Migrating into Financial Markets: How Remittances Became a Development Tool

Front matter

MIGRATING INTO FINANCIAL MARKETS

HOW REMITTANCES BECAME A DEVELOPMENT TOOL

MATT BAKKER

Part I. The Remit Tances-to-development Agenda At The Global Scale

1. Introducing the Remittances-to-Development Agenda: Migration, Remittances, and Development — Three

Vignettes 3

2. Facts, Figures, and the Politics of Measurement: The Construction and Diffusion of Remittances as a Financial Flow

34 3. Forging the Remittances-to-Development Nexus: Conceptual Linkages and Political Practices 58

PART 2. THE LONG ROAD TO FINANCIAL DEMOCRACY IN NORTH AMERICA: FROM STATE-LED TRANSNATIONALISM TO INTERGOVERNMENTAL COLLABORATION

4. Bringing Remittances into the North American Economic-Integration Project: A Genealogy of Mexican State-Led Transnationalism uy 5. From Promise to Practice: Toward Financial

Democracy in North America 162

Notes 217 Bibliography 229 Index 255

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The task of researching and writing this book could not have been completed without the support of a great number of individuals and institutions. First of all, I want to thank the many interviewees and informants within government agencies, international institutions, banks, and credit unions who selflessly shared their time and experiences with me. I also want to acknowledge the many migrant leaders, activists, and others within migrant communities on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border who shared their thoughts about and experiences with remittances and the public policies addressing them. Without the information gleaned from my interactions with these insiders from both above and below, this would have been a much poorer book.

This book has been with me as I have moved across three academic institutions, and I have accrued debts of gratitude in many places. I want to express my sincere appreciation to my many teachers, colleagues, and academic friends who have helped me along the way. My Ph.D. advisors, Fred Block, vil viii / Acknowledgments

Luis Guarnizo, and Michael Smith, shepherded this project along from its early stages and continued to provide support and guidance all along the way. Their profound influences on me are evident throughout this book. Thanks for everything. Another UC Davis professor, Ming-cheng Lo, also deserves special mention for much-needed financial support during the earliest stages of my research.

At Colorado College I was lucky to work with a great group of colleagues and students. Kathy Giuffre was a wonderful fount of support, inspiration, and gentle prodding as the two of us worked getting words on paper and pushing our writing projects to completion. I also thank Eric Popkin, Wade Roberts, C.J. Pascoe, and Santiago Guerra for their support and ideas as I sharpened the arguments in the book. My fellow temporary faculty members, Deb Smith and Elena Windsong, provided valuable camaraderie at CC.

My colleague Janine DeWitt in the Sociology Program at Marymount University has been wonderfully welcoming and a valuable source of advice in the final stages before publication. Many other new colleagues and friends have made the transition to a new institution smoother than I could have ever expected. Thanks go out to Clara Haught, Amanda Farrell, Carl Sachs, Stephanie Ellis, Elizabeth Langran, and Chad Rector. Thanks also to friends far and wide who have provided support and assistance in many ways. Special thanks to Tim Gutierrez, Nelson Martinez-Berrios, Enrique Martinez Curiel, and Martin Geiger.

On the financial front, I received invaluable support from various institutions at key points along the way. I thank the University of California Labor Education and Research Fund for an

Acknowledgments / ix early grant, as well as the Gifford Center for Population Studies for its support during the early stages of research. I greatly appreciate the support of Lois Stover and Sherri Hughes, administrators at Marymount University, who came through with some important funding as the book was going to publication. My final and heartiest thanks must go to the members of my family who have unfailingly supported me through the ups and downs that life throws at us. I thank my parents, James and Susan Bakker, for their endless support over the years. Heartfelt thanks to mi tía Victoria Jiménez, who has always welcomed me and my family with open arms in our home away from home in Guadalajara. And finally to those closest to me, Maria Luisa, Braulio, and Caramelo: I cannot find the words to express the depth of my appreciation for all that you do. Without you this book and my academic pursuits in general would never have come to fruition. ¡Gracias por todo!

