception of them as being more altruistic spenders whose control of family resources is more likely to result in the enhancement of the collective wellbeing (Kabeer, 2000: 29; Whitehead and Kabeer, 2001: 19). In some other contexts, however, remittances tend to flow along the gender line (i.e., sons to fathers and daughters to mothers) (King et al., 2006; Rahman and Lian, 2009). The control over remittances can also become a source of intrafamily conflict, driving a wedge between husbands and wives, parents and children, or nuclear families and more distant relatives (Gamburd, 2000: 239). Remittance management becomes particularly problematic when the migrant is a married woman who fears that her “left-behind” husband may “squander away” her hard-earned dollars on “social activities”, such as drinking and gambling, and she sends money to another relative instead (Gamburd, 2000; Hoang and Yeoh, 2011). The conflict may extend to wider familial networks when migrants and their spouses are reluctant to share the economic benefits of migration outside their nuclear unit, thereby rejecting relatives’ claims for mutual access to assets and undermining “deeply held patterns of family and caste associations” (Bruijn et al., 1992; Gamburd, 2000).

A diverse range of theoretical and conceptual frameworks...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Migration, Remittances and the Family
• Part I: Remittances as Gendered Processes
• Part II: Remittances and Generational Dynamics of Change
• Part III: (Non-)Remittance and the Family in Crisis
• Index