CHAPTER 11
Money and Family Relationships
THE BIOGRAPHY OF TRANSNATIONAL MONEY
Supriya Singh
TWENTY YEARS AGO I interviewed middle-income Anglo Celtic couples in Australia about banking and money. People told me how they went to the bank after their wedding, sometimes with the marriage certificate still wrapped in ribbon, to convert separate accounts to joint accounts. They told me how the joint account symbolized togetherness and commitment in marriage. They described how they still kept different bank accounts, sometimes mimicking the jars on the mantelpiece with rent money, holiday money, and children’s lunch money. They used money from bonuses differently from wages; overtime differently from basic pay.
My fieldwork was substantiating Viviana Zelizer’s (1994) historical findings. Different kinds of money were shaping and being shaped by social relationships and cultural values. What looked like particular personal decisions about how to name, store, and use different piles of money push against textbook understandings of market money as a homogenizing force (Zelizer 1994, 2005, 2011). The intertwining of personal money and money in the market is at the center of my work on banking across cultures, the study of the transnational family and remittances, the personal dimensions of transnational money, and how the global South is shaping the future of money (Singh, 1997, 2013b).
My current research on globalization, migration, and money hones in on transnational money, that is, money that flows between different parts of a migrant’s family across borders. This transnational family money translates into one of the largest international flows of funds, which are used to securitize loans, encourage diaspora bonds, finance development, and alleviate poverty. It is an important example of the melding of personal money and market money.
Drawing on the case of Indian migrants to Australia, this chapter focuses on how transnational money is imbued with meaning, morals, and emotion. Specifically, I point out how migrant remittances serve as a medium of communication and care. Exploring both their market and family dimensions, I show how these flows of money are influenced by moral expectations of reciprocity in parent-child relationships as well as by different politics of migration, life stages, and communication patterns. I find that, facilitated by new information and communication technologies, the give-and-take of money and gifts within the immediate transnational family increases with frequent communication on everyday matters.1
Remittances thus illustrate a thesis presented by Nina Bandelj and colleagues (in chapter 2 of this volume) that morals, emotions, money, and relationships intersect rather than remain separate. Remittances are also a kind of “relational accounting” (Frederick Wherry in chapter 3 of this volume). This chapter will show that the stronger the relationship, the greater the imperative to send money, to be a “good son” or a “responsible father.” Money flows more often from children (often sons) to parents than to siblings and other members of the extended family. Moreover, the more frequent communication made possible by mobile phones and Skype maintains the intimacy of transnational family ties, influencing the steady flow of money. This intimacy, however, can be threatened by life stage and/or miscommunication. Morals can falter. Inheritance disputes influenced by migration can trigger the breakup of the transnational family. Money stops flowing. It is then seen as a medium of control rather than care.
Transnational Money as Family Money
I identify remittances, both to and from the source country, as family money, suffused by the norms of how parents and children care for each other, and flowing two ways between parents, children, and extended family. The sending of money to families has at its center long-standing norms concerning the roles of parents, children, and what it means to be a family.
An Indian family in Australia. My global approach to money reflects my own biography as a “twice migrant,” with extended family in India, a son in Malaysia, a son and grandsons in Australia, and a sister in the United States. I recognized a difference in why and to whom I sent money as well as why and from whom I received it. There was money for school: I received it from my sisters, who sent it to my mother to help her pay for my education and daily necessities. When it was my turn, I too sent money home to my mother to help with discretionary expenditures. My family differed from most in that the daughters were sending money home, rather than the sons. We had no brothers. Moreover, the partition of India in 1947 had changed the gender norms in my family (Singh 2013a).
A Chinese family in Malaysia. In the early 1980s, when I was studying banking practices in Malaysia, I saw money tying together family life with difficult political issues. I asked an elderly Chinese banker about the role of remittances in Chinese banking in Malaysia. His response assured me that remittances are not a mere quantity of money transferred from one site to the next. The banker sobbed at his desk, telling me how during the Japanese occupation, when communication between Malaysia and China had ceased, he and his father could not send money home to China. The money itself had not only allowed intimate communication but also supplied critical resources. His mother and four siblings starved to death (Singh 1984).
