Remittances As Home Orientation Rooted in the Lifeworlds of Immigrants

The study considers remittances as part of the lifeworlds of immigrants in multiple interactions with return intentions and communication with those left behind. This is an alternative view of the standard approach to remittances as a possible source of development or as a variable to be explained by family solidarity, investment projects or the reasons for return. The key dependent variable is the home orientation of immigrants as a function of remittances, return intentions and communication behaviours, measured in quantitative and typological terms. The typological analysis of home orientation diverges from the standard approach, which is in terms of high or low intensity of cross-border activities of remitting or communicating between immigrants and those they have left behind. It argues for the fact that cross-border activities combine in different ways to generate specific social types of remitting practices. The remitting behaviours of migrants are, in our approach, multidimensional, encompassing economic, social and cultural content. Three hypotheses are formulated on: 1) collective deprivation in remitting money; 2) survival–development–identification strategies of migrants’ families; and 3) higher predictability of home orientation compared to economic remitting behaviours. In this context, higher predictability means greater variation of the synthetic variable of home orientation by social, cultural and economic factors as compared to the impact of the same factors on the more abstract variable of economic remittances.