Gendering migration and remittances: evidence from London...

Gendering Migration and Remittances:Evidence from London and Northern AlbaniaRussell King,1* Mirela Dalipaj1 and Nicola Mai2

1Sussex Centre for Migration Research, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9SJ, UK2Institute for the Study of European Transformations, London Metropolitan University, 166-220 HollowayRoad, London N7 8DB, UK

Received 2 February 2006; revised 10 July 2006; accepted 13 July2006

Keywords: migration; gender; remittances;London; Albania

INTRODUCTION

Ever since Annie Phizacklea’s One Way Ticket (1983), feminist researchers have highlighted the role of gender in migra-

tion, challenging and overturning previousstudies which either ignored the ‘female side’ ofthe migration story, assuming somehow that allmigrants were male, or were ‘gender-blind’ inthat males and females were included in the statistics and surveys but with no attempt madeto separate out their highly differentiated rolesand experiences. Genderless studies of migrationcontain a fatal flaw: descriptions and ‘ex-planations’ for the migration of ‘people’, byaggregating the very different characteristics,motivations, agencies and relations of men andwomen, end up by failing to portray accuratelythe migration of either sex. Pre-1980s scholarlyliterature on migration too often assumed malesas having the ‘breadwinning’ role, with womenonly migrating as wives, dependants and ‘fol-lowers’ of their ‘pioneering’ menfolk.

Phizacklea’s landmark volume and other sig-nificant statements about female migration in the1980s (e.g. Morokvasic, 1984; Simon and Brettell,1986) did not provide all the answers; rather, theywere the first stage in a debate which is stillongoing. In recent work, Phizacklea (1998,2003a,b) has reappraised her earlier formula-tions, acknowledging that migrant women hadbeen too readily cast in a structural straightjacket

POPULATION, SPACE AND PLACEPopul. Space Place 12, 409–434 (2006)Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/psp.439

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACT

Within the broad and interlinked fields ofgender, migration and development, thegendering of remittances has received verylittle attention. Yet remittances and their uselie at the heart of the migration–developmentnexus. This paper develops a gender analysisof Albanian migration to the United Kingdomand its impact on source areas, which aremainly in northern Albania. Based oninterviews with 26 Albanian migrants in theLondon area and with 46 migrant householdsin northern Albania and in the Tirana area(where many northern households haverecently internally migrated), the paper tracesgender dynamics in migration and indecisions about the sending, receipt anddeployment of remittances, and their potentialfor poverty alleviation and development inAlbania. Despite the potentially ‘modernising’effects of migration and remittances,‘traditional’ Albanian gender roles aregenerally maintained throughout themigration cycle, with only tokenistic changes.Intra-household modifications of thepatriarchal power structures of Albanianfamilies through migration and thedeployment of remittances are more likely tobe generational – father to sons – rather thangender-related. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley& Sons, Ltd.

* Correspondence to: Russell King, Sussex Centre for Migra-tion Research, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9SJ, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

which defined them as a gendered and racialisedclass fraction at the mercy of capitalist forces.Moreover, an exclusive focus on women in manyof these ‘first-wave’ writings of the 1980s tendedto treat them in a non-gendered way by simplyexamining their behaviour without trying tocomprehend the constraints which derived fromtheir sex and their position in society and thefamily – what Tastsoglou and Maratou-Alipranti(2003: 5) called the ‘add-women-and-stir’approach. In other words, such studies over-looked the function of gender as a relational cate-gory implicated in a range of social relationsconnected to the process of migration (Anthias,2000: 24). As a relational concept, it is crucial toappreciate the various ways in which one gender(either male or female) is structured in relation tothe other. In other words, the migration of bothwomen and men ‘is predicated on the time–spacestrategies of persons of the other sex’ (Bjerén, 1997:226, emphasis in original). And yet, the relationalcharacter of gender risks a binary and hetero-normative distinction between males andfemales in migration, ignoring the reality thatwomen and men articulate their migration pro-jects in relation to the time–space strategies of thesame, as well as of the other, sex. Phizacklea, forher part, now argues for a more flexible concep-tualisation of migrant women and of gender rela-tions in migration; she proposes a transformatoryinterpretation of female migration by viewingstructures as both constraining and enabling(1998: 26) – as ‘both the medium and the outcomeof the practices they recursively organize’(Giddens, 1984: 25).

This is but one strand in the ‘second wave’ ofliterature on gendering migration that hasemerged since the 1990s. Another is the ongoingresearch on women, gender and migrationcarried out through the lens of transnationalism(Bailey, 2001). In a recent review of gender andtransnational migration, Pessar and Mahler(2003) are rather harsh in their critique of thetransnational approach for not paying moreattention to gender. This may be because themain proponents of the transnationalist frame-work of migration studies (e.g. Portes et al., 1999;Vertovec, 1999, 2004; Faist, 2000) do less genderflag-waving and subsume reference to genderdynamics in their more subtle accounts; or itcould really be a case of a new paradigm ignor-ing old fundamentals. For their part, Pessar and

Mahler propose a new theoretical frameworkbased on ‘gendered geographies of power’ inorder to allow a ‘more nuanced transnationalexamination of how gender articulates withmigration’ (Pessar and Mahler, 2003: 817). Theirframework (Mahler and Pessar, 2001: 445–8) iscomposed of three elements which we shall selectively use to examine the Albanian case:

� geographical scale recognises that gender oper-ates simultaneously at several socio-spatialscales – the body, the family or household, theethno-national group;

� social location denotes individuals’ positionswithin interconnected hierarchies of materialwealth and privilege – these may changethrough migration to a different socio-economic and cultural setting;

� power geometries (cf. Massey, 1994: 149)acknowledge that time–space compressionproduces new geographies of power and patriarchy – again these may be changed, evenreinforced, by migration to another country, as well as rearticulated through time, as withthe time-compressed Albanian post-communisttransformation.

Two final introductory remarks, in order tobring this Albanian study into sharper focus. Thefirst is a simple heuristic dichotomisation of theinterpretation of migration as a potentially liber-ating and transformatory experience: on the onehand, migration is seen as emancipating forwomen, enabling them to regain a measure ofcontrol over their lives and destinies and to rene-gotiate relations with the men in their familiesand with patriarchy as a wider social structure;on the other hand, the end result could be muchmore negative, whereby migration is yet anotherlayer added to the multiple oppression (cf.Lazaridis, 2000) suffered by migrant women – aswomen, as migrants, as members of the labour-ing underclass, as ethnically stigmatised, andfinally as accepting of these oppressive struc-tures. We ask: how do Albanian migrant womenfare in comparison with these two types ofoutcome?

The second point is to justify remittances as aspecific focus for this paper. Migrant remittancesare increasingly seen as an effective strategy forcoping with poverty and stimulating develop-ment in migrant-sending countries such asAlbania (Russell, 1986, 1993; Taylor, 1999; Nyberg

410 R. King, M. Dalipaj and N. Mai

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place 12, 409–434 (2006)DOI: 10.1002/psp

Sørensen et al., 2002; Sander, 2003; for the Albanian case, see de Zwager et al., 2005; Nikasand King, 2005). Billions of dollars are annuallyremitted across the world: much more, indeed,than aid flows (Gammeltoft, 2002). The analyticalconstruct of ‘power geometry’ suggests ways inwhich we could examine how these flows aremanaged and gendered within a migrant community, in both the sending and receivingcontexts: in Albania and London.