Small Monies, Large Flows
International remittances, the market face of transnational money, are a currency of care for the transnational family. But they are also a formidable source of national income. Consider India and China, where international remittances are highest: India received $70 billion in remittances in 2014, followed by China with $64 billion. (The next three countries with substantial remittances were the Philippines, Mexico, and Nigeria.) Formal remittances to developing countries are expected to have reached $436 billion in 2014 (Ratha et al. 2015a). Remittances are more than three times greater than official development assistance and more stable than private equity flows. For many countries, they are greater than their most important exports or foreign direct investment. Remittances support the balance of payments. In some countries, they form a large percentage of gross domestic product. In 2014, for instance, remittances accounted for 42 percent of Tajikistan’s GDP; 29.9 percent in Nepal; 26 percent in Liberia, 22 percent in Haiti, and 17 percent in El Salvador. Even in India, remittances were 3.4 percent of GDP (Ratha et al. 2015b). The economic significance of remittances is even greater when informal remittances are taken into account. Total remittances include formal and informal transfers. The informal transfers accounted for roughly 45 percent of the total remittance amount in 2002 (Buencamino and Gorbunov 2002: 6).
In most of the global South, behind this large flow of international money lies a relationship between money, marriage, and family. Money flows two ways across generations, between parents and adult children and between extended kin. This is supported by norms of family practice that emphasize the filial duty of children as well as the parents’ responsibility to establish their children and promote their well-being.
People in most parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands send money home as a medium of caring and support for transnational families and communities across borders.2 But remittance flows are not simply a phenomenon of the global South. For instance, postwar Italian migrants to Australia sent money to Italy to help their families at home. Loretta Baldassar (2001) tells of a statue built in an Italian village celebrating the migrants who helped to sustain the community with tea chests full of goods and money. Wherever they may be, people send money home, partly because they want to continue belonging to the family, kinship group, and community. Transnational money is personal at its core. Most of the money goes to families.
I examine the changing relationship between family norms and practices, money as a medium of care, and the pattern of remittances by drawing on a qualitative study of 186 persons in ninety-five families across five decades of Indian migration to Australia. This study, conducted between 2005 and 2014, shows that the relationship between money, migration, and family changes according to a person’s life stage. But this relationship is also shaped by the different experiences of migration among the early migrants who came between 1970 and 1995 and the more recent arrivals who came between 1996 and 2014. Their experiences have been influenced by economic conditions in India and its place in the world economy; the use of the new information technologies for communicating with family across borders; and by changes in Australia’s migration policy and globalization.
The Politics of Migration
The first sizable number of Indian migrants arrived in Australia in the late 1960s as the White Australia Policy was being relaxed. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 passed by the federal government effectively restricted immigration to Europeans, with a preference for the British. Until 1958, non-Europeans were given a dictation test in any European language chosen by an immigration officer, effectively barring entry to people seen as undesirable (National Archives of Australia 2015). There was a slow loosening of these restrictions until the Migration Act of 1966 gave equal ranking to all immigrants. But it was in 1973 that the White Australia Policy was effectively dismantled (National Museum of Australia 2015).3
The early Indians who arrived in the late 1960s and early 1970s were mainly professionals, fluent in English, from middle-income families in metropolitan cities. They came with their nuclear families. Migration was often triggered by the husband, who wanted to migrate as a career choice. Indian migrants to Australia came with permanent residence visas for themselves and their nuclear families. The legal and professional status of Indian migrants to Australia, plus their ability to bring their nuclear families along, set them apart from migrants from the Philippines and Sri Lanka to the Middle East or, similarly, from Central America to the United States. The early Indian migrants did not have to contend with different degrees of (il)legality, leading to long periods of the separation of children from the mother and/or father, and the difficulties or impossibility of family reunion.4
These early Indian migrants to Australia arrived with limited funds because of foreign exchange restrictions in India introduced in 1974 and progressively liberalized after 1998. However, they were buffered by a social welfare net in Australia. The numbers of the India-born grew when parents and siblings joined the early migrants under specified conditions. While some of the migrants who came through the family reunion channel were professionals, there were others who went into small business and factories.
