By Sunil Amrith
Recent data from the World Bank suggests that global migrant remittances exceeded $400 billion in 2012. They are estimated to reach $534 billion by 2015. Remittances have shown “remarkable resilience” through the global financial crisis; they amount to around three times the total sum of development assistance. Though the United States remains the greatest source of migrant remittances in the world, the strongest growth is within Asia. India is the world’s largest recipient of migrant remittances, amounting to $70 billion annually: the greatest source of those remittances is the large population of Indian contract workers in the Middle East. Remittances from overseas amounted to 3.4 per cent of India’s GDP in 2011; in neighbouring Bangladesh, this figure is over 10 per cent.
I will write more in a separate post about migrant remittances in historical perspective. Is the growing importance of migrant remittances a novel symptom of globalization, or can we see parallels or even connections with an earlier history of Asian migration? My last book, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia, attempted to provide a narrative of that longer history.
Remittances are particularly relevant in the context of coastal regions of Asia that are particularly threatened by rising sea levels, more frequent flooding, and land subsidence. As Sam Knight pointed out in an important feature in the Financial Times a few years ago, while most policy discussions of climate change and migration see migration as an inevitable consequence of climate change—think of the spectre of “climate refugees”—the relationship can work the other way. In some instances, migration is “no longer an act of abandonment, but part of what allows people to stay.” The migration of some family members, and the remittances they send back, allows others to maintain their homes against drought or rising waters.
It would be short-sighted to separate a discussion of “climate migration” too clearly from a broader consideration of inter-regional movement around the Bay of Bengal, both in the past and in the present. The Asian Development Bank acknowledges that “migration flows associated with climate change” will use “existing migration corridors … already used by family or community members.”