The migration–development nexus: Rendering migrants as transnational financial subjects through housing

Abstract

Finance driven growth is providing a new development agenda for migrants’ remittances. Although there is a considerable amount of scholarship on migrants’ transnational social and economic practices and their potential development impacts in origin and destination countries, the migration–development nexus has yet to be examined as part of the globalising process of economic financialisation of the last three decades. In light of the growing importance of remittances as a source of finance for sending countries, migrant workers have emerged as important agents to be incorporated into the dynamics of the global financial system.Drawing on empirical data collected at the London–Colombia migration network, this paper explores the Colombian government’s efforts to channel remittances to housing and finance and migrant households’ (alternative) strategies for accessing housing transnationally. It argues that conceptualising migrants as transnational financial subjects is a useful tool for understanding the latest round of enthusiasm around the migration–development nexus. In particular, the recasting of migrants as agents of development is linked to wider attempts at the institutionalisation of migrants’ transnational socio-economic practices. These attempts are embedded in ideologically-driven neoliberal discourses of citizenship that privilege financial markets as the medium for households’ socioeconomic reproduction and ambition to exploit migrant households’ connection to broader circuits of capital and finance. However, the evidence suggests that Colombian migrant households are resisting these state-assigned financial subjectivities, which points to the government’s failure to shape the everyday actions of remitters and their families and thus, the limits and uncertainties of the process of neoliberal financialisation.