The Remittance Hole Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco
How did we get to a world where half a billion
human beings are marked by migration? What is the
end—or purpose—of immigration? Why do people
migrate?
Love and work (and war) drive global migration.
In low-and middle-income countries mass migration
has been tied to the incorporation of production, distribution and consumption of good and services into
global capitalism. The entry of 1. 5 billion workers in
China, India and the Russian Federation is an example of how economy and society aligned to fuel mass
migration. It ignited the largest migratory chain in
recorded history.
Nevertheless, if the current economic crisis inten-sifies over the next couple of years, the overall pattern
of growth in mass migration we witnessed over the
last two generations will likely decelerate.
While some undocumented immigrants may be
returning home,
8 there is no systematic evidence
to date that they represent a majority of the total
immigrant community, particularly in the context
of flows between the U.S. and Latin America.
9 (
Unfortunately there are no reliable numbers of this trend;
in 1957, the U.S. government stopped counting the
numbers of returned migrants.
10)
The reasons why have to do with the nature of
family and its relation to immigration. The unit of
migration is the family, not the individual.
11 Beyond
work, love is at the heart of migration’s global cycle
of human and financial resource transfers. Family reunification and migration for the sake of the
family unit—defined differently in various regions
of the word—constitute the ethical framework for
human migration.
An ethic of family nurturing, reciprocity and
caregiving is what animates mass migration today
and will do so in the future. Approximately two-thirds of all legal immigrants to the U. S. over the last
decade have been family reunification immigrants.
Once families settle and begin to grow, returning
“home” becomes less likely over time.
This leaves open, though, the uncertain effects
of the present global crisis on future remittances. The World Bank reports that after years of skyrocketing growth, remittance flows to low-income
countries “began to slow down significantly in the
Top Ten Countries with the Largest Number
of International Migrants (in thousands)
1. United States
38. 4
2. Russian Federation
12. 1
3. Germany
10. 1
4. France
6. 5
5. Saudi Arabia
6. 4
6. Canada
6. 1
7. India
5. 7
8. United Kingdom
5. 4
Top Ten
52%
of world total
190,633,564
9. Spain
4. 8
10. Australia
4. 1
Source:
“Top Ten Countries with the
Largest Number of International
Migrants,” 2005, MPI, <www.migra
tioninformation.org/data hub/
charts/ 6.1.shtml>
(accessed March 23, 2009)
third quarter of 2008.” In 2009, the bank added, the
decline is likely to be sharper—although it also
pointed out that the value of remittances is “
unlikely” to fall as much as private flows and official aid to
developing countries.”
12
Flows to Latin America are decelerating at faster
rates than flows in other corridors. The most recent
data on officially recorded remittances reveal that
during the third quarter of 2008, “the regional pattern of remittance flows appears to be shifting. Flows
from the U.S. to Latin America and the Caribbean
and those from Western Europe to Europe and Cen-
spring 2009
americas quarterly 87
