The Early Morning Phonecall

Somali Refugees' Remittances

Anna Lindley

• Editore: Berghahn Books
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781845458324
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Ciencias sociales
• Categoria: Emigración e inmigración

As migration from poverty-stricken and conflict-affected countries continues to hit the headlines, this book focuses on an important counter-flow: the money that people send home. Despite considerable research on the impact of migration and remittances in countries of origin - increasingly viewed as a source of development capital - still little is known about refugees' remittances to conflict-affected countries because such funds are most often seen as a source of conflict finance. This book explores the dynamics, infrastructure, and far-reaching effects of remittances from the perspectives of people in the Somali regions and the diaspora. With conflict driving mass displacement, Somali society has become progressively transnational, its vigorous remittance economy reaching from the heart of the global North into wrecked cities, refugee camps, and remote rural areas. By 'following the money' the author opens a window on the everyday lives of people caught up in processes of conflict, migration, and development. The book demonstrates how, in the interstices of state disruption and globalisation, and in the shadow of violence and political uncertainty, life in the Somali regions goes on, subject to complex transnational forms of social, economic, and political innovation and change.

Chapter 1

Migration, Conflict and Development: Situating Refugees’ Remittances

In a drawer in her London home, Farhiya¹ keeps a plastic box crammed with small papers. one afternoon she was telling me about her family, and she brought out the box. The papers are receipts for money she – like many Somalis – has sent to relatives and friends during her life in the UK. As we sorted through them, it soon became clear that over the last few years she had sent several thousand pounds. She was used to the phone ringing early in the morning as relatives tried to catch her before she left the house for work. Each piece of paper had a story behind it: a jobless brother with hungry children, a sudden hospitalisation, a compensation payment when a relative shot someone from a different clan, renting a truck to transport drought-weakened livestock to the nearest water source, a plane flight for a bright young relative to seek his fortune in Nairobi… Farhiya had come to London in the early 1990s. When it became clear that it was too dangerous for her to return to her country, by then engulfed in violence, she sought asylum and then citizenship in the UK. Married with three children, working for the National Health Service, she sees herself living in the UK for the foreseeable future. But she still maintains substantial social and economic links with her place of origin – reaching from the heart of the global North to people in wrecked cities, refugee camps and remote rural areas – links that have been crucial to the survival and welfare of people in the war-torn Somali regions.² Yet, while perhaps not typical in keeping the receipts for her remittances, Farhiya is one of a growing number of people who are beginning to count the cost of supporting relatives ‘back home’. Her experiences – and those of the others who participated in this study – point to the significance of migration and remittance processes stimulated by political upheaval and violent conflict, often occurring across vast global disparities.

This book is a collection of the stories behind remittances – and an attempt to understand their dynamics and effects in the Somali regions and in the diaspora. Following the money opens a window on lives entwined in the complex processes of conflict, migration and development. The stories collected illuminate the horror, grief and heart-stopping fear of war and fraught processes of migration: the trucks, rickety boats, tired bodies, dusty border post, airport at midnight, false passport, the officials, paperwork and the waiting. They illuminate life in exile: the refugee camp, rations, the bustling immigrant slum of the global South, the Northern cold, counting pennies at the supermarket checkout, new workplaces, council flats, the dinner-time talk, pillow talk, telephone talk and the not talking. Meanwhile, a world away, the remittance stories collected here illuminate the life that goes on – the circumspect return, the ears glued to the radio, the home destroyed and rebuilt, school day routines, negotiation of daily risks, moments of alarm and renewed violence, the mobile phone in the hand of the nomad, the livestock market, high street shopping throng, family gossip gone global, the hunger of meals missed, hunger for loved ones gone, and hunger for peace and progress. Across these fragmented geographies, remittances are traced as a vector of power, survival and affection, one means among many by which people navigate and indeed contribute to processes of social transformation.

The Somali regions are of course far from unique in having a vigorous remittance economy, but conflict-affected countries have been largely overlooked by the flourishing field of research on the impact of migration and remittances in poorer parts of the world. This chapter situates Somali refugees’ remittances in relation to wider analytical efforts to understand the linkages between migration, conflict and development, outlining the conceptual underpinnings of this study.

