Money and Internal Migration

• In Event: Internal Migration Politics and Policy

Abstract

“If You Ain’t Got the Do Re Mi,” sang Woody Guthrie in Dust Bowl Ballads, “The police at the port of entry say… Better get back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee” [‘dough’ is slang for money] – and the Los Angeles Times lauded the police presence at California’s borders as providing much-needed “protection against such swarms of two-legged locusts,” meaning jobless fellow Americans from the aforementioned states. “Nearly one in seven new welfare recipients in B.C. last year were from out-of-province,” affirmed The Province newspaper last year, arguing that, as “more homeless and unemployed people continue to arrive here, British Columbia should make it clear to other provinces that offloading their poor on B.C. is not acceptable.” Meanwhile, US cities and states also pay for the ‘return home’ to other US jurisdictions of individuals and families receiving social assistance, while simultaneously attempting to attract high net-worth taxpayers to move from other parts of the US. These are all manifestations of the role of money as a barrier or incentive in internal migration. California’s “bum blockade” resulted in the Supreme Court affirming the primacy of US over state citizenship, and the British Columbia statistics prompted the province’s Housing Minister to affirm that “We don’t have border security here that says you can’t come into British Columbia. If you arrive at a shelter here, we don’t judge you by where you come from. We try to help you.” In both cases, the nativist backlash against in-migration by fellow citizens thus sparked a counter-narrative of fellow citizenship. Yet many Canadian provinces and US states impose strict residency requirements on individuals receiving social assistance, effectively limiting their mobility within the federation. (For example, Quebec specifies a 7-day maximum period of absence before assistance payments are stopped.) Within the European Union, of course, the injunction that ‘free movers’ must not become a ‘burden’ on the recipient state has been a key condition of EU free movement rights since their origins in the 1950s. This paper investigates the role of money in internal migration, demonstrating the ways in which financial disparities and conditions exist in tension with ideas of shared citizenship.

Author

• Willem Maas, York University