Internal Migration and Money

• In Event: Internal Migration Politics

Abstract

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. During the Great Depression, 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 states like Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, and Texas. More recently, documenting how nearly one in seven new welfare recipients in British Columbia were Canadians from other provinces, The Province newspaper argued 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.” Within the European Union, 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. 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 from other parts of the US. These are all manifestations of the role of money as a barrier or incentive in internal free (or not so free) movement. How can and should we theorize about such phenomena and how can we explain the politics of internal migration?

Author

• Willem Maas, York University