So, to set the scene, this paper is located con-ceptually within the ongoing debate on gender-ing migration studies. It presents qualitative datafrom field research on Albanians who haverecently migrated to London. We are the first toresearch this migrant group in the UK. Secondly,this paper is one of the first to focus explicitly onthe gendering of remittances. This is a relativelynew theoretical perspective in the study ofmigration and development, as we shall see inthe next section.

GENDER AND REMITTANCES

As noted above, there is a considerable literaturenow on gender and migration, and an equallysubstantial literature on remittances and theirrole in developing migrants’ home countries.Until very recently, these two literatures barelytouched each other. Now, some reviewers(Nyberg Sørensen, 2005; Piper, 2005: 10–12;Ramírez et al., 2005; Kunz, 2006) are beginning toexplore what we call the ‘gender–remittancenexus’. These authors point out that nearly allremittance research stems from an overridingconcern with economic development and focuseson the magnitude and utilisation of financialremittances in poor, migrant-sending regions.Most remittance studies do not take a genderedapproach, have not questioned or explored thedecision-making processes behind remittances,and have not acknowledged that remittanceflows consist not just of monetary transfers butalso of social remittances: ideas, practices andsocial capital.

There are several simple yet profound ques-tions to be asked about how remittances are gendered:

� Who migrates and who does not?� How are remittances defined and

conceptualised?

� Who sends remittances?� What stipulations do they put on their use?� Are women more generous and reliable remit-

ters than men?� Who receives remittances?� Who makes the decisions on how remittances

are to be deployed?� How are social and family relations mediated

between senders and receivers, and withinpartial household units in each location (themigrant unit abroad and the ‘residual family’household at home)?

� Above all, how are wider gender relationsaffected by the process of sending money, giftsand ideas deriving from the work of migrantsin foreign places?

Our Albanian case study will not answer all thesequestions, but will shed light on many of them.

Estimated at US$100 billion in 2004, registeredremittances to developing countries represent alarge proportion of global financial flows, out-stripping official development assistance andequivalent to more than half of foreign directinvestment to developing countries. Remittancesare said to be more stable than private capitalflows, less volatile to changing economic cycles(indeed, they may have a counter-cyclical function), more directly oriented to individualfamilies who need support, and more widely distributed socially and spatially than foreign aidwhich is often tied to prestige projects (NybergSørensen, 2005: 1). Increasingly, poor-countrygovernments and international developmentagencies see migrant remittances as ‘manna fromheaven’ – strategic resources to be ‘captured’ andincorporated into national development strate-gies (e.g. Government of Albania, 2004; Interna-tional Organization for Migration, 2005). Thisline of economic policy focuses on the maximi-sation both of overall remittance transfers and oftheir channelling into ‘productive’ investment inenterprises such as efficient farms, small busi-nesses and service industries; spending remit-tances on housing, consumer goods and ritualand celebratory events is seen as ‘wasteful’. Sucha view, however, tends to reflect a narrow, ‘mas-culinist’ interpretation of economic develop-ment, with a lack of attention paid both tobroader social aspects of development (health,education, gender equality, democratisation, etc.)and to the heterogeneity and complexity of

Gendering Migration and Remittances 411


migration experience based on gender, age andother variables (Piper, 2005: 10). Feminist schol-arship has questioned the notion of ‘productive’investment as the only measurable and ‘real’aspect of remittances. Investment in ‘consumer’goods such as food, education, health andimproved housing should be seen as investmentin human capital. Criticism of the ‘ostentatious’spending of remittances on social events such asparties and religious celebrations diminishes theemotional, symbolic and communitarian value ofthese types of investment for different societies(Ramírez et al., 2005: 18). A gender analysis alsohighlights more the role of social remittances,usually defined as ‘the ideas, practices, identitiesand social capital that flow from receiving tosending-country communities’ (Levitt, 1996: 2).Social remittances constitute a thus-far neglectedlocal-level counterpart to macro-level globalmonetary flows, and are key to understandinghow migration modifies the lives of bothmigrants and those who remain at home (NybergSørensen, 2005: 5).

The traditional view in migration literature isthat it is mostly men who migrate for work andincome; women are mainly remittance recipients.This ‘passive receiver’ stereotype ignores twoimportant considerations. Firstly, women need totake on extra responsibilities in the absence oftheir husbands and other male householdmembers: bringing up children on their own,attending to the home, the farm and other liveli-hood duties, and facing social pressures by livingwith the male household head absent. On theother hand, there is also evidence that women areempowered and increase their agency in under-taking these wider responsibilities. Pribilsky’sstudy of Ecuadorian migration to New Yorkshows that the women who remain in theirAndean villages enjoy a higher status throughtheir new role as ‘remittance manager’: husbandsbecome dependent on wives to make wise deci-sions in the deployment of remittances betweencompeting ends (Pribilsky, 2004: 327–9).

Secondly, women are increasingly important asremitters in the new age of globalised and femi-nised migration, within which women havebecome both more numerous and more indepen-dently active in international mobility (Castlesand Miller, 2003: 7–9). Where women migratealongside men, or as semi-independent parallelstreams, recent literature tends to argue that

women send more remittances than men, despitethe fact that, on average, female migrants earnless than males. As Piper (2005: 12) points out,this may be because women are more likely to betemporary migrants, who generally are morecommitted to sending remittances than long-term migrants who have become more settledabroad. The literature also suggests thatunskilled and semi-skilled migrants generatemore remittances than the highly-skilled andprofessionals, and women are more likely to bein the former category. Much also depends onage, marital and life-cycle status. In truth, thelimited evidence that can be mined from existingstudies is fragmented and inconsistent, with different circumstances and cases producing different results, even in the same country(Taylor, 1999: 76).

It is, however, often asserted that, in certaincontexts – the Philippines and Somalia are oftenquoted – women are the more consistent remit-ters: they send more, and more regularly, thanmen (Tacoli, 1999; Salazar Parreñas, 2001; Horst,2002; Abdi, 2006). The ‘nurturing nature’ ofwomen, and their stronger sense of obligationand responsibility for family matters, are oftenadvanced to explain this difference; men areoften accused of being selfish and not fulfillingtheir family obligations. We have the feeling thatthis is ‘truth’ created by assertion and repetition,rather than validated by rigorous scientific inves-tigation. Feminist scholarship on this topic is indanger of fashioning its own myths and stereo-types. Statistically valid comparisons are rare.1

As recipients of remittances, too, there areclaims that women tend to use the incomingresources in a more sensible way (channellingthem into better nutrition, education andwelfare), whereas men are more likely to abusethese funds (Nyberg Sørensen, 2005: 3; Piper,2005: 12–13). It is also suggested that, oncemigrant women marry, their remittances shiftfrom their own families to their husbands’ fami-lies, especially in patriarchal societies (Piper,2005: 13). We will see how relevant this statementis for our Albanian study later in this paper.

ALBANIAN MIGRATION

Albania constitutes the most dramatic and large-scale instance of emigration accompanying andfollowing the political and economic revolution



and restructuring of the former ‘Iron Curtain’countries. Starting on a small scale in 1990, whenthe communist government of Ramiz Alia, suc-cessor to the 40-year regime of Enver Hoxha, wasstill in power, and then escalating with the ‘greatexodus’ of 1991–92 when around 250,000 arethought to have fled over the mountains toGreece and across the Otranto Strait to southernItaly, the relative scale of emigration fromAlbania has been greater than from any othercountry in Eastern or Central Europe (Barjaba,2000; King, 2003). Emigration continued through-out the 1990s and since, reaching another peak in1997–98 during the violence and political chaossurrounding the collapse of a series of corruptpyramid savings schemes. Many emigrants hadinvested their foreign earnings in these schemeswhich, when they folded, entailed a loss of $1.2billion, equivalent to half of Albania’s GDP for1996 (Olsen, 2000: 24).