Indian-born migrants quadrupled in Australia between 1996 and 2011. Student migrants who came on temporary visas were a great part of this increase. International Indian students are a new kind of migrant group, created by Australian policy linking international education and migration in the late 1990s. Students’ migration was a family decision. Indian families, particularly those from Punjab, saw possible migration to Australia as beneficial for individual and family prosperity.
Student migrants are the first large group of Indian migrants in Australia who have had to pay to migrate without the buffer of welfare support. These students also came from middle-income families, but they often hailed from regional cities and urban villages. Many were not fluent in English. But they came from a resurgent India with a strengthened middle class in a more open, global economy. The new information technologies, such as the Internet, e-mail, and particularly the mobile phone, not only contributed to a global labor market but also increased the two-way flow of communication in the transnational family. These factors shaped the flow of money, communication, and care across five decades of Indian migration to Australia.
A One-Way Flow: From the 1970s to the 1990s
Interviews revealed how remittances are differentiated between the early and recent migrants. For the early migrants, money was sent to India, but there was little talk of money coming from India to Australia. The one-way flow of remittances was accompanied by a similar one-way direction of communication and visits. Telephone calls were expensive. In 1975, a three-minute operator-connected call from Australia to India cost AU$7.50. It was another AU$2.50 for each minute after that.5 Expensive air travel meant that migrants went back once in five or six years. Family from India seldom visited. Thus the commingling and interchange of money, emotions, conversations, symbols, and objects often was interpreted differently by the migrants and members of their families in India.
Hema’s story is illustrative of these processes.6 She was fifty-four when interviewed in 2006. She had migrated in 1986, leaving behind her career, her home, and what felt like a sound economic base. She tells a story of fraught communications and the one-way flow of money and gifts. She functioned as a giver but felt unappreciated and unheard. Some of the problems resulted from miscommunication because of distance and infrequent letters and calls. She said, “You telephone them, write letters, and they say, ‘Everything is okay.’ But suddenly my father’s health was going downhill.” She learned later than she should have that the person who was her central communications point, her father, had fallen seriously ill. She arrived in India not knowing the full extent of his illness. She stopped in Calcutta to retrieve a lost bag. She was still in transit to her hometown when her father died. “Everything was over. The funeral was over. I just saw his photo. I haven’t gotten over it.” She says her family could not understand why she was so upset. “My brothers and sisters were there, and they saw my father going from good health to ill health…. They knew that he would die very soon…. For me it was a complete shock.”
Part of the lack of communication perhaps lay in her reasons for leaving India. She and her husband were not being pushed out of India because of economic necessity or any other troubles. She thought Australia would be better for them. As with many of the early migrants, the families accepted the couple’s decision but were not part of making it. So Hema and her family did not have the “licence to leave” (Baldassar 2007). The hurt extended to her family’s absence at her son’s wedding. Nobody from her family came, even though she sent them three tickets. They said their travel documents did not come on time. She recognized that such arrangements are complicated for people living in a regional city, but she thought that they should have made more of an effort to get the papers delivered in a timely way. She said, “It was all a very upsetting event for me.”
Adding more weight to the injury, the money flowed one way. Hema and her husband sent money when the family needed it. They brought gifts when they visited. But when it came to receiving a portion of her father’s inheritance, Hema found she was left out. She said it is not the material lack of inheritance that hurt. She said, “It is not the material lack of inheritance that hurt…. There is not much I want.” She was hurt because she was not part of the discussion. In her view, “I am completely outside. I only know a lot of things after the event.” She concluded, “As far as I am concerned, being a migrant … I am not even in the picture.”
These stories of money and communication flowing in one direction were common among the early Indian migrants I interviewed. They sent money home mainly to their parents, as and when needed. At times, the money also went to brothers, sisters, and nieces. Births and marriages led to significant gifts of money, because money is the preferred and sometimes the essential gift on these occasions in many parts of India. At times, this one-way flow of both money and communication was seen also as a one-way flow of care. The particulars differed according to the closeness of relationship. But distance was hard to bridge for some.
