Collective Outcomes of Social Remittances: Reactions of Local Communities (Acceptance and Resistance)

Abstract

The outcomes of social remittances and their spillover depend on the one hand on the content and modes of transfer, but on the other hand on characteristics of local inhabitants who are potential receivers of social remittances. Our research shows that local inhabitants see migration as a general social phenomenon and not as a new pattern, with examples brought by other people to be eventually followed and adopted. The impacts of migration are perceived in a biased way; on the one hand as modernising local towns (e.g. creation of new work places, better quality of life); on the other hand as adverse to local communities (e.g. breaking family life). In addition, the general attitudes to ideas and behaviours brought from abroad are rather ambivalent among local inhabitants. Migrants manifest what social remittances they acquired abroad with their own behaviours and activities. Less often, they disseminate them to the others. The range of local spillovers of social remittances depends on the social position of a migrant and on a range of his contacts with different categories of local inhabitants. At the same time, social remittances are often resisted by local inhabitants, which is connected much more to the general conservatism of local communities than to the content of these transfers.