Transnational migrants as consumer advocates for remittance reform

ABSTRACT

This extended case study uses a ‘conscientious consumption’ framework and a Polanyian interpretation of transnational advocacy to examine a migrant movement’s efforts to establish pricing fairness and migrant-centred development in the remittance industry. We trace how, between 2008 and 2011, the Transnational Institute for Grassroots Research and Action (TIGRA) utilized discursive and material strategies to leverage grassroots opposition to exploitative remittance companies, to ‘certify’ alternative providers, and to garner support from the Filipino government. TIGRA expanded the scope of transnational advocacy by hybridizing capitalistic and liberatory principles and targeting both market and state actors. Though initial leverage was achieved, TIGRA’s activist allies were ultimately reluctant to engage in consumer-oriented practices. Moreover, given the ascendance of elite discourses regarding remittances and development, TIGRA had limited opportunities to generate alliances ‘from above’. We argue that TIGRA’s construction of migrants as the source and beneficiary of ethical market action inverted standard assumptions of conscientious consumption and, whilst representing an otherwise invisible group, advanced a strong pursuit of power under a usually weak reform paradigm. However, TIGRA’s inability to maintain leadership with respect to its political targets calls into question whether reflexive, market-accommodating transnational movements can build sufficient power to alter neo-liberal regulatory discourses.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• regulation
• politics
• networks
• globalization
• rights

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Fred Block for thoughtful comments on several earlier drafts of this manuscript, Matt Bakker for his insightful suggestions on theoretical framing, and two very helpful anonymous reviewers.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Robert M. Saper http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2184-1709

Notes

1 For instant transfers of a typical monthly amount of $200 (cf. Yang, 2011), migrants in the US can expect the leading company, Western Union, to charge $9.50 (4.75%) if sending to Mexico and $15.26 (7.63%) if sending to the Philippines (World Bank, 2016).

2 However, the industry is not ‘unregulated’. Direction is accomplished through international accounting and standard setting (e.g., Basel Accords), national banking regulations, and the influence of booster organizations, including the National Money Transmitters Association and the Financial Services Roundtable in the US. Since 2009, the G-20 has also sought to coordinate the regulation of international finance and banking (cf. CGAP, 2011; Todoroki, Noor, Celik, & Kulathunga, 2014).

3 In the late 1990s, advocacy groups started legally challenging RTP price exploitation (Bakker, 2015, pp. 63–65) and by the mid-2000s started lobbying for legal consumer protections. TIGRA originally pressured local governments in several US cities to adopt pricing transparency ordinances (Calpotura, interview, 25 October 2010). Industry groups repelled the efforts; however, in 2010 Appleseed successfully introduced nationwide transparency rules via the US Dodd-Frank Act (Appleseed, 2010; cf. LoVoi et al., 2016).

4 Bakker (2015) shows how R-2-D enthusiasm stemmed not from robust observations of remitters’ behaviour, but rather from progressively better measurements of remittance flows that were interpreted as strong upward trends with muted cyclical effects. Informal flows are difficult to measure and may be equivalent to between 35% and 250% of formal flows (cf. Freund & Spatafora, 2008).

5 Bakker (2015, p. 88) points to works by Suhas Ketkar, Dilip Ratha, and the World Bank as laying the ideational groundwork for remittance securitization as a developing country response to an on-going crisis of limited access to foreign aid, credit and investment.

6 Personal connections and political sympathies helped facilitate the exchange between TIGRA and Filipino government representatives: Cavosora was a high school classmate of President Benigno Aquino (Calpotura, personal communication, February 2011), and a fellow Filipino activist/academician initially introduced Calpotura to the CFO commissioner (Calpotura, interview, 15 February 2013).

7 Instituto de Investigación y Práctica Social y Cultural (The Institute for Social and Cultural Practice and Research).

8 The California version of the DREAM Act makes sources of post-secondary financial aid available to residents who accompanied their undocumented parents to the US as children. A federal version has been defeated several times in Congress.

9 Calpotura transitioned out of his executive director position and assumed an advisory role in 2015.

10 Key technical developments included widespread account digitization, more globalized Internet and cellular phone access, and, as of 2007, the proliferation of smart-phones as tools for accessing financial services.

11 In 2014, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and British Labour MP Tessa Jowell attracted public attention through their respective calls to investigate RTP malfeasance and to regulate fees (Sherwood, 2014). This act of politicization represents one of the first times that major figureheads advocated direct intervention to curtail exploitative pricing.