A Two-Way Flow: From the 1990s Onward
The situation changed for the recent migrants who came after 1996, leading to the large swell in Indian migration to Australia. Indian international students began trickling into Australia, particularly for graduate education. In my interviews, the earliest student came in 1997. By 1999, the Australian government, in search for skilled migrants, gave students who had studied in Australia extra points in their application for permanent residence. The number of students increased, particularly for vocational education, responding to the Australian government’s use of education as a pathway to migration. At the same time, foreign exchange restrictions in India loosened. The Indian economy also was liberalized in the early 1990s. This was important for the Indian international students, who were the first group of Indian migrants to Australia who had to pay to migrate. (In the early 1990s, Australia began charging full fees to international students, thus treating education as an export.)
Remittances among the recent migrants flowed in two directions after 1996 among the people I interviewed. Recent migrants send and receive money, depending on their parents’ need and capacity. With much easier communication facilitated by mobile phones and reciprocal remittance and gift arrangements, we see care circulating in both directions. Communication is instantaneous and frequent. Some recent migrants talk of calling their families at least once a day or even more. They are part of the small talk of everyday life—how much coriander to put in the lentils; whether to wear the blue salwar kameez or the red one to the wedding. Housing design and purchase decisions are made by the transnational family over Skype. Travel between the two countries is also now more affordable, enabling families in India to visit. Parents routinely visit to help their children, particularly to look after the grandchildren. India was Australia’s tenth-largest market for inbound arrivals and total expenditure in 2012 (Tourism Australia 2013). This care expressed through money and communication focuses on the needs of the most vulnerable members of the family: the elderly and the soon to retire, as well as the young, who need a rather expensive investment in their education (AU$20,000 to AU$30,000 a year per person). Likewise, when new families form, they want to invest in a home of their own. These are the kinds of costs that lay claims on those in the sending and the receiving societies.
Skilled migrants coming on permanent visas bring money with them, from their savings or with the help of their families. The Second Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia (LSIA), managed by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, is the latest survey that details money sent and received in the first two years of settlement. It surveyed 3,124 people who had applied offshore for permanent residence. The participants in LSIA2 were surveyed twice—within six months of arrival, between February 2000 and January 2001, and then again between February 2001 and March 2002. Among the participants, 124 India-born migrants were in the first round and 111 in the second round. The main finding from LSIA2 is that more than two-thirds of the India-born migrants who arrived between 1999 and 2000 were on skilled visas, and they brought and received money from their savings and families. This was eighteen times as much as they sent to India in the first two years of settlement (Singh and Gatina 2015).
The two-way flow of remittances and communication is illustrated in the stories that follow. Charan and Chitra, he a retired academic while she continues to teach, talked about their decision to send their son, Chand, in his late twenties, to Australia. In the first year they took out a loan, but Charan said that the 14 percent interest was excessive. So they used a lump-sum distribution from his retirement account to fund their son’s education. “What about your old age?” I asked. Charan reasoned, “After all, what will we do with the money? If it is not used at the proper time, what is the use of that money? If he is settled and has a good life, that will be our satisfaction.” Charan felt they still had enough money to meet their ongoing needs. Unspoken, however, was their faith that once their son settles down in Australia, he will help look after his parents. Chand is hoping that when he gets his permanent residence, his parents will want to join him after his mother retires. His mother visited him shortly before I met Chand in Melbourne. He said he was comforted by his mother’s visit, because she could see for herself the rhythm of his life in Melbourne and that it was okay. He said, “Hearing of things on the phone is different…. But unless and until you come here you don’t know.”
Not all families can send their children to study abroad while meeting the family’s ongoing needs. In Akash’s case, he was twenty-two when he left for Australia in 2006 to study. He came from a small town in Punjab, and his family emptied out all their savings. There was perhaps INR 50,000 ($785) left in savings, but the family had to consider what they would do for his sister’s wedding expenses. The income from the father’s shop brought in only INR 5,000 ($78) a month. Seven years later, Akash recalls the shock of leaving home. He found intermittent work while studying. In 2009, three years after he arrived in Australia to study, he sent INR 500,000—that is INR 5 lakh ($7,854) home for his sister’s wedding. This was in addition to sending one or two lakh ($1,571 to $3,142) to his parents every four months so that they could survive. He did this by putting away half the money he earned every week from a variety of jobs that included marketing, door-to-door sales, and pizza delivery. His parents in India showed me the wedding albums with Akash standing proudly by his sister at the ceremony. They pointed out the renovation of their modest house along the narrow lanes of the town. Akash had sent INR 5 lakh for that as well. These remittances and the activities that this money supported made plain that they were good parents and were blessed with a good son.
