International Migration and Community Development: Comparisons of Emigration to the U.S. And Europe from Adjacent Origins in Rural China

Qian Song, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY)

This study will put two prominent emigrant sending adjacent communities in China in comparative perspective, and investigate the differentiated social processes that determine emigrants’ willingness to remit, the amount to remit and spending patterns of the remittances in the home country. The growing volume of comparative literature on on international migration and community development either takes a macro approach, linking Gini coefficient with community emigration prevalence ratio, or overwhelmingly concentrated on the studies of Mexican communities sending emigrants to the U.S. Little attention has been paid to what is happening on the ground at the micro-level, such as remitting decisions and remittance usage by individual households in the perspective of comparative social contexts. Eventually, at the micro-level, we are able to examine the similarities and differences in the social processes at migration origins that generate disparate remittance outcomes in the context of emigration from China.