Some parts of the book have appeared in previous publications. An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Discursive Representation and Policy Mobility: How Migrant Remittances Became a ‘Development Tool,” Global Networks, 15(1): 21-42 (2015). Parts of chapter 4 were previously published in “Mexican Migration, Transnationalism, and the Re-scaling of Citizenship in North America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34(1): m19 (2011), available online: http:// www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01419870.2010.482159, and “From ‘The Whole Enchilada’ to Financialization: Shifting Discourses of Migration Management in North America,” in The Politics of International Migration Management, edited by Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 271-94

(reproduced with permission of Palgrave MacMillan).

x / Acknowledgments

I must also thank the many people at the University of California Press who shepherded this book to completion. Special thanks are due to my editors, Naomi Schneider, Ally Power, Peter Richardson, and Cindy Fulton, who guided me through the transition from proposal to book. Finally, a hearty thanks to Paul Psoinos, whose meticulous copyediting work made this a far better book.

PART I

The Remittances-to- Development Agenda at the Global Scale

CHAPTER I Migration, Remittances, and Development — Three Vignettes

This book explains how migrant remittances became a development tool around the turn of the new millennium. This was the active accomplishment of policy entrepreneurs and experts intent on transforming the way that people around the world viewed and acted upon remittances. The following three vignettes offer an initial glimpse at the actors, historical events, and fundamental contradictions at the heart of this story.

KEEPING THE MONIES FLOWING IN TIMES OF CRISIS

The global financial crisis unleashed in 2008 threatened, among many other things, to erode the high volume of remittances that international migrants send back home to the global South, monies that had come to be seen—as we will see throughout the course of this book—not just as a lifeline for poor families but also as a promising source of development finance. The aggregate amounts of money migrants sent across borders declined in 2008 as a result of the financial calamity, but the declines did not last long. By 2009 global financial flows had stabilized and would start to grow again in the coming years. How did this happen? Were migrants somehow immune to the effects of the financial crisis, the crippling unemployment, economic uncertainty, and financial ruin it brought to so many ordinary people the world over? Maybe not. Robert Meins, a remittances expert from the Inter-American Development Bank, one of the most important international financial institutions working at the intersection of migration and development, suggested in an industry newsletter that a whole different dynamic was at work.

He explained that:

The defining characteristic of remittances is that they are seen as a family obligation. Senders are more likely to cut back on their own consumption than to reduce the amount of money they send to their families. Unlike speculative flows or foreign investment, therefore, profit motives do not drive remittance levels. As a result, changing economic or political risks and natural disasters will not negatively impact the decision to send... . [Emerging evidence suggests] that immigrants are working longer hours to compensate for lower wages, switching sectors after job loss, responding to labor demand and/or local immigration enforcement by moving from one state to another, and even tapping into their savings to maintain remittance levels. (Migrant Remittances, 2008: 8—9)

For experts in the international institutions intent on drawing out the developmental potential of remittances, this was good news. Migrants exhibited the requisite adaptability and willingness to keep the monies flowing. There would be no significant long-term effects of the financial crisis on worldwide remittance flows. Whether migrants themselves—who engaged in these multiple forms of self-exploitation and experienced firsthand the pain and disruption necessary to keep sending monies home—celebrated this reality as much as the remittances experts did is a completely different question.

THE HEROIC MIGRANT AND THE END OF MIGRATION

One of the central promises of change that former Mexican president Vicente Fox made in the run-up to his victorious election in 2000 was that he would govern on behalf of 118 million Mexicans—a number that included the 100 million people residing within the territorial confines ofthe Mexican nation-state as well as the 18 million mexicanos en el exterior, the imagined community of Mexican migrants and their descendants living abroad. In recognition of their economic contributions to Mexico and their continued commitment to the nation, Fox often referred to those mexicanos en el exterior as heroes. In this, President Fox was part of an expanding chorus of leaders from major migrant-sending states, from Ireland to the Philippines, who have celebrated the heroic contributions of migrants to their homelands over recent decades. For Fox, this heroic imagery took perhaps its grandest form on December 3, 2000, just three days into the presidency. That day Fox held his first public event and opened the official presidential residence, Los Pinos, for a meeting with migrant leaders. In his official address, the newly inaugurated president waxed eloquent about the spirit and tenacity of the migrant, about the set of characteristics that migrants shared with a curious amalgam of historical figures:'

It is in each humble, poor, successful, and triumphant migrant where we realize the capacity that we carry within us all, that potential that I would almost say is unlimited but which we ourselves sometimes can’t see, that we only discover when we are facing a challenge and when we begin to struggle to overcome those obstacles and to reach our goals. That is when the true spirit of man comes out, a spirit that we all carry within us.

Just to cite a few of the great figures of humanity: that capacity that Gorbachev had, or Juan Pablo II, or Martin Luther King, or Gandhi, or Mandela, or Walesa, who on their own, because they decided to fight for something big, because they decided to reach for the unreachable—they transformed humanity, they transformed borders, they transformed and they changed chilling and painful realities. That spirit, that capacity is in the soul of each migrant.