A number of the people I interviewed weighed the happiness of children against their own. There was Fateh, sixty-one years old, who bought a house for his son and daughter-in-law in Melbourne in 2009. Fateh sold some shares of stock and a parcel of land in India to pay for the house via a bank transfer. He kept aside what he thought he and his wife would need for the next ten years for their expenses—but not extravagances. His wife and son-in-law advised him against paying for the whole house. But Fateh said, “I am glad I liquidated some shares three years ago. I would have lost 70 percent of their value anyway.” He added, “What is the point of giving after you are dead?” Interviews with other transnational families show that those who were relatively well off also helped their children to buy homes and set up businesses once they got permanent residence. It was taken for granted that parents would help their children. Parents’ giving even after the child has completed his or her education is seen as a continuation of parental care.
Some parents join their children in their new country of reception. Charandeep, thirty-four years old, came to Australia as a student in 2005. His father funded Charandeep’s education by using all his retirement funds and borrowing from the bank. He arrived with AU$4,000 in hand. His father even offered to pay his living and lodging expenses. Charandeep said, “I asked him ‘Where would you get the money from?’ He said, ‘You don’t need to worry. I’ll arrange it.’ I understood he would sell some part of the property to do that.” Charandeep explained that his communication with his parents bridged the spoken and the unspoken. Soon after he arrived, he worked as a kitchen hand in a chocolate factory. His shifts sometimes finished after 1 a.m. He then had to stay overnight with friends. When his mother heard that on those nights he would go to sleep without dinner, drinking only a glass of milk, she asked her husband to send him AU$4,000 for a car. After Charandeep finished his degree and began working, he started paying off the loan. He sent money home and was able to buy his father a car. In 2013, his parents joined him in Melbourne. At the time of the interview, they planned to sell much of their property in India and invest in property in Australia. In other cases as well, I observed that family reunion triggers the selling of some property in India to finance house purchases and other investments in Australia, particularly if the family owns more than one piece of property in India. In the study, all of the parents who have permanent residence because they have children in Australia have kept some property in India so that the parents and children can stay in India from time to time.
Charandeep is the only child, so there was no need to differentiate money going to him vis-à-vis other children. But for families with children in India and Australia or with a number of children in India, family reunion brings up the issue of the segregation of family monies and subsequent inheritance. In the interviews I conducted, children who spoke about property and family reunion in Australia were not dealing with potential conflicts because there was either little property to divide or only one child. But my encounters in an Indian community organization revealed at least one case where parents said their son had thrown them out of the house because they would not agree to sign over to him all their property in India.
When Relationships Falter
Sending money home and receiving it highlights money as a medium of care in a transnational family. But relationships do not always work according to the normative script. Rather, people engage in relational work (Zelizer 2012; Bandelj 2016), trying to match their relations and communication with appropriate economic transactions in order to maintain their ties. But sometimes those matches fail and relations deteriorate, as when adult sons try to extract property from their parents after they have moved.
Sometimes the children “do the right thing” and bring their parents to their settlement country to provide for them in old age, but the parents are torn between staying with them (usually the sons in patrilineal families) and missing their old neighborhood and network of kin in the home country. Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni (2002) writes about “Mrs. Dutta,” who sold her home in Calcutta, mesmerized by the portrait of her son and his smiling family in the United States. She moved to live with them, only to be surprised by how much she missed the sounds and freedoms of her own home. Feeling alone and un-needed in a new context, her certainties about family collapsed. She finally returned home to Calcutta to rent an apartment that belonged to her friend.
