Outsourcing Welfare

Abstract

This book is about how remittances—the money international migrants send to family members in their home countries—contribute to economic, political, and social stability in developing countries. Remittances are motivated by altruism, they rise in times of crisis, and they are spent largely on basic goods and services. Because of these qualities, remittances are transnational safety nets that serve a function similar to the social welfare programs most developed countries use to insulate citizens from market, environmental, and life-course risks. Outsourcing Welfare argues that counting on expatriates to send money home has become a de facto social welfare policy in many cash-strapped developing countries during an age of austerity, climate change, and globalization. Through ethnographic research in a coffee-growing village and a pork-producing town in rural Mexico, Outsourcing Welfare shows that the Mexican government was able to count on people to go abroad and send back remittances to compensate for economic shocks that occurred during Mexico’s neoliberal market transition. The book also analyzes survey data collected during Mexico’s 2007–2008 food crisis to illustrate how remittances reduced economic grievances and the demand for government-provided welfare. In later chapters, the book explores the effects of remittances on economic grievances, civil unrest, and political behavior in Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America during the global food and financial crises of 2008–2011.