The existential ambivalence that haunts immigrants

I have often wondered, in this blog too, on what home means in such a modern world where moving around is not unheard of.  Though we relocate and make our lives in completely alien settings, we more often than not forget that this is a new practice in human history.  Through her first forty-plus years, my father's mother barely got around to even forty miles away from her birth place.  Forty miles!  And her parents knew a world that was even smaller.  And here I am ten thousand miles away from all those settings.

The two book reviews that I did recently completed were also about the lives of people making a home for themselves in places far away from the Subcontinent.  One book was about home here in the US, and the other was about the Caribbean.

Life is not always easy when we are far, far away from our original homes.  There are moments, yes, when it hits me hard that I am an immigrant. The reminders coming through remembrances of things past, of places and people and foods and music and everything else.  As the author of this essay notes:

Still, no matter how settled, a queasy unsettledness, an existential ambivalence, haunts the immigrant.

An existential ambivalence.  How wonderfully she has articulated that emotion. Damn these writers who can write so well!

The author is no novelist. She, Ruth Behar, is an academic. An anthropology professor at the University of Michigan.  A daughter of Cuban immigrants, Behar writes:

I have surprised myself by ending up becoming more of a rooted creature than I ever imagined I’d be. I have held on to the same job, the same house, the same address, the same husband (I, who never expected to marry). I gave my son, my only child, who is now the age I was when I thought I was never going to settle down, the gift of an immense stability – firm and steady ground on which to stand.
But when I travel and a stranger asks if I’m from Michigan, I immediately reply: ‘I live there, but I’m not from there.’ I feel compelled to tell everyone about my immigrant past: ‘I was born in Cuba, my ancestors were Jews who spoke Yiddish and Judeo-Espanyol, and I grew up in New York. I live in Michigan because it’s where I work.’
I suppose I fear that people might get a mistaken impression of me if they think I am from Michigan. It’s a desire to tell the truth of who I am, to assert I am a person of many diasporas, I come from somewhere else, I don’t have a firm allegiance to any single place. I am passing through, grateful for a place to rest my wings.

This existential ambivalence might not understandable at all to those who have not moved around a whole lot.  But, it is real.  It is an everyday struggle even if one has merely moved from "home" in one part of the country to another.

When I lived in California, an acquaintance missed her home so much that she quit her job and returned home to Chicago.  She missed the "home" that Chicago was, even though it was merely a couple of hours of flight away.

The existential ambivalence can haunt one in other ways too, like with the "descendants of enslaved people in the Americas."  The author of that essay writes about her sense of belonging after taking "a heritage-focused trip" to Nigeria and Ghana.

There are many ways to nurture a healthy cultural identity, but a journey “home” — to a place that makes you feel that you truly belong — is an especially effective one. 

We are people of many diasporas struggling in our ways to deal with the existential ambivalence.

Brain Drain?

The internet was in its infancy, back when I joined graduate school.  Major research universities were connected, of course, and there were plenty of groups that were focused on specific topics.  One of those groups was soc.culture.indian, which was about all things India--from cricket and politics to movies and cooking.

One of the more frequently passed around and commented posts there was about the "n+1" syndrome that apparently affected plenty of students from India.  Those ill with this syndrome will typically tell themselves, and their friends and family, that they would return to India in "n" years.  And, with every passing year, with various life changes, that "n" continued to remain the same number, however.  The "n+1" was about the mind that was conflicted between staying in the US versus returning to India.

I had no such conflict.  And if anyone asked me about my plans, I added my own funny line.  "It is a country with hundreds of millions of people.  They are not going to miss me."  Ha ha.

Intellectually, there was the interest in brain drain.  If the talented leave, then what about the development of the country?  And, what about the investment the country had made in those who leave?  Should there be a tax on the incomes of these expats?

It has been more than three decades since.  The Indian diaspora is the largest in the world:

India has the largest number of persons born in the country who are now living outside its borders. The number of Indian-born persons residing abroad numbered 17 million in 2017.

That is to be expected from a country whose population exceeds that of the population of the entire African continent by a 100 million people.  Let that sink in: India's population is greater than the population of the entire African continent.

I am an Indian-born person, though an American citizen for a long time.  Most Indian-born persons living and working outside India carry only Indian passports.  Their connections to India means that there is one heck of a money flow from the expats to the home country.  How much do the Indian expats send home?

India retained the top position as recipient of remittances with its diaspora sending about USD 69 billion back home last year

69 billion dollars.

I tell ya, they don't miss me one bit!  My exit was no brain drain; as the old joke goes, with my move from India to the US, maybe I even simultaneously increased the IQ levels in both countries ;)

There is migration ... and then there is diaspora

Early on, I  realized that I had a limited vocabulary.  One classmate knew words that I could not even find in the primitive dictionary that we had at home.  As I have noted many times here, my best friend from high school often stumped me with words.  One high school student included a word in her personal statement that was well outside my word list: Sesquipedalian.  It is no surprise to me that she is now wrapping up her doctoral dissertation at Yale!

Maybe that is all the more why Hemingway's works (like here) have always appealed to me, with his short sentences and words that are rarely outside my comfort zone.  William Faulkner may have insulted Hemingway with "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary" but I don't care; hey, I have never read Faulkner ;)  Seriously, I had planned on reading a Faulkner work five summers ago, but gave up after only a few pages.