Key features of the Albanian emigration wereits suddenness and intensity (emigration havingbeen banned for the previous 45 years); its highdegree of clandestinity and (in the eyes of receiv-ing countries) illegality; its focus, at least initially,on neighbouring Greece and Italy; and the factthat it affected all sections of the population, fromscientists and government officials to formerworker-peasants and socially marginalisedgroups such as Roma (Barjaba and King, 2005).Over time it has become more ‘regularised’(through legalisation campaigns in Italy andGreece since the late 1990s) and also more diver-sified geographically, with significant numbersmoving to other European destinations and toNorth America. Britain has become a key desti-nation for Albanian migrants since the late 1990s,in reaction to the pyramids’ collapse and to the Kosovo crisis of 1999, when half a millionKosovan Albanians crossed into northernAlbania.

Recent estimates of the scale of emigrationfrom Albania confirm that no other country inEurope has been so affected by population lossdue to migration in the last 15 years. The 2001Albanian Census recorded a net loss due to emi-gration of 600,000 during the prior intercensalperiod (1989–2001); however, this excludedshort-term emigrants of less than one year’sabsence (INSTAT, 2002: 19). More recently theGovernment of Albania (2004: 40) has revised theestimate to around 1 million, including 600,000 in

Greece, 250,000 in Italy, and 50,000 in the UK, the third most important European destination.Emigrants now account for one in four of theAlbanian population.

Most authorities – both individual scholarsand development-oriented teams from organisa-tions such as the World Bank, UNDP or Oxfam –agree that ‘emigration has been the single mostimportant means Albanian families use tosurvive’ (Olsen, 2000: 37). In the World Bank’sreport on Poverty in Albania we read that ‘migra-tion is the principal means of coping with eco-nomic difficulties’, making the ‘differencebetween being relatively prosperous and beingpoor’ (De Soto et al., 2002: xiv). And in the Alban-ian Human Development Report for 1998 it is like-wise asserted that ‘emigration remains one of the most important . . . means for securing theeconomic future of individuals, families andsociety as a whole’ (UNDP, 1998: 37). Virtually allfamilies have immediate household members orclose relatives abroad, often distributed in two ormore countries. This crucial role of emigration,and its payback of remittances, in alleviatingpoverty and stimulating future development isespecially salient in the context of the collapse ofcollective farming and state-run industries in thetransition to the neo-liberal economic policiespursued by the first Berisha government, withfull Western support, in the years between 1992and 1997.

Most emigration to Britain originates from themountainous north of Albania, where poverty ismost intense and widespread (King, 2004; Zezzaet al., 2005). The emigration rate is also high fromthe southern uplands, but most of this is tonearby Greece. What further distinguishes thenorth is its high rate of internal migration toTirana and other towns of the central, coastalregion, the economic core of Albania. Migrants inBritain may therefore have family and remittancelinks to households in the north of Albania or inthe Tirana region, or indeed to both.

Males have always been a majority in Albanian emigration, reflecting the traditionalAlbanian saying: ‘A man becomes a man out inthe world, a woman becomes a woman rockingthe cradle’. This blatant gendered division oflabour sets the scene for some of our subsequentanalysis. During the Ottoman era, kurbet (whichtranslates as ‘out in the world’) was an estab-lished practice for Albanian men: a response both



to the harshness of the agro-pastoral economy ofa predominantly mountainous country and tothe opportunities available elsewhere in the fron-tier-free Ottoman Empire. Kurbet entailed the sac-rifice of living and working away from home, butit was also seen as a rite of passage and, to someextent, as a ‘golden era’ because of the wealthgenerated by the savings and remittances of themigrants for their families (Barjaba and King,2005: 9–10; de Rapper, 2005: 177–8).2

Since 1990, males have again outnumberedfemales in the migration streams, especially inthe early years of disorganised departure.Through time, however, the sex balance hasmoved towards normalisation. Clear evidencefor this comes from records of Albanians in thetwo main destination countries, Italy and Greece.Regrettably, no figures are available for Albani-ans in the UK. However, if the Italian data are inany way indicative, the picture is one of a rathertraditionally gendered model of Albanian migra-tion, with males departing first, followed bywomen and children (Bonifazi and Sabatino,2003; King and Mai, 2004).

REMITTANCES IN ALBANIA

Remittances have made a major contribution toshoring up the Albanian economy at a time ofgreat political and economic turmoil. Accordingto estimates from the Bank of Albania, whichinclude both formal-channel transfers (via banks,Western Union, etc.) and informal channels (byhand, private courier, etc.), remittances havesteadily increased over the past decade, from$275 million in 1993 to $500m in 1996 (droppingto $267m in the ‘pyramid year’ 1997), to $615min 2001 and exceeding $1 billion in 2004 (deZwager et al., 2005: 21). Figure 1 graphs the trend.In per capita terms, remittances have risen fromaround $100 in the early 1990s to exceed $200 in 2001 and $300 in 2004 (total remittancesdivided by the resident population of Albania).Throughout the period 1993–2004, remittanceshave contributed around a sixth of GDP. On thiscriterion Albania ranks fourth in the world, afterTonga, Lesotho and Jordan (Sander, 2003: 15,based on data for 2001). In addition, remittanceshave consistently been twice the value of exportsand have compensated in great measure for thecommercial trade deficit (Nikas and King, 2005:254).

How have these remittances been used? Evidence from both qualitative surveys (de Sotoet al., 2002: 39–47; Uruçi and Gedeshi, 2003) andfrom sample surveys and questionnaires (Kule et al., 2002; Gedeshi et al., 2003; Arrehag et al., 2005;de Zwager et al., 2005) gives a fairly clear picture,which will be corroborated by our own qualita-tive data later in the paper. Most remittanceincome goes on consumption rather than invest-ment, reflecting the dominant nature of Albanianmigration as a survival strategy. In approximateorder of priority, remittances are spent on:

� daily needs – food and clothing;� improvement in quality of living – furniture,

electrical goods etc.;� enlargement and improvement of residence –

new roof, extra rooms, piped water, properbathroom, etc.;

� acquisition of luxury items – new or second-hand car;

� maintenance of family and community tradi-tions – weddings, funerals;

� investment in an economic activity – farming,industry, trade and services, etc.

The surveys cited above reveal that the over-whelming majority of remittance income is spenton the first three in the above ranking. Probably



year

1100

1000

900

800

700

600

500

400

300

200

100

0

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

US$(million)

Figure 1. Remittances to Albania, 1992–2004.Source: Bank of Albania data in de Zwager et al.

(2005: 21).

the greatest uncertainty – and the liveliest policydebate – surrounds the last on the list. If thepropensity to invest remittances in businessdevelopment could be increased, then the longer-term economic impacts of the remittance inflow(beyond short-term impacts of construction andconsumer purchases) could be enhanced. Atpresent the prospects of this happening are ratherslim because of the poor economic climate, lackof trust and of a business ethic (memories of thepyramids fiasco are still fresh), and the poor stateof key infrastructure – water, energy, transportand communications. Whilst there is some anec-dotal evidence of returned emigrants developingmicro-enterprises in the more productive parts ofsouthern Albania (Nicholson, 2001, 2004), theoverall scale of ‘productive return’ is still small –most investments that are made are targeted atsmall commercial concerns such as bars or filling-stations (Gedeshi et al., 2003: 54–5). On the otherhand, the division between productive and non-productive use of remittances is increasinglyviewed as a false dichotomy. Housing, forinstance, can be considered both as a form of consumption and as a productive investment; as the value of land and housing goes up, somoney spent on improving property can be con-sidered a productive investment, producing eco-nomic rent that can be cashed in at a later date.Having said this, there is a widely-acknowledgedneed for better management of the remittance-investment process (Government of Albania,2004: 43–7; Piperno, 2005; Uruçi and Gedeshi,2003).