Mohinder’s mother reminded me of Mrs. Dutta from Calcutta. Mohinder, a thirty-nine-year-old man, was visiting his family home in Punjab with his wife and children. His mother now lives with her youngest son in the United States for eight months of the year, and four months in Punjab. When she is away, she misses the Sikh temple, her neighbors, her own place. She commented, “I am alone. The children go out all day long. The grandchildren are not the same as the children. They don’t speak Punjabi. They say, ‘Have your medicine.’ They say ‘Thik?’ [All right?] And that is the end of the conversation.”
Gina, a seventy-year-old woman, is also torn between, on the one hand, her feeling that her rightful place is with her sons and grandchildren in Australia, and on the other hand, her comfort in her own place, her daughter who lives nearby, and extended kin in a metropolitan city in Tamil Nadu in southern India. She went to Australia twice and stayed with her sons. But she came back to India. According to Gina, “Here I can go anywhere. I am very happy here. I have my own house here.” She has friends, neighbors. The vegetable man comes to her house. The sons call once a week. She adds, “I have very good children.” Then she cries. She knows that according to their patrilineal norms, it is her daughter’s mother-in-law who has the right to stay in her daughter’s house. “I live alone. I am becoming old. I sit and cry…. I miss my sons.” She looks forward to a possibility of having at least one of her sons in her own home. This is because her eldest son, capitalizing on transnational connections, is now commuting between India and Australia, building up a social enterprise.
Parents’ feeling that they do not have a template for living with their sons in a strange country has its roots in the different developmental cycle of the joint family after migration. Instead of married sons joining the parents, it is the parents who join the sons in a new country (Singh 2015, 2016). The notion of filial duty works best when the children stay with the parents. It disappears in different degrees when parents move to stay with the children (Bose and Shankardass 2008). In my study, the parents who have joined their children in Australia have given themselves flexibility in that they have kept their own base in India and so are able to come and go between India and Australia. Time will tell whether this is a sufficient escape valve for tensions that may develop in this new version of the joint family in Australia.
Fractured relationships also result when children and/or parents do not meet the expectations of reciprocal care. Baghban, a 2003 Bollywood film, shows how parents who have given their sons all their money, thinking that they will be looked after in their old age, can be proven terribly wrong. For instance, the sons separate the parents, saying it is too difficult to look after both, and then make them move from one son to the other to shift the load. It is only when the adopted son returns from overseas that the parents get the respectful home and status they expected.
In my study, I found the reverse case—a dutiful son finding it difficult to understand his mother’s lack of care. Isher was thirty-seven when I met him in Melbourne in 2012. When he was single and living with his mother and an elder brother and his family, he would pay the majority of the household expenses. When he married, however, he had to cover his settlement expenses, so he could not contribute as before to the mother and elder brother’s household. Isher and his wife think that this is what ruptured his mother’s bond with him. Isher says his mother perhaps does not know how to resist her eldest son’s control. When his late father’s property was divided, Isher did not receive his share. Still, Isher occasionally sends money to his mother. He invited her to Melbourne. But Isher and his wife are no longer invited to stay with his mother when they go to India.
Conclusion: The Meanings and Valuations of Transnational Money
Transnational money changes meaning and value depending on the context of migration and the intensity and frequency of communication. Money and communication intersect because both are media of care. That’s why a dollar sent may be less or more than the dollar received.
The value of money sent and received is interpreted in terms of relationship and care rather than mathematical quantity. The anthropology of money shows that numbers can be ambiguous and that multiple monies must be interpreted in their social and cultural contexts. This is particularly the case when transnational money serves as a social payment (Maurer 2007). For instance, when Akash sent money for his sister’s wedding, that money achieved the hallowed status of a gift from a “good brother” compared with the money he sent for everyday survival. The money he sent for his parents’ home—though it was the same amount as that sent for his sister’s wedding—fell into a different relational category, demonstrating he was a good son.
