The Children Left Behind by International Migrants from Sri Lanka: Victims or Beneficiaries of Globalization?

Abstract

Development discourse often emphasizes the poverty reduction potential of international migration as a positive element of globalization in general and economic globalization in particular (Das 2009). The strongest evidence in support of this argument is the rapid/continuous increase in the flow of economic remittances bound to sending countries in the global south (De Haas 2005; World Bank 2005, 2011). Perhaps an even more appealing pro-poor property of these remittances is their resilience during global financial crises (see Sirkeci et al. 2012 for evidence during the 2008 crisis). The impact of migration, including that of the remittances, is felt the soonest and the strongest by the immediate members of transnational families left behind by the migrants. This impact, as all other globalization-related impacts, can either be a benign force (Dollar and Kraay 2002) or a malign one (Milanovic 2003). Migration and globalization are closely connected, yet the migration of people is often ignored in the literature on globalization. Children are also often excluded from our conceptualization of the world and research on globalization. This chapter, using data from Sri Lanka, looks at micro-level impacts of the international migration of parents on their children with a view to contributing to this debate from the angle of children. It offers an innovative contribution to the emerging literature on migration and globalization through an exploration of children’s and families’ engagement in migration that draws attention to multidirectional and multitemporal movements within individual, family and community migratory ‘arcs’.