Often, discussions about immigration's effect center on the economic costs and benefits, do immigrants boost our economy or take jobs from the native-born? The billions of dollars they send back each year to their home communities are either hailed as the next development panacea or criticized by people who think they should remain here.
But it's not just money that flows between the US and immigrants' homelands. Migrants also send social remittances, the new ideas, behaviors, and even identities acquired in the US. When we talk about immigration, social remittances are a key part of the equation because they help alleviate poverty, spread democracy, and improve America's relations around the world. Sometimes social remittances change trivial things, like the way people dress or what they eat. But they often have a more far-reaching impact.
When immigrants tell their family back home that they got a job because of their qualifications, not because of who they know, some of them begin to question whether the rigid social hierarchy should remain. When migrants tell how they asked a police officer for help and he didn't ask them for a bribe, their friends and relatives also get the idea that there is a better way.
If schools educate, hospitals cure, and judges mete out justice in the US, why can't they do that back home too? Social remittances also strengthen democratic processes and social and religious institutions. Pakistani women who tell their mothers and sisters back home that they serve on the Islamic Center Board and that they run the religious school can inspire women in Pakistan to do the same.
People from India, who are used to electricity that stays on and water that runs all day, tell their relatives to demand better services from the government. When non-migrants respond, by organizing village committees, paying visits to government officials, or voting candidates out of office, things start to move in the right direction.
A culture of accountability is created that expects efficiency, effectiveness, and equality. More people participate and they have better skills with which to do so. At least, this is democracy in the making; at most, the conditions that cause people to migrate begin to ameliorate.
That's not to say that everything migrants export is positive. Some of the people who stayed behind hold migrants responsible for rising individualism and materialism in their homelands. They say that young people don't learn the value of hard work or respect because they only want to migrate to the US.
Nor is it to say that migrants don't see that mismanagement and corruption exists here. However, relatively speaking, they believe it is better here than at home. Migrants are not only ambassadors for America outside our borders, they also teach us about their countries.
By being exposed to their culture, we become better teachers, politicians, neighbors, and America becomes an even more cultured country than it is already. The health care provider who understands that most Hindu and Muslim youths are not allowed to date does better work.
The senior citizen home administrator who knows that most South Asian families would never dream of putting their elderly parents in a nursing home is more effective. When we debate the costs and benefits of migration, we can't just do it based on what happens inside our borders nor on the basis of a purely economic scorecard. Migrants are diplomats.
When they talk about their experiences here, they educate their family and friends about their lives here. America is transformed from an immoral, family-unfriendly bully to a place with workmates and fellow churchgoers who also care deeply about their families and communities.
Migrants are also interpreters and development workers, spreading skills, democratic values, and ideas about good governance and the rule of law that help bring about peacefully the kinds of changes we are currently waging war for in Iraq. [Peggy Levitt is chair and associate professor of the sociology department at Wellesley College and a research fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University.
Her new book, 'God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape' has just been published by The New Press. Her last book, 'The Transnational Villagers' (UC Press, 2001) was about Dominicans living in Boston.]
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