That is why it was indispensable for us that our first visit here, in Los Pinos, the first formal act, was held with you, because we want to infect ourselves with that spirit, we want to follow your example and we want for all of Mexico, the 1oo million Mexican men and women that are living here in our beloved country struggling day in and day out, that wake up each morning to get to work, for all of us to do it with the energy, con los pantalones, con las faldas with which you all have struggled and have met with success.

(Fox Quesada, 2000b)

And yet, despite this laudatory characterization of migrants, in literally his next breath, Fox spoke of his dream of a nonmigratory future: “We see in the future a dream, and that dream is that every youngster, every adolescent, every child of ours can stay at their family’s side, that they can stay here in Mexico, that they can grow, can realize their dreams and their own transcendence here in their homeland.” This duality, this schizophrenic portrayal of heroic migrants as the utmost representation of what humanity has to offer while at the same time representing mobility across borders as a social ill to be done away with in the future, continued to be a main theme throughout Fox’s administration and that of his successor, Felipe Calderón. It would not be a stretch to say that this contradictory framing has seeped to the very core of Mexican state-policy discourse on migration.

THE LIMITS OF MIGRANT INCLUSION

In March 2002 the governments of the United States and Mexico formally announced a new “Partnership for Prosperity.” Although U.S.-Mexican relations had cooled following the events of September 11, 2001, as the administration of George W. Bush prioritized its War on Terror over the further integration of North America, the partnership sought to combine the forces of the public and private sectors to foment regional development and expand economic opportunities for individuals across Mexico and the United States—including the inhabitants of the traditional migrant-sending regions of Mexico whose limited economic possibilities could lead to further outmigration.

Government officials in the local offices of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Mexican Consulate in Chicago took this initiative and ran with it. Beginning in May 2003 they jointly formed the New Alliance Task Force (NATF) and worked with local banks, credit unions, and communitybased organizations to encourage financial inclusion by expanding the financial-education opportunities and banking services available to Mexican immigrants in and around the city. This innovative transnational collaboration bore real fruits. In no time the government officials had dozens of financial institutions involved in the initiative. It served as a valuable conduit to share information about the legality of providing financial services to the undocumented. Its working groups also helped to create innovative new financial products for this community, such as the ITIN mortgage, which relies on an individual

Taxpayer Identification Number supplied by the IRS rather than the Social Security Number—ubiquitous but unavailable to undocumented migrants. But this successful partnership would not last. Anti-immigrant pressure groups challenged the FDIC’s participation in a program providing assistance to “illegal” immigrants. Thus began the slow and silent death of the NATEF. It would seem that this program to include migrants and their monies in the formal financial system escaped the limits of what was possible in a period marked in so many other ways by the tendency to exclude the undocumented from the institutions of mainstream America.

These brief vignettes offer a window into the efforts of various actors who worked to reframe our understanding of the importance of migration, migrants, and their monies for the global economy and, in the process, turned remittances into a development tool. They also illustrate the growing confluence of the transnational engagement policies of migrant-sending states like Mexico and the market-centric development policies of international financial institutions. And finally, they help us see how policies designed to include migrants and their monies within financial markets fit uneasily in a political environment marked in so many other ways by efforts to exclude migrants—particularly the undocumented—from social, cultural, political, and economic institutions. These are the major themes explored throughout this book.

Introduction

At the beginning of the new millennium a new tool for development suddenly appeared on the global stage: remittances.

These are the monies that transnational migrants, usually poor, “anskilled” labor migrants from the global South, transfer to friends and families back home. Often sent in amounts of little more than a few hundred dollars at a time, the aggregate amount of remittances flowing to the so-called developing countries in 2013 was estimated to be somewhere on the order of 414 billion U.S. dollars (Ratha et al., 2013). This staggering amount of money has led political leaders and policymakers around the world to begin imagining remittances as “an important resource for the development of poor countries” (Iglesias, 2005: x).

To be sure, migration scholars have long debated how their object of study and the remittances generated through the process of labor migration either contribute to or impede development in migrant-sending regions. Significant debates played out in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, between optimistic and pessimistic scholars about the relation between remittances, consumption, productive economic activity, and development in Mexico and other major migrant-sending countries (Alarcón, 2002; Binford, 2003). But something exceptional was happening at the turn of the millennium, as national governments, international development organizations, and groups in civil society ratcheted up the enthusiasm about remittances and their great potential to kick-start development processes in the migrant-sending regions of the global South. As remittances gained visibility in recent years, the existence of earlier scholarly debates was all but ignored, and the potential developmental impacts of remittances were presented as an entirely new discovery.’ (See Terry, 2005.)