THE STUDY

This paper stems from research commissioned byOxfam on emigration, remittances, poverty alle-viation, return migration and development inAlbania.3 The core of the project was six monthsof field research divided into two phases: London(and some nearby towns) and Albania. Semi-structured in-depth interviews lasting around anhour were first carried out in the London area toa non-probability sample of 26 Albaniansaccessed through a variety of avenues, includingone of the author’s personal networks. We inter-viewed 19 men and 7 women: as far as we cantell, this roughly corresponds to the gender ratioof Albanians in the UK, but there are no figuresto confirm this. It is readily apparent, however,

that most Albanians in the UK are youngworking males in their 20s and early 30s. Becauseof these migrants’ vulnerable status, it provedextremely difficult to get people to agree to beinterviewed. Several refusals were encountered,and agreement was usually only reached whenabsolute confidentiality was repeatedly assured.Hence there are no names, locations or revealingdetails in the extracts below. For similar reasons,only eight interviewees consented to be taped;for the rest, detailed notes were taken during andimmediately after each interview.

The interview schedule followed a condensedlife-course approach, starting with backgroundprofile data and moving through reasons for andmeans of migrating to the UK, employment,family relations, remittances, plans for the futureand return. Throughout this sequence of themes,prompt-and-probe questions sought insights into gender dynamics. All interviews were inAlbanian.

The second phase of the research, in Albania,went much more smoothly in terms of accessinginterviewees; 46 interviews were made, most ofthem tape-recorded, transcribed and translated.The interviews were with households withmembers who had migrated to the UK, includ-ing a few where the migrant had returned, eithervoluntarily or through repatriation. The inter-views were distributed across a wide swathe ofnorthern Albania (districts of Shkodër, Kukësand Mat) as well as in peri-urban settlementsoutside Tirana and Durrës in central Albania,where internal migrants from the north had relo-cated. Four interviews were taken in the south,in the districts of Lushnjë and Vlorë. This overalldistribution reflects the geographical pattern oforigin of Albanians in the UK; the locations, communities and even individual householdswere identified through the London-based interviewees.

In selecting the sample in Albania, an attemptwas made to interview an equal number of menand women. In practice, it proved very difficultto interview women away from the rest of thehousehold, due to the nature of Albanian ruralsociety and the lack of separate space within thedwelling. In nearly all cases the encounters werefamily interviews, with the male head speakingon behalf of the household. However, everyattempt was made to involve women in the inter-view. Usually the interviewing context was



extremely friendly and relaxed – unlike the situ-ation in the UK.4 The main topics covered by theinterview were general questions about thefamily structure and members involved in migra-tion, especially to the UK, contacts and relationswith emigrants from the household, and a par-ticular focus on remittances. We particularlywanted to know who received remittances, howdecisions were taken about their use and invest-ment, the impact of remittances on the householdeconomy, and expectations about the futurereturn of the emigrant family members – usuallythe sons and daughters of the interviewees.

GENDER IN ALBANIA

Before presenting and discussing the interviewdata, we need to say something about genderrelations in Albania. This is a potentially hugetopic involving both regional variations (gener-ally the north is more socially and culturally conservative, as are rural areas in general) as well as complex dynamics of change from pre-communist to post-communist times. In giving a brief account there is a great risk of over-simplification and essentialism.5

Northern Albania is the land of the Ghegs,whose traditional clan organisation and dis-persed settlement patterns contrast with thecompact villages and land-owning peasant socialstructures of the south, inhabited by Tosks. Innorthern Albania, much – probably too much – ismade of the legacy of the customary code of lawknown as kanun. Developed during the Ottomanoccupation, the kanun laid down specific rulesgoverning all aspects of Albanian life, includinggender relations, conceptualised within a tribalsociety imbued with extraordinary levels ofpatriarchy and subjugation of women. Althoughessentially an oral tradition, a version of thekanun – that of the fifteenth-century Albanianleader Lek Dukagjin – was collected and trans-lated by Gjecov (1989: xiv) who noted that ‘it hasleft its mark on the character of the people as isdemonstrated in their moral and ethical stan-dards such as a sense of honor, vengefulness,courage and decisiveness in critical situationsand a feeling of closeness within the family, the brotherhood and the clan’.

In the absence of effective government (themodern Albanian state dates only from 1912), thekanun survived until the communist era when it

was partially repressed, only to resurface inmutated forms in the post-communist period.The problem for scholars of contemporaryAlbanian society, which must include the studyof migration and of gender, is exactly how toevaluate these mutated forms; too often, it seems,the ‘old kanun’ is reified as the secret key tounderstanding the alleged complexities and mys-teries of modern Albania – a trap that many NGOreports, travel accounts and even scholarlystudies repeatedly fall into.6 We are ourselvesaware of the danger, in mentioning the kanun, ofreplicating the stereotype whilst deconstructingit at the same time. However, we have to providethis brief but unsatisfactory sketch because kanunwas mentioned in many of the interviews,including some selected for inclusion in thispaper.

What do these background notes on Albaniansocial history mean for post-1990 migration,especially to the UK? Two things. Firstly, the revival of vendetta killings – which todayoften have more to do with recent disputes thanwith honour-bound obligations of the past(Schwandner-Sievers, 2001) – is a motive for theemigration of some young men who are impli-cated, either as potential victims or as obligantsof future revenge murders. Some of our maleinterviewees claimed that they came to Englandto escape a blood feud – although we do not dis-count the possibility that this was fabrication (ashas been suspected in some asylum cases) orexaggerated. Secondly, the relationships betweenyoung women and the men who accompanythem in the migration process – including theirbrothers, cousins and fiancés – have sometimesled to their involvement in prostitution abroad(Mai, 2001). For the purposes of this project, itwas decided that this topic was ‘off limits’. Thereis, however, some evidence from criminal inves-tigations, police records, newspaper reports andtelevision documentaries of Albanians’ involve-ment in the sex industry in London.

