Migrants Sending Money and the Family

Abstract: To know why migrants send money to home, this paper introduces a new conceptialization of the relationship between the migrants and their families. It builds on 30 in-depth and unstructured interviews, complemented by ethnographic participations, with the Bangladeshi immigrants in Los Angeles. Conceiving migrants’ remitting as a socially motivated economic act whereby the migrants invest both financial and emotional resources to maintain and further develop social relationships, it recognizes migrants’ relationships to their family and origin community in Bangladesh as central to their remitting practices. Unlike the NELM approach’s assumption of economic rationality, or the cultural approach’s emphasis of cultural factors, this paper finds the immigrants’ relationships to the remittance-recipients as central in determining their remitting. It recognizes multiple forms of family and community organizations to which the immigrants simultaneously identify themselves. However, it finds this identification as a process whereby the immigrants choose to attach to certain forms among a range of culturally defined social aggregates, which causes their remitting to be selective. Emphasizing the immigrants’ emotional involvement and collective orientation, this study recognizes the mingling of the immigrants’ self with the recipients in their origin country as essential in remitting. Thus, this paper makes significant contribution to the study of migrants' family by showing how individuals' identification with the family is a process, which allows the individuals to shift their attachment to particular forms of family in different contexts.