Claims about the impact and importance of this new object of development seemed only to gain steam as the decade of the

2000s unfolded. Across the world, official statistics documented extraordinary growth in migrants’ remittance transfers. Scholars and policymakers pointed out how the determinants and essential characteristics of remittances, founded as they are in familial relations and obligations, made them a valuable source of development finance for a variety of reasons. Not least of these reasons was the apparently “countercyclical” nature of remittance flows, which meant that they would tend to rise when needed most, following natural disasters or economic downturns (Ratha, 2003). The euphoria around remittances and development reached such staggering heights that by mid-decade even some analysts close to the World Bank were forced to ask whether remittances had become “the new development mantra” (Kapur, 2005). Certainly, the infatuation with remittances waned somewhat in the aftermath of the global financial crisis initiated in 2008, but not completely. The flows may have momentarily dropped, in some cases precipitously, as declining economic activity meant fewer migrants ventured to the global North, but policymakers around the world continued to pursue opportunities to exploit remittance flows for the purposes of “development.” 3

The primary concern of this book is to explain how these private resources, these paltry sums of money from some of the world’s least affluent people, came to be so widely seen as a public resource, as a promising source of development in the new millennium. To do this, I untangle and examine the discursive and political practices of a variety of actors from across multiple geopolitical scales, whose intellectual work and on-the-ground efforts helped to generate a consensus around the view that remittances constituted a promising development tool and around a preferred set of market-based policy solutions that promise to spur development by incorporating migrants and their monies into global financial markets. This consensus forms what I term the “remittances-to-development agenda” or R-2-D agenda. Given that the U.S.-Mexico “remittance corridor” (Hernández- Coss, 2005) has been a leading canvas on which this policy construction has been sketched, significant attention is given to the making and implementation of this agenda in North America.

The market-based policy solutions at the core of the R-2-D agenda are not the only alternatives available to policymakers intent on exploiting cross-border migration and the resources it generates for developmental purposes in migrant-sending regions and countries. Another much-celebrated policy option relies less on the abstract forces of the market and more on the collective agency of migrants themselves to promote development back home. Mexico pioneered public policy seeking to capitalize on migrants’ collective agency (and resources) with its Tres por Uno matching-grant program, designed to channel funding toward community-development and publicinfrastructure programs in migrant-sending villages and towns. (See Goldring, 2002; Merz, 2005; Fernandez de Castro, Garcia Zamora, and Vila Freyer, 2006; Michael Peter Smith and Bakker, 2008; Iskander, 2010.) The success of the Tres por Uno program came not simply from its policy design but, perhaps more important, from its ability to foster lasting relationships between migrant leaders and state officials. This would facilitate an “interpretive” policymaking process with state officials and migrant leaders working together to co-produce the matching-grant program (Iskander, 2010).

Similar dynamics of state officials’ “acting with” migrants (Iskander, 2013: 169) underlie other historical successes in remittances and development policy, such as the Moroccan government’s successful initiative in the 1970s to bring migrants’

remittance transfers into the formal banking system and to use these monies to fund major national development projects. The success of “Operation Moroccan Workers Abroad,” as that program was known, relied on an extensive “strategy of accompaniment,” through which government officials developed trust with migrants, came to understand the barriers impeding their use of the formal banking system, and helped migrants to overcome those barriers (Iskander, 2013).*

These types of policies certainly face their own difficulties in solidifying the nexus between migration and development. The Tres por Uno program, for instance, has sometimes been criticized for prioritizing projects that respond to the desires of absent migrants—funding the construction of rodeo rings or the beautification of town plazas, for example—more than to the lived realities and needs of current residents. It would not be difficult, however, to imagine modifications to such public-private partnerships that would make their development aspirations more strategic and bring migrant remittances and public resources together for more focused infrastructure projects designed to foment community and economic development in the areas where it is needed most.

