MIGRATION

According to the United Nations, more people than ever live in a country other than the one in which they were born. The UN Migration Agency (IOM) defines a migrant as:

any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a State away from their habitual place of residence, regardless of: (1) the person’s legal status; (2) whether the movement is voluntary or involuntary; (3) what the causes for the movement are; or (4) what the length of the stay is.

Globally, an estimated 270 million people, or roughly four percent of the world’s population, live and work outside their country of origin, and half of this population are women (UNCDF).

Movement across national borders, or migration, can be voluntary or involuntary. People may leave their home country voluntarily in search of a better life and higher standards of living, or they may be forced to move by forces and conditions beyond their control, such as climate change, war, famine, economic crisis, or other instabilities.

Many migrations are caused by multiple factors and fall somewhere in between these aforementioned reasons. Mama Icha, for example, chose to move to the United States in order to provide childcare to her daughter’s children, but this choice was in response to the lack of affordable childcare options for the family in the US and lack of economic opportunities in Colombia.

According to a 2015 report by Migration Policy Institute, despite being a nation rich in natural resources, exemplary in biodiversity, and populated with diverse talents, “Colombia is the largest source of South American immigration to the United States and the 14th largest source of US immigrants overall, accounting for 1.7 percent of the country’s foreign-born population.”La Casa de Mama Icha asks us to consider what structural factors create a situation by which a country like Colombia with such wealth has to experience rampant displacement of its most valuable resource: its people.

Mass emigration from Colombia to countries like Venezuela, Ecuador, Canada, and the United States began in the mid-20th century as Colombians escaped lack of job opportunities and a decade of civil war called La Violencia, a period of deadly, armed conflict between the warring Liberal and Conservative parties. This in-fighting created power vacuums which gave rise to leftist, guerrilla movements, against which rose paramilitary groups years later. Over the course of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21th century, Colombian civilians have been subject to rampant violence and economic instability as the country’s governance is engaged in this tug-of-war. Leftist groups have used political violence and drug trafficking to fund attempts to resolve excessive economic inequality and the concentration of land in the hands of a small elite; while paramilitary groups, also partially financed with drug trafficking, have fought to maintain the economic and political order which serves their interests. Meanwhile, the United States with its Cold War priorities, provided funding and training to any groups or leaders that would quell rural, working class organizing in favor of leadership and economic policies favorable to United States’ imperial and capital interests (Lee, 2017).

Given these volatile conditions, many Colombians fled their home country during the second half of the 20th century. By 2014, an estimated 1.2 million people residing in the US claimed Colombian heritage, making Colombians the seventh-largest Latin American group in the United States (Carvajal, 2017). Today, all of the Colombian people living in diaspora—around five million people—would form the second most-populous city in Colombia.

Parallel to the migration to other countries, the violence in Colombia also has forced many people, the majority from rural areas, to leave behind their homes and lands and look for refuge in other areas of the country, mainly in cities. According to world statistics reported by The UN Refugee Agency, “Colombia has the highest number of internally displaced people with 7.8 million at the end of 2018.”

Immigrant communities often infuse their host societies with cultural resources such as food, music, arts, and language, as well as economic resources through entrepreneurship and small business ownership. A 2021 study by SCORE, a nonprofit organization supporting small businesses, found that 20% of small businesses in the US are owned by first-generation immigrants, “contributing more to the economy” than almost any other group (other major contributors include veteran and encore entrepreneurs).

For those within the immigrant community, such contributions are not only designed for social mobility, but are also a form of finding community, constructing belonging, and contributing to social justice or cross-cultural understanding. Epifania, for example, runs a thriving catering business in which she introduces fellow Philadelphians to Colombian food. And Michelle Angela Ortiz, Mama Icha’s granddaughter, is a nationally recognized artist who uses her cultural heritage and talents to draw attention to pressing issues within immigrant communities and to call for immigration policy reform.

RETURN MIGRATION

Often, public conversations about migration focus on people’s movement away from a home country to a host country. This prevailing framework tends to overlook those instances in which migrants eventually return to their home country, what’s commonly referred to as return migration. Return migration is difficult to measure or study because much of it is spontaneous and goes unrecorded (OECD, 2020). Just like migration, return migration can be forced—as in the case of deportations—voluntary, or a combination (such as for families who find themselves discriminated against and unable to make a living in the host country). Mama Icha’s return can be said to be a combination of forced and voluntary. While on the one hand, her decision to leave the United States is an act of will, it is a choice that she must make to mend the ruptures in her family created from three decades of living apart due to unsustainable economic conditions.

