Silence will carry your voice like the nest that holds the sleeping birds.
Rabindranath Tagore
According to the Financial Times, “remittances have overtaken FDI, private capital flows and aid as the largest inflow of capital to emerging economies.”
Turns out that those ever increasing remittance chunks are a small fraction (16.83%) of the actual income migrants are earning away from home. Which basically keeps more than 80% of the remaining migrant incomes unaccounted for (World Bank estimate for 2013).
Wouldn’t it be great if all those amounts - the plump remittances and plumper by far remainders - could somehow be plumped back into the same sordid scheme of affairs that pressured people to migrate in the first place? The priests of capital have come up with many such infusions into the lifeblood of neoliberalism.
But first, let’s disabuse ourselves of any notion of Northern benevolence in all of this. Here is a diagram showing the remittance flow from Global North countries versus Global South countries: in 2021, the Global South sent more money (204 billion US$) to low and lower-middle income countries than the Global North (168 billion US$).
Coming back to priestly-inspired infusions, migrants are incentivized in the host countries to put their savings in schemes such as diaspora bonds, migrant mutual funds, and transnational loans, so that the savings land up in the safekeeping of financial houses. The chart below gives an idea of the sums which are up for grabs: in 2013, migrant savings were close to 500 billion US$ (higher than remittances by around 20%).
There is a whole new field called Financialization of Remittances (FOR) that studies all of this. Publicly available FOR data should guide my next post to get a better handle on this brand of financialization.
Silence will bring the cusp of peace to your door do as you will with the knob of night Silence will shriek the film of war through your eyes blink as you will as time wanders Silence will throb the sob of earth at your chest sing as you will, as you dream, as you nest.