But this type of public-private partnership, based in a mutual respect for the collective agency of migrants and for government, has not been popular with the purveyors of the R-2-D agenda. In this age of market fundamentalism, any policy option calling for extensive and high-profile government actions to lead the drive toward development is seemingly off the table. The policy entrepreneurs’ driving this agenda have promoted instead market-based policies that would rely on the agency not of organized migrants or enlightened government officials but of financial institutions seeking clients and profits in a competitive market to achieve the elusive connection between migration and development.’ Despite the market-fundamentalist rhetoric, the design and application of such market-based solutions—ironically enough—would itself require significant governmental work. As we will see below, such governmental work included knowledge work to reimagine the importance of migration and the remittances it generates for development in the global South; policy design and diffusion work drawing up and spreading various policies that promised to incorporate migrants and their monies within financial markets and institutions as a means of promoting (financial) development; and the work of sulyect formation, both teaching officials in banks and credit unions about the benefits to be had from offering financial services to migrants and remittance recipients and providing migrants, their friends, and families with the financial education and literacy they would need to act as good financial subjects.

Analyzing these various forms of governmental work, Migrating into Financial Markets illustrates how the proponents of the R-2-D agenda have helped to spread the image of migrants’ remittances as a promising if underutilized tool for development. It also shows their success in laying out a preferred set of market-based policies that have largely displaced alternative policy approaches. Such achievements, however, do not mean that the agenda and its associated policy program have been an unqualified success. As we will see over the course of the book, the effects of all the governmental work animating the agenda have been uneven. Even if the agenda’s proponents may have been successful at getting the world to view remittances as an enticing pool of untapped capital that could be leveraged by financial markets and institutions, the market-based solutions that they advocate have not (yet?) reached their promise.

CONTEXTUALIZING THE REMIT TANCES-TO-DEVELOPMENT AGENDA

In order to provide a broader contextualization for the emergence of these policies and practices, the remainder of this introduction discusses two prominent features of the contemporary global political-economic terrain that help to situate the recent (re)discovery of remittances by development policymakers and practitioners. These broader contextual features are: (1) the state-led transnationalism (Goldring, 2002) of migrant-sending states looking to exploit transnational migration as a development strategy; and (2) the continuing dominance of market fundamentalism (see Somers and Block, 2005; Block, 2007; Block and Somers, 2014) in the arena of international-development policy and practice. As these two dynamics increasingly came together by the early 2000s they helped cement the R-2-D agenda’s consensus around the importance of remittances, their strategic value as a tool for development, and the types of market-based policies and institutional changes necessary to turn their potential developmental impacts into reality.

MIGRATION, STATE-LED TRANSNATIONALISM, AND DEVELOPMENT

Since 1995, the government of the Philippines has celebrated a “Migrant Heroes Week” every June. In an expression of just how profoundly the heroic migrant has changed official representations of the territoriality of the Filipino nation, a government official speaking at an event opening the festivities in the year 2000 proclaimed, “Philippine territory goes beyond what we once knew. It extends now to Australia, to the United States, and [so forth]. What used to be Bayang Filipino [Filipino Nation] is now

Mundong Filipino [Filipino World)” (quoted in Rodriguez, 2010: 78). A similar discourse on heroic migrants and the extraterritorial extension of national boundaries can be observed across a number of other migrant-sending countries as well. Consider the case of Ireland. When the country’s president-elect, Mary Robinson, took office in 1990 she painted a portrait of Ireland and its citizens stretching all across the globe. In her inaugural address, Robinson stated, “there is a vast community of Irish emigrants extending... throughout the continents of North America, Australia, and of Europe itself. There are over 70 million people living on this globe who claim Irish descent. I will be proud to represent them” (quoted in Levitt, 2001: 195). These rhetorical gestures, and the policy interventions migrant-sending states undertake to implement these visions of an unbounded national community, raise an important question about whether and how contemporary transnational migration has come to undermine the nation-state’s presumed triple correspondence between sovereignty, territory, and political community.

This question has been the object of a vibrant academic debate over recent decades among students of migrant transnationalism? Although scholars may argue over the causes and consequences of these recent policy innovations, there is little disagreement that something significant is under way when migrant-sending states become engaged in extraterritorial political activities designed to cultivate and maintain ties with their migrants living abroad. While these efforts may not serve to completely delink the nation-state, with all its powers and capabilities, from its territorial moorings, they do appear to extend extraterritorially the (trans)national development project, the boundaries of national identity and community membership, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. What is driving migrant-sending states to pursue such extraterritorial projects? What types of policies give life to these projects? And how have they dovetailed into the R-2-D agenda?

