Sending Money Home: Understanding the Social Dynamics of Migrant Remittances

This article synthesizes major strands of scholarship on migrant remittances, addressing the central question of what motivates migrants to remit and how these motivations vary across social, temporal, and structural contexts. We review classical and neoclassical theories, the migration–development nexus, and the New Economics of Labor Migration, highlighting analytical limits in their economistic assumptions. We then examine sociological and transnational approaches that reconceptualize remittances as socially embedded practices shaped by gendered obligations, kinship norms, moral economies, sending-state regimes, and digital mediation. Building on this literature, we outline a multilevel sociological framework that situates remittance behavior at the intersections of microlevel familial subjectivities, mesolevel community expectations and transnational networks, and macrolevel political–economic structures. This framework underscores the recursive relationship between the causes and consequences of remitting, illustrating how remittances simultaneously sustain households, reshape social relations, and reproduce state and global dependencies, thereby challenging linear models prevalent in development discourse.