Migration-Development Linkages

Families linked by remittances are quintessential players in the era of globalization. Like entrepreneurs who seek out markets, capital and labor around the world, they too hop borders in search of competitive advantage. The United States may be a better place to earn wages; Mexico may be a better place to raise children… By facilitating migration, family networks allow them to seek economic opportunity wherever it can be found, and their digital networks allow them to instantly convey money, information and affection across borders. They successfully rebelled against geography and redrew the map of the Western Hemisphere with new networks of economic interconnection. (Suro 2003: 4)

This vision is typical of the rather upbeat migration-development consensus that has emerged in recent years. But the fraught reality of migration for many people still contrasts with these more upbeat views. To understand how we have got to this point, we need to set current views in the context of longer trajectories of migration-development thinking, and its relationship to shifting social scientific and development paradigms (for an excellent review, see de Haas 2010).

Prior to the 1970s, there was a general optimism that migration could provide a source of capital and knowledge transfer that would contribute to modernisation and economic ‘take-off’. Neoclassical migration theory claimed that migration results from the uneven geographical distribution of the factors of production, and that people move in response to the resulting wage differentials, ultimately leading to convergence of wages (Todaro 1969; Harris and Todaro 1970). But in that case, some asked, why did so many people not move, despite large global wage disparities? Why did wage differentials so rarely disappear – and when they did migration was rarely the most important mechanism? Clearly, states and political structures shaped migration in important ways that were not acknowledged in this model.

In the 1970s and 1980s, radically different explanations of migration developed out of historical structuralist analysis of processes of development and change in poorer parts of the world. In this view, migration was produced by upheavals resulting from the incorporation of peripheral areas on unequal terms into an expanding global capitalist system dominated by a core of wealthier countries (Portes and Walton 1981; Reichert 1981; Sassen 1988). Migration thus raised serious concerns relating to the ‘brain drain’ of skilled people and malign sociocultural effects resulting from the disruption of family and community life. The sending of remittances was seen as small comfort, spent largely on imported products, failing to promote local manufacturing and investment, and exacerbating social inequality.

But treating migration as entirely determined either by rational individuals’ responses to wage differentials or by macro-level political and economic structures leaves little room for explaining variability in migration patterns and the role of migrants’ agency (de Haas 2010). From the mid-1980s, against a background of the simultaneous proliferation of global travel possibilities and tightening immigration regimes, more subtle theoretical approaches developed, which embraced the role of households and wider social networks in the migration process.

A ‘new economics of labour migration’ (NELM) emerged as a critical response to neoclassical theory, contending that migration should be seen as a household-level strategy to maximise income, spread risk and overcome local market constraints (Stark and Lucas 1988; Taylor 1999). Deciding whether a household member should migrate involved weighing up the costs of migration (such as the loss of family labour and travel expenses) against the anticipated benefits (such as remittance income). In this way, remittances became central to migration decisions, reflecting an implicit contract between the migrant and those ‘left behind’ – underwritten by altruism, self-interest, mutual insurance motives or loan repayment obligations. Thus remittances could help families overcome constraints and improve their economic situation, with numerous multiplier effects in the local economy.

Meanwhile, on a distinct interdisciplinary trajectory, livelihood approaches (initially developed to analyse rural communities) were exploring how households mobilised their particular capabilities and resources, mediated by the wider structural environment, to produce particular livelihood strategies (Chambers and Conway 1992; Ellis 2000). Alongside agricultural intensification, extensification and diversification, migration was identified as a key way for people to adapt to or seek to better their circumstances (McDowell and de Haan 1997).

Researchers also began to explore the role of transnational social networks in facilitating migration, reducing the uncertainty and costs involved. The often intense interactions and exchanges of information, money and ideas between migrants and their home communities began to come to light. Some researchers began to argue that through such exchanges, people were effectively forming transnational social fields that challenged the notion of the communities as localised and spatially bound (Basch et al. 1994; Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Vertovec 2003). This focus on ‘transnational communities’ had implications for the understanding of migration-development linkages, by showing that long-term migration did not necessarily involve a linear process of assimilation and detachment from the country of origin, but that transnational connections might persist for many years.

