Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Migrant Collective Remittances: Transforming Public Works, Local Government and Transnational Civil Society

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Migrant remittances, the portion of earnings foreign workers send back to their countries of origin, reached $276 billion in 2006. Empirical scholarship investigating this source of hard currency concludes that households spend the majority of remittances on basic needs-housing, medicine, food-however, some studies report a portion for 'productive' ends. The extant literature privileges the household as the dominant analytic framework overshadowing the collective efforts of citizens, migrants abroad and government actors to improve local conditions with remittance income. There is evidence to suggest that communities across traditional migrant-sending states are improving social welfare by pooling remittances to finance community projects, although there is currently no data to permit systematic analysis of the determinants of this phenomenon or the outcomes produced. This dissertation rectifies this empirical gap and theorizes the factors that facilitate collective uses of remittances, specifically how migrants and the civic associations they embody in host countries negotiate an alternative mechanism to the electoral process in the provision of public goods and services.This project argues that to explain the variation in remittance-use, researchers must move outside the confines of the nation-state to evaluate migrant cross-border exchanges and the economic and extra-economic linkages they create. Migration induces a spatial extension of social networks across borders enabling the formation of new forms of political agency and civic practice. This research examines the interplay of multiple actors and structures operating at different spatial scales within one comprehensive, interactive framework, creating the opportunity to explain synergy or co-production: patterns of constructive mutual support between state, society and migrant actors, Using a multi-methodological approach grounded in fieldwork, the project explains variation in remittance use across Mexican municipalities from 1990 to the present. The large-n econometric analysis examines the affect of remittances on access to public goods and services, while a survey instrument disseminated to all registered migrant associations in the U.S. collects data on collective remittance practices and public-private partnerships. Follow-up interviews with migrants and government actors triangulate the quantitative component and generate descriptive data on the process of co-production. The database of public works projects and descriptive data accumulated are for the public domain. This dissertation will also make audible the voices of migrants and their actions that lead to political and social re-organization in their home communities, particularly salient during contemporary discussions of immigration policy reform.