The extraterritorial policy initiatives of migrant-sending states, aimed at fomenting and reproducing transnational livelihoods among migrants, have been analyzed by a number of authors using varied conceptual language to describe the policies, from “state-led transnationalism” (Goldring, 2002) to “global nations” (Levitt and de la Dehesa, 2003) and “diaspora engagement” (Gamlen, 2008). These conceptual distinctions notwithstanding, analysts generally agree on the content and objectives of these policies. The policies are aimed at encouraging migrants to both successfully incorporate within destination societies and to maintain a variety of intensive and ongoing connections with the homeland. This is part of a strategy of sending states to manage the “perils and promises of emigration” (Fitzgerald, 2009: 19). The exact institutional mix of transnational-engagement policies varies across sending countries, as Gamlen’s (2008) crossnational comparison amply documents, but they usually include some combination of policies inducing migrant investment in the homeland (Goldring, 2002; Saxenian, 2006; Iskander, 2010), granting dual nationality and extraterritorial political rights (Itzigsohn, 2000; Martínez Saldaña, 2003; Itzigsohn and Villacrés, 2008; Michael Peter Smith and Bakker, 2008; Escriva, Bermúdez, and Moraes, 2009), offering expanded government services abroad (Délano, 2009), and cultivating continuing identification with the homeland (González Gutiérrez, 1999; for a general discussion of these policies, see Levitt and de la Dehesa 2003; Ostergaard-Nielsen, 2003; and Gamlen 2008).

Explanations for the turn to state-led transnationalism tend to center on the political and economic interests of sending states. Political interests can be understood as driving the turn toward transnational-engagement policies in a number of different ways. The adoption of state-led transnationalism is often an effort to shape the sending state’s emigrants into an effective ethnic lobby within the polity of the receiving state, a lobby that can advocate on behalf of the interests of the sending state within the receiving polity (de la Garza and Pachon, 2000; Ostergaard-Nielsen, 2003). In addition, as these policies have become increasingly prevalent in recent decades, there may be political pressure from the international arena for sending states to mimic the efforts of other states, adopting policies that have become an international norm (Levitt and de la Dehesa, 2003). Luis Guarnizo and Michael Smith (1998) emphasize the economic aspect, arguing that as a result of global economic restructuring, migrant-sending states have become dependent upon foreign investment, and this leads to a “growing dependence on transmigrants’ stable remittances [prompting] sending states to try to incorporate their ‘nationals’ into both their national market and their national polity by a variety of measures” (Guarnizo and Smith, 1998: 8). The policies adopted by countries around the world to link the economic skills and resources that their emigrants have acquired abroad to economic development back home vary around the world. These include efforts by Mexico and other countries to foment migrants’ collective investment in community infrastructure projects (Fernández de Castro, Garcia Zamora, and Vila Freyer, 2006; Michael Peter Smith and Bakker, 2008; Iskander, 2010; Portes and Zhou, 2012); policies by China and India to induce highly skilled, wealthy migrants to help transform the national economy through their investments, skills, and connections (Portes and Zhou, 2012; Eischen, 2013; Yi, 2013); and even efforts like that of Morocco to channel migrant remittances through state-owned banks to help finance large-scale infrastructure projects (Iskander, 2010, 2013).

Understood as driven by the political and economic interests of sending states, state-led transnationalism can come across as an effort at strategic repositioning, something of a counterhegemonic project of peripheral and semiperipheral states to improve their positions within the capitalist world-system. Such a portrayal implies that these policy complexes—and the transnational practices they encourage among migrants—may run counter to the interests of more dominant receiving states in the global North.*

Recent scholarship has endeavored to undermine these and similar suggestions that state-led transnationalism policies promoting migrant reincorporation are antithetical to the interests of the receiving states and civil societies, questioning the common assumption that immigrant incorporation and transnational engagement are mutually exclusive political possibilities (Oboler, 2006; Portes, Escobar, and Arana, 2008; Michael Peter Smith and Bakker, 2008). A continuing engagement with the homeland does not need to work against incorporation and integration into social and political institutions in the receiving country if we recognize the possibilities for a “simultaneity” of experience and practice across borders (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004). Survey research on Latino migrant organization in the United States finds that “migrants and their organizations carry on their everyday activities along parallel tracks that do not appear to contradict, but actually support one another. Transnationalism and political incorporation proceed simultaneously, as local happenings interact seamlessly with those in the home countries” (Portes, Escobar, and Arana, 2008: 1085). This supports the findings of other case-study research demonstrating the compatibility of homeland and hostland political practices and orientations, as migrants are increasingly acting politically on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, living their lives “in terms of and/also rather than either/or possibilities” (Michael Peter Smith and Bakker, 2008: 204).