As regards the current situation of women inAlbania, the picture is very much in flux, but onthe whole still rather negative. Relevant data arepresented in the 2005 Human Development Reportfor Albania (UNDP, 2005), which focuses almostexclusively on gender issues, in particular theimpact of post-1990 economic trends on thewelfare of women, whilst useful statistical back-up is provided by the Albanian Statistical



Institute’s publication Gender Perspectives inAlbania (INSTAT, 2004), based on the results ofthe 2001 Census. Interestingly, in the formersource the sections on ‘Albanian women anddecision making’ and ‘Women and migration’ areimmediately juxtaposed (UNDP, 2005: 73–6), yetno links are made between the two; so the role ofwomen in decision-making about migration andremittances remains unclear and unacknowl-edged. The main message of the UNDP study,however, is that there are strong inherent biasesagainst women in the transition period, with eco-nomic reforms increasing social, spatial andgender polarisation. Quoting from the report’sexecutive summary:

‘. . . the situation and social position of womenin Albania has NOT changed markedly overthe past decade. There is an increasing gapbetween rich and poor, opportunities and ben-efits between men and women, and rural andurban sectors of society. Gender inequalitiescan be seen in leadership and decision-making,employment and income generation, domesticviolence, trafficking of women, education andthe health sector. Economic and career oppor-tunities for women are still restricted. Societalattitudes are of critical importance in keepingwomen in a secondary place . . . and out ofpublic life and public management.’ (UNDP,2005: 15)

Much of this situation was rather differentunder ‘the regime’ when women were – at leastnominally – more equally treated. We say ‘nom-inally’ for two reasons. Firstly, there is a suspi-cion that some of the regime’s measures, forinstance placing women in public life, weretokenistic, with the main decision-making still inthe hands of men – and above all, of course, inthe hands of one man, Enver Hoxha, the patri-arch par excellence.7 Secondly, in addition to theirstate-provided work, women were expected tocarry the main burden of work in the home. This‘double burden’ of women as workers and asmothers/carers is an old socialist mentality (aswell as a capitalist one, consistent with women’sentry into the workforce) that still lingers on inAlbania. Nevertheless, certain statistics arerevealing: for example, women made up about athird of MPs in the 1970s and 1980s, but only6–7% in the elections of 1997 and 2001.

Overall, there is no doubt that, for Albanianwomen in all walks of life, economic and per-sonal insecurity have increased since the early1990s, despite the fact that in other respectsAlbanian women have more freedom underdemocracy and despite the probable greaterability of women – especially in urban areas – torespond to the new regime of flexibility in thepost-communist era. The large-scale closure andbreaking-up of state industries and farms and thescaling-down of government bureaucracies havecaused high unemployment amongst women,who have generally been the first to lose theirjobs in deference to the priority of limiting male‘breadwinner’ redundancies. As a result, womenhave become more dependent on their familiesand husbands, and more detached from sociallife and the public sphere (Olsen, 2000: 55). Onthe other hand, in rural areas, where many menhave migrated, women have taken on all thefarm work, in addition to other reproductivework; as such, they do participate in the publicsphere, albeit not as equals. Yet also in ruralareas, and especially in the north, families havebecome more concerned about poor levels of per-sonal safety for their womenfolk, especiallyyoung girls who, it has been alleged, have beenlured and even kidnapped by ruthless men(including relatives) for involvement in sex-workmigration (Lawson and Saltmarshe, 2000; Mai,2001).8

MIGRATION: ALBANIA TO THE UK

We now move to our own data, drawn from 72interviews in London and Albania. The relativelysmall size of the sample (especially in the UK),and the role of personal contacts in the interviewaccess process, do not allow us to claim statisti-cal representativeness; but neither is there anyreason to believe the sample is unduly biased,bearing in mind that we were asked by theresearch sponsors to focus on migrants workingin low-skilled jobs in the UK, who constitute theoverwhelming majority.9

Reasons for Migrating

Reasons for migrating varied according togender, and to a certain extent also according toage and family status. Three sets of reasons werereferred to most frequently:



� general conditions of poverty and lack of workin Albania;

� the more specific situation of economic andpolitical insecurity in the wake of the pyra-mids’ collapse and the Kosovo refugee crisis,as well as occasional reference to the bloodfeud (males only);

� family reunion (mainly for women).

The economic motive was the most commonlycited; often this was linked to political instability.This conforms to most interpretations for Alban-ian emigration (e.g. Barjaba, 2000; De Soto et al.,2002; Kule et al., 2002; King, 2004; Nicholson,2004; Zezza et al., 2005; de Zwager et al., 2005).There is no need to labour this point, so just oneinterview clip is sufficient. The interviewee is amiddle-aged man who managed to get to the UKwith several family members. The route is afamiliar one for Albanians aiming for the UK: aSchengen visa and then the back of a truck fromBelgium or northern France.

‘I left Albania because the country was col-lapsing, it was straight after the 1997 pyramidcrisis, criminality and political corruption werewidespread . . . I just felt that my family was indanger and that I could no longer secure afuture for them. I sent my first son to the UKin 1997 because my brother was already there.Then I came here as well with the rest of myfamily in 1998. Since I had a tourist trans-portation license in Albania, it was relativelyeasy for me to obtain a Schengen visa for all ofthe family. I contacted somebody working inBelgium, paid him 3000 US dollars and then. . . we were all smuggled into a truck headingfor the UK.’

Other reasons were articulated instead of, oralongside, the economic one of low incomes,unemployment and the pyramids’ collapse. Someyoung men referred explicitly to the blood feud:

‘I left Albania in 2000 because lots of killingswere happening in the village I used to live in.My brothers-in-law were involved in a bloodfeud. Insecurity and the killings are based onthe kanun. Once the first killing starts . . . it willnever end.’

For female migrants two trajectories emergedfrom our small sample. Most common is thefamily reunion route:

‘My husband went to Italy and after he hadbeen there for about six months he left for theUK. After another six months he brought usover. We decided to go only because of ourchildren. We wanted to give them a propereducation.’

‘I left because I was engaged . . . my fiancécame here because he thought that this was theplace where we would stand the best chancesfor a better future. I waited for three years tojoin him.’

The two brief extracts above illustrate the tradi-tional role of Albanian women as ‘followers’ inthe migration process, which we noted earlierwas also characteristic of migration to Italy andGreece. This is the ‘model’ followed by the major-ity of women coming to the UK from Albania.But there is a second route followed by individ-uals coming from less patriarchal backgrounds,or those with the desire and the wherewithal toescape such structures – like this woman in her20s from a small town in northern Albania:

‘I left because of the Albanian mentality aboutwomen . . . particularly about the way womenshould behave according to age. . . . I mean, ifa woman passes the age of marriage, which isusually 20 years of age, you will get a lot ofgossip from other people about why you arenot getting married and this hurts. . . . Where Icome from women usually marry when theyare between 16 and 20 years old. . . . In thesmall towns, when you finish school or uni-versity and you are still not engaged, they lookat you differently and this makes you pessimistic.’

The Journey

Most males migrating to the UK do so alone –although they may rely on family members andtrusted contacts, as well as less trusted and oftenunscrupulous agents, along the way – and followa similar route. Many have worked first inGreece, where it is easy to cross the border andwork short-term in the informal economy, typi-cally in agricultural or construction jobs, in orderto save money to finance the much longer andmore expensive trip to England.10 This usuallyproceeds by buying a passage (the cost is a few hundred dollars) on a high-speed dinghy



between Vlorë and the south Italian coast.11 InItaly too it is possible for an Albanian to live andwork as an undocumented migrant for sometime. But the real value of Italy is that it is part ofthe Schengen area which stretches overland allthe way to the Channel coast. The journey acrossthis large territory of frontierless Europe isusually by train to Belgium where Albanianagents facilitate – again for considerable fees –attempts to cross to the UK in the backs of lorries,generally without the knowledge of the driver.Women and children are also conveyed in thisway, although some may fly in to join their hus-bands or relatives if their travel documents are inorder and they have the money. The followingaccount is from a young woman arriving to joinher husband:

‘One person accompanied us, a man from thesame village I come from. We first went toGreece with a Schengen visa and then movedon to Italy by boat from there. From Italy wewent to France by train and from there we tooka lorry to the UK. The first time we tried, thedriver caught us. He called the police who sentus to the camp in Calais. We had to go back toParis again and found no luck there. We couldonly arrange to leave again on the fourth dayof our stay in Paris. We did not eat or drinkanything, and it was cold. We embarked in atruck full of rubbish. There were six of us. Westopped in St. Albans [a town just outsideLondon]. The driver reported us to the policewhen he noticed that we were making noise inorder to attract his attention. They first washedus. Later, the police took us to the social secu-rity office. When we were sent to a hotel, Iphoned my husband. We agreed on the placewhere we would meet up and then went to theplace he was living.’