Given the high numbers of people living outside of Colombia, the Colombian government has developed programs to encourage and facilitate the return of highly skilled emigres or of people displaced by armed conflict. But these programs’ success are limited by “the lack of a comprehensive plan guaranteeing employment and competitive salaries” (Carvajal, 2017). Such programs targeting highly skilled Colombians also do not actively support the fruitful return of elder Colombian nationals like Mama Icha.

HOME

The documentary La Casa de Mama Icha asks us to consider home as not simply a shelter nor simply a personal space rich in personal memories and sentimental value, but also a political space. As Mama Icha and her family illustrate, caregiving decisions are socio-economic decisions. Through years of savings, Mama Icha steadily builds a house in Colombia which is made possible by way of a transnational experience—a transnational experience that was itself compelled by unsustainable expenses of childcare and the family’s search for greater economic opportunities. Mama Icha called this a “double fraud:” in order to have the possibility to live (and later die and be buried) where she wanted, in her own homeland, she had to live in the United States in pursuit of resources to build, maintain, and pay expenses on her dream house in Colombia. In this way, the house, like Mama Icha herself, is made transnational.

Home in La Casa de Mama Icha is also a dynamic feeling and sense of rootedness that exists between and across borders, “understood both as a physical location of dwelling as well as a space of belonging and identity [...] shaped by consumption, remittances, and social networks” (Brickell and Datta, 13-14).

The decisions Mama Icha makes for herself and to support her family are protected rights. Though the right to housing is not explicitly stated in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution, nor is it framed as a fundamental right in mainstream political and social discourse, housing is an internationally recognized right inscribed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent United Nations committees. The right to adequate housing for all persons includes:

• Protection against forced evictions and the arbitrary destruction and demolition of one’s home;
• The right to be free from arbitrary interference with one’s home, privacy and family; and
• The right to choose one’s residence, to determine where to live and to freedom of movement.

Housing is in fact a right upon which almost all other rights depend (Florida, 2017). As per Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs,” people must first meet urgent needs for food, shelter, and safety before they can engage in higher-order and collective struggles for growth, for self-actualization, and for the betterment of society. How, for example, can families exercise freedom of expression or their right to vote, asks Former President Jimmy Carter (Florida, 2017), if their housing situation is not reliable or safe? Migrants work doubly hard to secure housing for themselves and their families despite the common experience of being excluded from voting rights in the US, which would provide more power in shaping conditions that directly impact their need for shelter, experiences of belonging, and opportunities to shape home.

CARE and CAREGIVING

If the amount a job earns is an indicator of its value to a society, the unpaid or under-paid nature of caregiving work is a glaring mismatch between the market value of this service and the essential value it provides to the functioning and well-being of a society. Though “child care is essential to the health of the nation’s economy and to children’s well-being” (Boesch & Hamm, 2020), this work is often unpaid, as was the case for Mama Icha. The National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) and AARP report that in 2020, nearly 1 in 5 or “53 million adults in the U.S. have provided unpaid care to either a child or another adult,” amounting to about $470 billion in unpaid contributions to society. Thirty million of those adults are doing their caregiving work while also working a paid job. Unpaid caregiving labor is disproportionately the responsibility of Black and Latinx women. This suggests that “the devaluing of care is connected to attitudes” about race and gender (Boesch & Hamm, 2020).

Though there are many gains to caring for an elder, including an increased sense of connection and love, unsupported caregiving can cause financial hardships for a family, as well as increased levels of stress, depression, exhaustion, and subsequently, compromised immune function (CDC). Caregivers are also prone to physical disorders such as diabetes or high blood pressure. It is urgent that the United States begin to develop more sustainable, more nurturing, and more affordable systems of elder care (as well as care for caregivers) because the number of people 65 years old and older is expected to double between 2000 and 2030, while the number of potential caregivers within each family will decrease from 7 to 4 in that same time period (CDC).

The AARP Policy Institute advocates for expanding Medicaid to support paying family caregivers. Doing so can have significant advantages:

• The person who needs care can age in their own home, which is the preference for the vast majority of people who need long-term support services.
• The family caregiver earns modest income, mitigating the impact of the job hours they lose by having to take on caregiving responsibilities.
• Costs are kept lower. One analysis found the average monthly cost for self-directed care was $1,774 in 2019, compared to $6,175 for a room in a semi-private nursing home.