In graduate school, I was encountering new words and ideas every single day.  One of those is a word that I now use as if I had known it even from my days at the kindergarten with Mrs. Higgins!

Diaspora.

In our daily lives, we don't think much about "diaspora."  But, if we paused to think about it, then in no time we are mighty impressed with the importance of that word and its meaning in the contemporary world.  One can immediately understand why we would want to understand various aspects related to "diaspora."

This essay reminds us that we will be hearing a lot more about "diaspora" given the large-scale movement of people in the recent past couple of years.  However, "while human migration is always part of a diaspora, not all migrations equal a diaspora."  But, of  course, we--including me--use the word "diaspora" a lot more loosely than it ought to be.

There are two weighty ones in human history: the Jewish and African diaspora.  Even a mere mentioning of the Jewish or African diaspora conveys to us that mere movement of people does not make a diaspora.  Right?

Perhaps contemporary Western societies’ misuse of the term “diaspora” to describe any national groups’ geographic migration is changing the meaning of the word. Or, maybe we haven’t done a good job of educating our citizens about distinctions of important universal concepts. Or, maybe we need a new term for many of today’s populations forced to migrate from their homelands. This will be exceptionally true if, unlike groups in the African diaspora, new groups of migrants are socially included in their new locations.

Here is to hoping that we will see more natural assimilation as people move, and not the creation of more tragic diaspora stories.

Kerala: No country for young men

One of the greatest of all hushed-up stories is this: forty-five years ago, when Neil Armstrong opened the Eagle's door and climbed down on to the surface of the moon, he was welcomed by a Keralite who also offered him a glass of hot tea.

Of course, that did not happen.  But, it is a tired-old joke from the old country that easily highlights the presence of Keralites (as in a person from Kerala, which is a state in southern India) seemingly in every corner of this planet--and on the moon too.

According to a recent survey, these expatriates number 1,625,653.  Where are they?

Among them, 1426740 are in the Gulf countries.

As in the countries by the Persian Gulf.  Other estimates place the number even higher.

These expatriates send quite a lot of money back to their homeland:

Kerala has set a new record in remittances this year by already reporting a whopping 36 per cent year-on-year spike in inflows as of June-end at Rs 75,883 crore.

The 75,883 crores of rupees are the equivalent of about 12 billion US dollars, which perhaps makes the expatriates the state's single largest export.

Kerala is, of course, only one example in a world where there are many of us who live in countries that are different from where we were born:

There are more than 230 million international migrants worldwide, which is more than the population of the world’s fifth most populous country, Brazil.

Out of those 230 million, 1.6 million are from Kerala.  The twelve billion dollars from these expat Keralites were about a sixth of what India earned through its diaspora:

India received $70 billion, more than the value of its exports of information-technology services.

More than the IT exports!

The Kerala, and India, stories might be big in the magnitude, but there are others with more impressive numbers:

In Tajikistan, as we have previously reported, migrant workers send home the equivalent of 47% of the country's GDP, and as many as half of the Tajik men in working-age are now believed to be living abroad. Similarly, an estimated 40% of Somalia’s population depend on remittances and need the cash to buy food and medicine.

All these lead to an interesting question: how much do these remittances help with local economic development?  

I noted in this post, from more than four years ago, that the international remittances--and remittances from Keralites who work in other states in India--have not transformed Kerala into an economic powerhouse.  Instead, Kerala has become a money-order economy.  Kerala ranks high, even in the world, on various social development indicators, yes, but could that have been achieved without these international and domestic remittances?

While Sen gave credit to the numerous state-initiated welfare programmes, Bhagwati and Panagariya said that the state's achievement on both the counts was mostly due to the globalisation of the state's economy in the 1990s and the huge inflow of remittance from its large non-resident community.

So, what are the effects of remittances on economic development?  The Economist quotes from an IMF study:

decades of private income transfers—remittances—have contributed little to economic growth in remittance-receiving economies...the most persuasive evidence in support of this finding is the lack of a single example of a remittances success story: a country in which remittances-led growth contributed significantly to its development...no nation can credibly claim that remittances have funded or catalyzed significant economic development.

And notes:

The cash may flow back but the human capital has left. If those who emigrated were not working anyway then the flow of remittances will have a positive effect, but if they were already working in the home economy then the impact will be more nuanced. Inward flows of remittances may boost national income, but GDP measures the output of a country. The effect of remittances on GDP growth therefore depends upon how the money is spent by the recipients.

The export of human capital means that a Keralite scientist might have even worked for NASA and helped send Armstrong to the moon, and could have sent quite a few dollars back to Kerala.  And the leftist politics in the state has certainly achieved remarkable social indicators, largely thanks to the money from elsewhere. But, after all these decades, does the state have a robust domestic economy, or are the youth from god's own country doomed to emigrate in order earn their livelihood, even if means setting up a chai stall on the moon?

Map of the day: the wanderers

The Economist notes:

MORE Chinese people live outside mainland China than French people live in France, with some to be found in almost every country. Some 22m ethnic Indians are scattered across every continent.

As a wanderer myself, I am all the more excited with this discussion.  Plus, it is not the first time I have blogged about the wandering humans--like this one, for instance.