Although the precise details of the route vary,this description of the journey to the UK is typicalfor both men and women. In fact, some accountsare much more harrowing, involving beingdumped in the sea at night off the Italian coast,theft by agents along the way, violence andbribery, and near-suffocation in the backs oftrucks (for examples see Dalipaj, 2005: 54–66;King et al., 2003: 42–6). The risks and hardshipsinvolved reflect the desirability of getting to theUK which, since the late 1990s, has been per-ceived as a much better place to be than Greece

or Italy, the two primary destinations for Albanian migration.12

Life, Work and Gender Relations in London

Most of the males interviewed were employed inlow-skilled casual jobs in the London area, typi-cally in construction and related trades, but somein other sectors such as garages, car valeting andcatering. Wages are low; much work is done ‘offthe books’. With time, as migrants’ knowledge ofEnglish and of ‘the system’ improves, and assome of them sort out their immigration status(e.g. being granted exceptional leave to remainor, since 2002, humanitarian protection status), sotheir relationship with the labour market getsbetter, with higher wages, more secure contractsof employment, and in a few cases independentsmall businesses – for instance as a painter anddecorator (King et al., 2003: 46–9).

Women, if they take part in paid work at all(most are at home looking after young children),tend to work as assistants in shops and cateringestablishments, or as cleaners in hotels andprivate residences. Again the level of pay is low,sometimes below the minimum wage, since thesetoo are mainly informal sector jobs. The twoaccounts below are from female married inter-viewees, but they also shed light on maleemployment and, in a subtle kind of way, ongender relations amongst Albanian householdsin the UK. The speakers also vocalise a mas-culinist version of the economy and of the dom-inant role of male social networks in accessingwork.

‘When we first arrived here we didn’t knowanybody. There was nobody waiting for us. Mybrother came later on. We did not speakEnglish. No one promised us jobs and no oneoffered us a hand. My husband could only finda job after we were here some months. Heworked in construction. That job was badlypaid, very tiring and in the black economy. Heearned £25 per day for 8 hours of work. Hefound that job through friends. Now the situa-tion has changed. He still works in construc-tion but now he is well paid, £60 per day.However, he is still working ‘in black’ and heis paid less than his English colleagues. I havenot worked here. I only attend classes as I havetwo small children to care for.’



‘He found the jobs himself. He went aroundasking in the neighbourhood. In other cases he found a job through employment agencies.But his Albanian friends are always the oneswho give him advice and help him out withwork. I think right now he is satisfied with hiscurrent job. His colleagues are English and hedid not tell me about any particular problem atwork . . . but he does not like talking aboutthese things. . . . I think he has a contract now. . . All his friends work in constructionbecause their asylum applications wererefused. Employers usually do not ask for an insurance number in the construction business.’

Although emigration to the UK has offeredAlbanian women and men the possibility ofgetting paid work and of experiencing them-selves and each other in new ways, mostmigrants seem to reproduce the same canons ofmasculine and feminine roles and behaviour theybrought from northern Albania. The next threequotes illustrate this point from different per-spectives. The first is from a young woman in her20s, married to an Albanian whom she joined inLondon.

‘Albanian women don’t get to know that manypeople here because it is very difficult for themto go out . . . you know the Albanian mentalitygoes on here as well. They have kids, they musttake care of the place . . . there are very fewpossibilities for them to be free. My situation isdifferent . . . for women like me it has changeda little bit . . . with my husband we understandeach other, but in the end it is him who decides. . . the money we make we put it together, inthe same account, and if I need something Ihave to ask him. He never says no, but I stillhave to ask him. My money goes straight intohis account, just like in Albania, only the tech-nology changes. . . . But I would not want tohave a foreign partner, it would be against myvalues, because it is known that an Albanianman would never leave you, while foreign mencan do what they want. . . . I think theseEnglish girls are too free, they spend theirnights at the pub, I mean every night. . . . Iunderstand that they might want to go to thepub sometimes, but not always. It is not a placefor women. And when they go out they do notask permission of their parents, they just do

what they want and don’t think about what theneighbours might think.’

In the above quote we see both a reaffirmationof the behavioural models brought from Albania– ‘My money goes straight into his account, justlike in Albania’ . . . ‘If I need something I have toask him’ – but also some acknowledgement that‘for women like me it has changed a little bit’.Albanian female behaviour is then contrastedwith that of English women, who are perceivedto be too free, spending every night in the pub.This latter point is echoed in the next extract,from a young single male who, in response to aquestion about friendships or relationships withAlbanian or non-Albanian partners, answered:

‘Yes, I had foreign girlfriends . . . mainlySpanish but also English, Polish, Russian. . . . Ido not have any problems! The main problemAlbanian men have with foreign women is thatafter a while they want to leave, but Albanianmen cannot accept that and try to keep themby all means. I cannot stay with a foreignwoman for a long time. . . . However, I haven’tbeen with an Albanian woman for a while.Indeed I do not know them at all. Maybe Iwould prefer to be with an Albanian womanbecause of the language and because they aredifferent from foreign women, I think they are more stable and mature. It depends also onthe man. If the man is smart and strong theAlbanian woman will be even better. I mean,there is no one like an Albanian woman, shelistens to you, while the English woman willsimply tell you she is going to the pub,whether you like it or not. . . . [But] . . . it is dif-ficult to meet up with an Albanian woman . . .they are kept like in a prison, as if they wereliving in Alcatraz . . . they are always con-trolled by their families.’

Again, this last point is picked up, from a differ-ent angle, by the third quote, a cri de cœur froman Albanian teenager living with her family inEngland:

‘My family continues to control me. My olderbrother controls me, he interferes in every-thing. He is over-protective and won’t allowme to have a boyfriend. He gets in my wayeven more than my father does. There are lotsof Albanian men here and very few Albaniangirls, who came with their families. They



usually spend their time projecting themselvesas pure and playing the role of virgins in orderto show Albanian guys that they are good.Because Albanian men want you to be pure, tobe a virgin. Our families keep us closed in athome, under surveillance, because they areafraid of gossip. All Albanians here came fromthe North and everybody knows everybody.An Albanian guy threatened to marry me . . .and now my parents want to force me to marryhim. I don’t want an Albanian man, because he does not care about you. He thinks onlyabout his own pleasure . . . I had an Englishboyfriend once . . . it was completely differentfrom an Albanian guy. I hate Albanians. All myfriends are foreign, not Albanian . . . [But] myfamily wants me to marry an Albanian man,because they are fanatical, they think Englishmen do not respect you . . . They want to goback to Albania one day, but I don’t, I want tostay here and go to college, to enjoy myself.They do not understand me. I do not want tomarry now. I want to be independent. I wantto choose the one my heart wants. I want to goaway from these fanatics. We are not inAlbania.’

The above three quotes offer fascinatinginsights into how ‘Albanian’ gender roles andpositions are mobilised in relation to theirEnglish equivalents as experienced, or perceived,in London. In the interview narratives the twobehavioural codes are expressed contrapuntally,each contrasting and interweaving with theother, but in different ways. Sometimes the‘Albanian way’ is seen as superior to the English,sometimes it is inferior. And note how, in the finalquote, there is a generational and family dynamiccombined with the contrasted behaviour ofAlbanian and English young men.

