Internal Migration, Remittances, and Community Development

Filiz Garip, Princeton University

This study seeks to evaluate the developmental consequences of internal migration and remittance flows for 22 migrant sending communities in Thailand. The paper first establishes a theoretical link between migration-remittance motivations and expected changes in the level and distribution of economic resources in sending communities. Emerging hypotheses are then tested on a multi-level, longitudinal, and prospective data set from 22 Thai communities. Quantitative analyses are supplemented with insights from fieldwork to evaluate how economic changes caused by migration and remittances alter the social structure of the community. The paper also attempts to determine how the changes caused by migration-remittance flows in a community affect future migration flows. Utilizing a computational modeling approach, long-term changes in the distribution of resources in a community due to migration-remittance flows, and the subsequent changes in the dynamics of migration are simulated.