REMITTANCES

Remittances are earnings typically sent by immigrants in host countries to relatives and family in their home countries to support living expenses like food, clothing, shelter, health care and even weddings or funerals migrants can’t attend in person. Each year, more than 200 million migratory people send remittances from higher-income countries to over 800 million family members in low- and middle- income countries (IFAD, 2021). Remittances are often critical to the economic sustainability and development of lower-income countries, amounting to over three times the amount of international aid that goes into these same countries (United Nations Department of Economic & Social Affairs, 2019).

In 2020, five-hundred and forty (540) billion (USD) was sent in remittances from higher-income to low- or middle-income countries across the world (World Bank, 2021). Sixty-eight (68) billion (USD) of that global sum of remittances were sent out from families within the United States to countries around the world (Migration Data Portal, 2021), with $6.87 billion (USD) of those remittances going to Colombia (World Bank Data, 2020). This amount accounted for 2.5% of Colombia’s GDP and the second source of overseas income after the exports of oil and coal.

It is tempting to think of remittances as a shocking siphoning of funds from one place of higher resources to a place of lower resources, but more accurately, remittances ask us to consider the interdependency of all countries, on each other and to the laws of nature. Remittances are one way to redress centuries-long imbalances in power and extraction of resources from lower-income countries (McNeish, 2018). We also see the ways in which remittances demonstrate global interdependencies through the lens of climate change. Remittances are a by-product of migration which is itself often compelled by climate-related disasters which disproportionately impact lower-income countries and make livelihoods unsustainable. 50% of the carbon emissions contributing to such disasters are produced by three nations: China, India, and the United States. This means that the industrial practices of these three countries are playing a significant role in creating unsustainable living conditions and thus compelling migration in countries around the world.

(1)We discussed earlier the paradoxical situation of Colombia’s natural wealth and its mass displacements. But this is not a situation exclusive to Colombia. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, an African country, is considered one of the richest in the world in natural resources, but “these vast resources have scarcely benefited the Congolese people. Instead, they have contributed to decades of conflict, numerous serious human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law” (UN Mapping Report, 2003). Such exploitation of Congolese resources by military power and foreign actors have led to Congo having one the highest number of displaced people and a high dependency on the economic resources (remittances) sent by Congolese people living abroad.

According to the United Nations, remittances also can offer essential support to the development of a home country in all of the following ways and many more:

• Poverty reduction: a 10% increase in per capita remittances leads to a 3.5% decline in the share of poor people in the population
• Improving the health and well-being of recipient families.
• Reducing infant mortality: Infants born into remittance families have a higher birthweight and are less likely to die during their first year.
• Remittance-receiving households have demonstrably better educational participation than non-recipients, and invest about one tenth of their income educating their children.
• Transforming the economic role of women both on the sending side and receiving end through financial independence and better employment opportunities.
• Mitigating some of the negative impacts of climate change-related disasters by helping cope with income shortages due to weather-related shocks.

On the other hand, a reliance on remittances can lead lower-income nations to become dependent on the migration of their citizens. Remittances can create both an inflation of real estate costs in such local economies and a new, higher standard of living from the cash flow. If the home economy and job opportunities therein have not substantially improved, these new costs of living can only be sustained through an infusion of earnings from abroad (Wucker, 2004, p. 39). Local governments can also learn to rely on emigration and remittances to replace “the traditional function of a social safety valve,” thus discouraging governments from making the changes needed to support their local economies and create sustainable living conditions (Wucker, 2004, p.38).

Remittances are typically sent as over-the-counter, cash transactions sent via wire transfer through companies like Western Union and MoneyGram. These companies make profit from exorbitant fees charged on each transfer. Such transfer fees might range from 7% of the total funds sent to as high as 20% (Butler, 2019). The World Bank, who tracks remittance flows each year, reports the fourth quarter average (global) fee of a $200 wire transfer in the year 2002 at 6.5%, more than double the Sustainable Development Goal target of 3 percent. (World Bank Data, 2021). By reducing average costs to three percent globally, remitting families would save an additional $25 billion (USD) annually (Elks, 2018).

The UN Capital Development Fund advocates for a move away from cash transfers toward digital. Digital transfers circumvent some of the inefficiencies, exploitative costs, and failure points of cash transfers. Various digital technology companies are starting to compete for a share of the remittance market by charging lower fees. Remitly, for example, is an app-based service where customers can use their smartphones to transfer money digitally abroad at a fraction of traditional Remittance Transfer Providers. Remitly operates in Colombia and might charge $3.99 or approximately 2% for a $200 transaction. Bitcoin may also be a cheaper and simpler way for migratory families to send money back to their host country. As a new medium of exchange, it will require educating consumers on its uses and benefits.