A further example of this contrapuntal con-struction of Albanian and English cultural andbehavioural norms around gender comes from adifferent interview context, this time in Albania.We met George by chance late one Saturday after-noon. We were on the battlements of Berat Castle,in south-central Albania, admiring the view. Alarge Mercedes came bouncing up the castle ram-parts and a man aged about 30 got out, accom-panied by his teenage girlfriend. Hearing usspeaking English, George came over and told ushe had lived for many years in England. In many

respects George’s story was typical of young menmigrating from Albania; in other respects it wasunusual; above all it was notable for his insightsinto the contrasts between the English ‘way oflife’ and the Albanian mentality, and for the ironyby which his apparent self-awareness of what hehad learnt about ‘English’ behaviour contra-dicted his own behaviour at the time of the interview.

George had started his migratory career in theearly 1990s, working as a seasonal migrant forseveral years in the tourist sector on the Ionianisland of Zakynthos. Mostly he had worked as abarman. One summer he had met, and latermarried, an English girl on holiday, Tracey. Relocating to the London area, he worked in thecatering sector, rising to an assistant managerposition. He and Tracey then separated, and hereturned to Albania where he planned to open ahotel down on the coast.

Several interesting contrasts emerged duringGeorge’s narration of his migrations. WhilstGreece was OK for earning money and was closeby, he railed against the negative view of Alba-nians held by Greeks, limiting the possiblities ofwhat an Albanian migrant worker could do. InEngland, on the other hand, there was no limit towhat he could achieve – people were taken forwhat they were worth. Unlike Greece, where ‘thefamily’ stifled everything, England was where hewas able to ‘find himself’ and be rewarded for hisefforts and talents. George went on to stress howmuch he had learnt in England about differentmodes of behaviour, especially towards women,allowing them independence and the right tospeak for themselves. English people, he said,were calm in a crisis, unlike Albanians (andGreeks) who would quickly flare up. And yetGeorge also displayed patriarchal views andbehaviour typical of the unreconstructed Albanian male. He criticised Tracey for drinkingtoo much vodka on Zakynthos. He talked oftenabout his duty to his father, whose other fourchildren were all abroad, and never about hismother. Most revealingly of all, he completelyignored his girlfriend, who sat silently by his sidethroughout the hour-long discussion. Eventually,when she showed signs of restlessness andboredom, yawning and wandering off, weexpressed concerns about her feelings. Georgedismissed our worries peremptorily: ‘Oh, don’tworry about her, she’s OK’.



SENDING, RECEIVING AND GENDERING REMITTANCES

In this section of the paper we return to the remit-tance-related questions posed earlier, namelywho sends remittances, to whom, and how thedecisions about remittances are negotiated (ornot) within the changed personal and family/household dynamics that emigration inevitablybrings.

We draw mainly on interview data from theAlbanian fieldwork, most of which was carriedout in the sending context of rural north Albaniaand the out-of-town informal settlements thatsurround, but are physically apart from, Tiranaand Durrës. This enables us to match up insightsinto how remittances are handled from both endsof the migration spectrum, Albania and the UK.Happily the results are both complementary andconsistent, albeit with different nuances. Thecomplementarity derives not only from the twogeographical settings, but also from the differentnature of the interviews and interviewees: in theUK mainly younger people in their 20s and 30s;in Albania mainly families dominated by middle-aged and older people, the parents of themigrants in Britain.

The Family Setting

A first approach to analysing the interview material on remittances is to set it within thecontext of the family, the importance of whichwas made plain in numerous interviews. In thisfirst extract, a middle-aged man from a villagenear Kukës, in the northeast highlands,explained to us forcibly:

‘Look, you have to understand something. Thementality here is very different from the one inthe developed world you live in, because animmigrant, even if he earns money with greatsacrifice, has to look back to his family and itsmost important needs . . . which are, firstly, the house, the living conditions . . . then mar-riages, funerals and stuff like that. Not only themembers of a family must take responsibility,but all relatives are responsible and must helpeach other, uncles, cousins, grandmothers,grandfathers, small children, they all are partof the same picture. Nobody helps you butyour family.’

The extract above places stress not only on themoral authority of the family and its extensions,but also indicates some of its spending needs.The same point about the primordial importanceof the family as ‘the regulator of people’ is madebelow in this interview exchange between one ofthe authors and a middle-aged father in ruralnorth Albania, who not only is concerned to finda wife for his son in the UK (and offers to findone for the interviewer too!) but also sheds inter-esting light on the harshness and traditionality oflife in this remote part of Albania.

‘Family is the regulator of people . . . life doesnot finish with us . . . you have to think aboutthe future, about the continuity of your blood-line. I think you are a human being only if youhave family. Time spent without a family forme is lost, wasted. It is for the family that it isworth sacrificing one’s labour, one’s youth. Itis only worth it if it is for the family. . . . We area bit worried now about the son who lives inthe UK. He keeps telling me: “wait a bit more,wait a bit more, I am not ready yet”. And wewait, but he is already 25, by this age he shouldhave children already . . . Without family?Never. Why would you want to migrate if notto start a new family? What other reason couldthere be?’

But has your son got a girlfriend, I mean, whomshould he marry if he hasn’t got anybody at themoment?

‘I’ll find one for him, from the village, a goodgirl . . . If you want I can find one for you aswell, no problem! [general laughter]. . . . It istrue that here in the north we are different fromthe rest of the country, for the fact that manyfamilies were involved in feuds, that livingconditions were harder and therefore illnessesmore serious, one was forced to have manychildren, as some would die in one way oranother.’

Of course, the family has its gendered contrastswithin it, as was made clear earlier. One which isparticularly pertinent to the phenomenon of emi-gration and the impact of remittances is the ‘rule’that females become part of their husband’sparental family upon marriage. This means thatwives become part of their husband’s lineagealso for remittance purposes, even for the wives’earnings as workers abroad. Such a gendered



channelling of remittances clearly works to theadvantage of families with many sons, andagainst those with daughters – as was lamentedto us by an Albanian father who had five daugh-ters (some of them abroad and sending remit-tances to their husbands’ parents) and no sons.From the London interviews several instanceswere given of how this traditional patterning ofparental obligations and remittance destinationwas being re-negotiated. In this first example, ayoung married woman describes the traditionalpattern:

‘You know how it is where I come from . . .once you marry you become part of anotherfamily . . . you cannot really help your family[of origin] any more. . . . I might send a presentto my mother every now and then, so that shecan buy something special for herself, but therest of the money I get is for my own familyhere and my husband’s at home. We put themoney in the same account and then he sendssome home whenever they ask for it.’

In the second example the interviewee relateshow a fairer division of the spoils has beenagreed, but not without tensions, which ariseover the amounts sent and the constant demandscoming from her husband’s side of the family:

‘We have supported both of our families,although more my husband’s. The money wasused to build the new house and to buy newfurniture. My husband is paying monthly forthe education of his brother. He is also sendingmoney to his sister who is completing a univer-sity degree. However . . . they are never contentwith what we send . . . they always ask formore. They think that it is easy to make moneyhere. We sent a lot in the beginning, up to £2500per year, but not any longer. Sometimes I arguewith my husband because he always agrees togive them money . . . and they decide how touse it as well . . . all they do is ask my husbandfor money and he gives it to them.’