Building on these conceptual advances, the 2000s have witnessed a boom in interest among policymakers in the impact of migration on development. The effects of emigration on home country labour markets and patterns of inequality, the human capital dimensions of migration, and cultural diffusion of ideas and practices are all important aspects of this relationship that researchers have been working to understand. But remittances have tended to take centre stage in migration-development debates, seen as a potential source of ‘development finance’.

Processes of globalisation and technological advance have greatly facilitated the sending of remittances and there has been notable growth in recorded volumes and their macroeconomic significance in many countries. Remittances increased steadily from 1990, compared with other capital flows, which tended to be less reliable. In 2008, developing countries received official remittances of some $338 billion, compared with $621 billion in foreign direct investment, and $120 billion in overseas development assistance (oECD 2009, UNCTAD 2009, World Bank 2009). (The global impact of the recession on remittances is still rather unclear, although tightening labour markets in destination countries seem likely to have a moderating effect on overall volumes.) Meanwhile, it is thought that unrecorded remittances may amount to as much as 50 per cent of the recorded amount: recording systems fail to capture the often large transfers through informal channels and often exclude transfers made through regulated non-bank channels (World Bank 2006).

This statistical analysis fell on receptive ears, catapaulting remittances to the status of a ‘new development mantra’ (Kapur 2003). Migrants helping their family members back home seemed to capture the spirit of contemporary development preoccupations in terms of the rolling back of the state, promotion of self-reliance and facilitation of local-global linkages. Remittances have seduced contrasting constituencies in development politics (Jones 1998). From the neoliberal perspective, focusing on economic stabilisation and growth, migration and remittances represented a transfer of resources to poorer economies in the spirit of comparative advantage. From the broader perspective of human development, remittances were also of interest, as family resources that could support education, health and housing. For supporters of grassroots participation, remittances were a form of ‘globalisation from below’, a way people coped with poverty and the ravages of structural adjustment, even a form of local resistance.

The resulting pronouncements circulating in the policy world that migration and remittances are ‘good for development’ should be treated with caution. While recognising that the term is often used to describe particular politics and projects of progress, I am primarily interested here in understanding development as historical processes of change and social transformation – and the place of migration in these processes (cf. Skeldon 1997; Castles 2008). It is important that migration should not be seen as an exogenous variable in the development of countries of origin, but rather as something endogenous – generated by processes of social change, having its own internal ‘self-sustaining and self-undermining dynamics’, as well as having an impact on processes of social change (de Haas 2010: 43). Empirical evidence accumulated over the years in fact indicates considerable heterogeneity in the impact of migration and remittances in communities and countries of origin (de Haas 2010).

Adjusting our perspective in this way helps to bring into focus the fact that many of the countries where remittances are most significant owe this largely to mass migration in the wake of recent conflicts and political upheavals. Remittances reached more than 10 per cent of the GDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina, El Salvador, Haiti, Lebanon, Nepal, Nicaragua and Serbia and Montenegro in 2005.³ Given the frequent collapse of formal banking and flourishing of informal financial mechanisms it is likely that official figures considerably underestimate remittances received by conflict-affected countries. For many countries engulfed in or recovering from violence – including Somalia, Liberia, Burundi, DRC, Eritrea, Timor-Leste, Zimbabwe, Angola and Iraq – remittances are known to be significant, but there are few reliable macroeconomic data.

With conflict and post-conflict societies among the major beneficiaries of remittances, plenty of questions come to mind. The dominant conceptual model of remittances – the new economics of labour migration – suggests that migration is a deliberate strategy to diversify household income. It draws heavily on research in rural Mexican villages characterised by temporary migration to the US, but it is unclear whether it can explain migration and remitting in less established migration contexts or where greater insecurity prevails, as in the...