ABSTRACT
A recent scholarly article on the subject of remittances concludes that they sustain wide transnational networks and offer “a pragmatic solution to the socio-economic consequence of dispersal” (Magee and Thompson 2006). A fitting description of the present, except that it was written about Irish migrants to New Zealand between 1864 and 1900! Migration and remittances are clearly not a new phenomenon: Magee and Thompson locate the first rapid rise of remittances in the 1870s, a consequence of growing emigrant wealth and the ease of international transfers. What is new today, however, is the scale, and the speed, with which migration has grown. In the first half of the 1960s, 2.8 million people moved from developing
to high-income countries; by the last five years of the twentieth century, 13.6 million migrants of this nature were on the move; and overall, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the World Bank estimated over 100 million migrant laborers worldwide and over 200 million people living in a country different from their birth (World Bank 2008). The amount of remittances generated by these migrants is also unprecedented: In 1990 migrants were estimated to have remitted $31.2 billion, by 2005 it increased more than fivefold to $166.9 billion, to $240 billion in 2007, and to $305 billion in 2008 (Ratha et al. 2007; World Bank 2009). The real number is much higher, because official estimates are based on reported transactions that exclude abundant informal transfers of money. The lion’s share of the money, approximately 70 percent, goes to develop-
ing countries, making them perhaps the most significant source of external financing for much of the developing word. Even with poor data for total amounts, remittances command a larger share of gross domestic product (GDP) and foreign exchange reserves than overseas development assistance, official capital flows, or private non-foreign direct investment (FDI) flows, and are equivalent to 90 percent of FDI (Ratha 2003). It is hardly surprising that there is considerable development potential ascribed to a phenomenon that creates the second largest source of foreign currency earnings for developing countries behind FDI. For one-third of developing
countries, remittances are even greater than all capital flows combined (Ratha 2003). Like any phenomenon of tremendous scale, it is tempting to oversimplify
and regard remittances as a self-sustaining alternative to the pitfalls and politics of official development aid and the vagaries of investment. The promise is high for poverty reduction and economic development, but remittances are connected to the international political economy in all its labyrinthine dimensions: they are structurally intertwined with the often perverse logic of supply and demand for labor; global shifts in consumption and income distribution; the politics of immigration and integration; migrant vulnerability due to pervasive xenophobia, racism, and sexism; and highly unregulated systems of labor provision, money transfer, working conditions, and social welfare. Whether as senders or receivers of remittances, women are directly
impacted by all aspects of the remittance phenomenon. Gender is a foundational, crosscutting issue present in all of the political economic dimensions of remittances, as well as analytically discrete. Good data specific to gender and remittances remain rare, though attention is increasing. In many ways remittances are seen as positive for the “gender gap” in the home countries, because data show that communities that receive remittances have higher numbers of girls in school, less child labor, improved health for girls, and positively adjusted fertility rates, in addition to more entrepreneurial activities for women (Ozden and Maurice 2007). Beyond the indicators, however, there are deep social transformations set in motion by remittances, including wrenching changes in family structure and gender roles. While much of the remittance literature focuses on the role of women as
remittance recipients or the impact of remittances on women in the home country, women are also increasingly working abroad and sending remittances back to the men or family at home. Often women migrants are without their families and in intimate contact only with other women migrants abroad, resulting in new perspectives on women’s roles and work. Women migrants who are senders rather than receivers remain an under-studied category, and the social and cultural impact connected to shifting roles of women as migrants is even harder to quantify than is remittance sending or spending behavior. This chapter provides an overview of some of the major issues concerning
gender and remittances. I begin with a more detailed look at remittances as a new development policy and then sound a cautionary note about the progressive promise of remittances under conditions of both economic growth and crisis. This leads to a discussion of gender and remittances in which I argue for a shift from viewing gender largely within an economic calculus debated at the level of macro-economic policy to a discussion of remittances as part of the reorganizing of global labor, and with it, social relations and politics.