As my interviews illustrate, the meanings of transnational money in Australia have changed across the five decades of migration, depending on the directional flow of money and communication. These meanings are also influenced by the individual or family nature of the decisions underpinning migration. The early migrants sent money and took gifts home as a way of showing they cared for their families. They had to strike a balance between caring for their nuclear family in Australia versus the transnational family. When money was tight, there was a feeling that the sacrifice entailed in the sending of money was not sufficiently recognized. Families that remain behind often have inflated perceptions of the ease of earning, together with ignorance of the higher expense of living overseas. This was buttressed by relative exchange rates. Few had visited Australia to see for themselves the stresses of migration and settlement. Consequently, the dollar sent across borders is often seen to embody less sacrifice than the dollar sent within the country. Money sent home is also pitted against the day-to-day physical care-giving provided by other family members, usually siblings in the home country. In some cases, these tensions surrounding care and money spill over into conflicts over inheritance, one of the most significant expressions of belonging in the family.7
Among the recent migrants, money as a medium of care was celebrated on both sides. Migration was a family decision. Student migrants’ need to finance their relocation with resources from their parents has made their family’s financial and emotional support very explicit, and their relationship was reinforced by the monies transferred (Zelizer 2005). The children recognized that parents had drawn on their retirement funds or savings and had sold property and other assets so that the children could move ahead. Parents funded the students’ education and, if possible, helped them to buy houses and set up businesses. They helped with the care of the grandchildren. If they chose to migrate, and if resources permitted, they brought money with them to invest and further help their children. Student participants said this support has strengthened their feelings of filial obligation in the present and in the future, as they seek ways of ensuring care for their parents in Australia.
Recent migrants sent money home, repaid loans, and, if possible, made arrangements for their parents to come and stay in Australia. Parents and children showed care through the flow of money and communication. Their instantaneous and frequent contact meant that parents too realized that money sent home was coming through intense hard work and sacrifice. So the money sent on both sides got inflated with care. As a student said, “The money that goes to India after the children start working is in the hundreds. But the money that comes for homes and businesses is in the thousands.”
Remittances are a revealing case of the creation of an economy that blends care within the family with economic transactions. Indeed, remittances are consequential for governments as an important contribution to their gross domestic product and foreign exchange reserves. At the same time, remittances are the currency of care in relationships. The perceived value of money goes up with the intensity, frequency, and closeness of communication. It is devalued in the absence of such communication. The opposite scenario is played out when family relationships fracture in the country of destination or across borders. Money then communicates control in families rather than care and reciprocity. Unfortunately, this is not just the script of novels and films but may increasingly be played out in different versions of family conflict or even violence in families that migrate—or those that are left behind.
Notes
1. This work draws on interviews conducted between 2005 and 2014 with 186 persons from ninety-five families. The interviews were with early migrants who came to Australia from the early 1970s to mid-1990s; second-generation Indians born in Australia or who came with their families before they were twelve years old; Indian student migrants who arrived in 2005 or later; and student and skilled migrants from the mid-1990s and their families in India. The interviews were supplemented with participant observation of the Indian community in Melbourne, Australia.
2. See the World Bank Migration and Remittances Factbook for a comprehensive listing. Related studies include Levitt (2001); Mahler (2001, 2007); Akuei (2005); Cliggett (2005); Horst (2006); Mahler and Pessar (2006); Smith (2006); Viruell-Fuentes (2006); Lindley (2009); McKenzie and Menjívar (2010); and Abrego (2014).
3. Also see Neumann (2015) for a detailed account of Australia’s immigration policy until the 1970s.
4. But see Gamburd (1998); Parreñas (2005); Smith (2006); and Abrego (2014) for different contexts.
5. Personal communication, August 18, 2015, from Murray Rasmussen, Secretary, Victorian Telecommunications Museum, Telstra Museum, Hawthorn, Victoria. He was citing the rates from “International Calls,” p. 16, in the 1975 Melbourne White Pages Directory.
6. All the participants from the qualitative study are referred to by pseudonyms.
7. See also Baldassar, Baldock, and Wilding (2007). An interesting case of discrepancy in the valuation of community remittances comes from Mexico, where the migrants feel they have sacrificed and should have a voice, whereas the local municipality feels the migrants lack local knowledge and so should defer to local leadership (Smith 2006).
Abrego, Leisy J. 2014. Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love across Borders. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Akuei, Stephanie Riak. 2005. “Remittances as Unforeseen Burdens: The Livelihoods and Social Obligations of Sudanese Refugees.” Global Migration Perspectives. Geneva: Global Commission on International Migration.
Baldassar, Loretta. 2001. Visits Home: Migration Experiences between Italy and Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
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