The NAID Center has also pioneered the close examination of the poorly understood yet increasingly central dynamics of economic integration in North America; the complex relations between migration, remittances and patterns of economic development in both the U.S. and Mexico. In fact, NAID researchers were among the first to quantitatively assess the impact of migration on local and regional economies and to consider the effects of remitted earnings (money migrant workers send home) on the transnational economic development of both immigrant-sending and immigrant receiving regions. The NAID Center has continued to be an innovative leader in generating empirical and policy analysis of the emerging“globalization from below”, as well as organizing pioneering research collaborations between leading institutions and social actor across borders.
Globalization From Below and Public Goods
With the support of funders including the MacArthur Foundation, the NAID Center directed a transnational team of researchers who conducted comparative research, tracking, and evaluation of the migration/remittance nexus between the Mexican states of Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Oaxaca in Mexico and their hometown associations (HTAs) in California. Using household surveys, participant-observation and comparative case studies, researchers studied the formation and functioning of home-town associations among migrants in California and the state-level federations of such associations, and their respective capacities to remit funds collectively to places of origin in Mexico. Ensuing NAID Center activities including investigating the ways in which governments, NGOs and international development banks could support hometown organizations and remittance flows to promote and finance sustainable rural development and productive investment in migrant sending regions in Mexico.
In 1997, the Mexican State Governments of Jalisco and Zacatecas funded the NAID Center to undertake a study of remittances to those states and the potential to leverage remittances for economic development. As a result, the NAID Center began to develop ties with a number of Mexican hometown associations (HTAs) in California. As these ties to Mexican HTAs have strengthened over time, the NAID Center has been able to undertake original studies of the linked economies between immigrant-receiving communities in California and specific immigrant-sending villages in Mexico.
Transnational Linkages between San Diego and Baja California
The Ties that Bind US project, utilizing funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, was a collaboration between the NAID Center, the International Community Foundation (ICF), California State University at San Marcos, the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, and the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego. The Ties That Bind Us project seeks to study migration patterns, civic participation, challenges to integration, and cross-border linkages between communities in San Diego and Baja California. Based on data from the US census, the Mexican Consulate, border-crossing surveys and migrant focus groups, this project highlighted the plight of immigrants in San Diego County and the potential to resolve some of the problems they face through a transnational approach. Developing Immigrant Participation in Credit Unions via Home Town Associations and Remittance Programs.
NAID Center’s earlier work on remittances and HTAs led to further research to address the lack of savings, remittance, and productive financing options for migrants in their communities of origin as well as in the United States. The NAID Center received funding from the Ford Foundation to partner with the California Credit Union League (CCUL) to provide financial access to immigrants, facilitate cross-border financial and remittance partnerships between banking institutions and HTAs and improve loan capacity for economic development in migrant-sending regions.
NAID Center research highlighted the importance of connecting the end-points between the migrants and Mexican villages in the context of technological innovations which posed both opportunities and challenges for a convergence of a broad range of remittance and financial services mechanisms across borders. The research also helped to identify the constraints and the pathways to increased migrant banking through culturally-appropriate outreach strategies and an expansion of targeted financial products. NAID research also suggested that HTAs were not an automatic vehicle for increasing the banking of migrants in the United States because of their limited role in U.S.-based financial affairs of their members and because their range organizational structures and dispersion of members did not necessarily coincide with credit unions’ focused areas of service.
