How can anybody possibly enforce this? Let’s say I’m trying to wire money. At which stage of the process and in what manner do I prove that I’m not on public assistance?
8 responses to “An Empty Gesture”
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Yeah, particularly for people sending money to countries whose banking systems aren’t hooked up to ours. How would you ever track that?
AFAICT from using that sort of service, the way it works is, you send money to the money-delivery company in the US, with the contact info of the recipient, and pay them a fee. Then the company sends money to its overseas branch office. Then the overseas branch office takes an envelope of cash and gives it to a kid on a bicycle, and the kid on the bicycle tootles out to the recipient’s house.
None of which is as conveniently trackable as wiring money from a bank account to another bank account.
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Exactly. There’s a million apps that do it. There are so many ways. This sounds nice but it’s fake. Unfortunately.
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“I’m trying to wire money”
Pretty sure Somalis would largely (or mostly) use Hawala which leaves no electronic trace (you pay someone here, someone in Somalia pays the recipient, a bit more complicated than that but not much).
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We used this method back in the USSR when people who managed to get permission to leave would sell their property in the USSR and get paid in the new country. It was a way for emigres to help the relatives they left behind.
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OT:
You recommended a book a while back for understanding the effects of mass migration on the home countries and family dynamics of the immigrants. IIRC that book was Mexican Voices/American Dreams (Davis). Are there any other sources you’d recommend, whether books, authors, articles… ?
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–eg that book focuses on MEX specifically– are there sources (Spanish or English) that get into the situation in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador… ?
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Do you know this one:
The stories are heartbreaking and in almost all of them the parents left the children behind to go to the US.
Pretty much anything about the maras is about absent parents who are up north.
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No, that one is new to me, thanks.
I have the Mexican Voices book on order– just seemed like a big enough deal that somewhere out there, there should be… other books, articles, essays, *something* even if I have to feed it through google translate to read it 😉
-ethyl
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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