Finally, in the third example, this time from anolder woman in her 40s, an equitable distributionhad again been negotiated, but then, at the endof the quote, the formal gender roles reassertthemselves ‘as it was before in Albania’.

‘I have helped my family in Albania. We havehelped the brothers and sisters from both sides.

Every time they have problems they give us aring and then we call them back. When thishappens they always ask for money. Myhusband has sent money to his two brothers.He sent 2 million Lek [equal to roughly$20,000] to one of them because he wanted tobuy a car, and 4 million Lek to the other onebecause he needed to buy some material for hisbusiness. He also sent money to his sister, sothat she could buy some land to build a newhouse in Tirana. I sent money home too, 5million Lek to my brother who wanted to buya new house in Durrës. My husband hasbought some land in Tirana. He thinks eitherto build a house or to buy a flat in Tirana. Wesend the money via Western Union . . . myhusband does everything . . . he keeps all themoney in his name, in his bank account. Noone else has access to it. He still takes decisionsas it was before in Albania.’

Sending and Spending

Understanding the way remittances are sent andspent enables us to uncover the gender-powerand generational dynamics operating both athome and abroad. In the traditional system amarried woman has no economic responsibilitytowards her parents, but only towards herhusband’s family; it is left to the woman’s broth-ers to support her/their parents. When remit-tances enter the picture, this cleavage becomeseven more apparent, and the three prior quotesillustrate various degrees of conservation and re-negotiation of the traditional pattern. Daugh-ters/wives may only be allowed to help theirparents or relatives in certain circumstances or onspecial occasions, when ‘presents’ may be sent; atthe same time, they are still expected to con-tribute to the well-being of their husband’sparents. In the majority of cases, even where afairer division has been agreed, it is the husbandin the UK who manages all the financial transac-tions; and typically, as we show below, it is themale head of the family back in Albania whoreceives and deploys the remittances.

Two further comments on the generalisationsjust made. The first is that there may be femalecircuits of remittances which are ‘hidden’.Female migrants might be able to squirrel part oftheir earnings or savings and convey this moneysecretly to their parents, perhaps most likely to



the mother. Such payments would not berevealed to their husbands, and equally not to usin interviews. Subversion of the hegemonicgender role is therefore not easily documented.However, in other conversations with Albaniansliving in the UK we have ‘soft evidence’ that thistakes place. For instance, an Albanian femalepostgraduate student told us:

‘When I have transported money given to meby married Albanian women in the UK, to giveto their parents back in Albania, I have the sus-picion that the amount given to me didn’t cor-respond to the one agreed with their husbands.In addition women are the ones who do theshopping for food and clothing for the family,since their husbands are at work almost all day.In this way, they control how much money isreally spent on the maintenance of family andhow much is put aside in a “secret” envelope.’

This important quote suggests that women inthese migrant Albanian families have moreagency than is immediately obvious, althoughnot as much as in an ideal situation. Further hints(but not in taped interviews) on this ‘secret’remittance circuit came out in some conversa-tions we had with migrant households inAlbania.

The second comment is much more openlysupported by evidence and this concerns ameasure of intergenerational power shift infavour of the son, who may become more cen-trally involved in how money is spent by theresidual family back in Albania. This emergesclearly in the following conversation in Londonwith a young male migrant from northernAlbania:

‘My father is the one who decides everything. . . but now he listens to me a lot more. Now,if I don’t agree with something he usuallyrespects what I say.’

Is it because it is your money now?

‘Well, look, we don’t put it that way . . . this isthe money of the family and my father issimply the head of the family.’

Does your mother have a say? Can she disagreewith the way money is spent?

‘Well, it has never happened . . . if my brotheror my father decide something . . . I mean they

would not decide something if somebody inthe family would disagree . . . if they decide tobuild a new house they do so for the whole ofthe family . . . not just for themselves.’

What about your wife, can she disagree?

‘It doesn’t make any difference, I mean, she isstill part of the same family.’

But what about the place you might go back to livein, in Albania . . . maybe she would rather livealone with you in a different place than with yourparents?

‘No, no. She knows very well what our economic conditions are.’

And is neatly corroborated by this family-settinginterview in a north Albanian village:

Who gets the money coming from abroad?

‘Father gets it [chorus].’

‘Yes, I get it and put it into the account. But Ispend it for the family, according to what mysons say as well. When they are here, theydecide what they do with the money directly.Sometimes I disagree about priorities. Forinstance I would have rather built a newcowshed instead of buying this new washingmachine for my wife, but my son came andstarted saying “we must get rid of this oldwreck” and that was it. What can I say? Afterall it’s their money we are talking about.’

However, in many interviews in Albania ourquestion about ‘who decides’ the spending ofremittances coming from the UK and elsewherewas met with a measure of incredulity. This reac-tion reflected two sentiments: firstly that thereshould be any suggestion that the male familyhead should not be in charge of such decisions;and secondly that, in the dire conditions in whichmany families were living, there should be anydiscussion over the needs which were so obvi-ously apparent – food, clothes, furniture. Thenext two quotes, both from female intervieweesin north Albania, reinforce these points, andexpress a note of near-ridicule that there was anydiscussion to be had:

‘Who decides? It is the man who decides asusual . . . but the real problem is that we do nothave enough money, we need much more,



although our sons are doing all they can tohelp us.’

‘Would I have liked to use it [the money] dif-ferently? I do not understand. Do you mean wedo not need windows or a door? Or we do notneed to eat? We don’t need to be warm? Thereare not that many decisions to take when youlive like this.’

The cross-generational passage of decision-making power over the use of remittancesreferred to earlier is clearly exemplified in thenext extract, from an elderly father in Bathore,outside Tirana. As well as a nice touch of humour,this conversation reveals another aspect of tradi-tional Albanian family organisation: the respon-sibility of the youngest son to ‘stay behind’ andlook after his elderly parents.

‘Who decides? My younger son, he is now incharge of everything . . . when they [sonsliving in the UK] want to do something theyphone him up and then they decide, altogether,because this place will be left to them.’

What about the mother, does she decide anything?

‘Of course she is there as well when they talkand she says what she thinks . . . and she runsthe place, the housekeeping economy of thefamily.’

But does she decide or not?

‘Well, I give you an example, if they decide thatwe need some beer, then it is up to her todecide which brand to buy.’

Impact of Remittances and the Likelihood of Return

The field evidence on the use of remittances fullysupports findings from other remittance surveysreported earlier in this paper. All over Albania,the story is the same: the first priority for remit-tances is the basic survival needs of the familyand an improvement in the quality of accommo-dation. Most of the dwellings we visited inAlbania were still modest, despite improvementsfinanced by remittances. Such improvementsinvolved various small projects: moving the toiletindoors; repairing or replacing windows, doorsand roofs; buying new furniture and domesticappliances such as TV sets and refrigerators, and

so on. Water and electricity supplies remainproblematic; some households had purchasedsmall generators to cope with intermittent powerprovision.

The contrast between dwellings wheremigrants abroad were sending remittances, andthose housing families or individuals withoutremittances, was all-too-visible in the areas wevisited. This interviewee describes the contrast atKatund i Ri, on the plain outside Durrës, wheremany families originally from the north havesettled:

‘In this area there are about 15 people abroad,the majority in the UK, but only the youngerones have managed to get documents . . . Whyhave they left? To help their families! I only get6000 Lek [about $60] per month. . . . There are11 of us in this house – how could we survive?That is the only possibility, otherwise wewould have to borrow money even to eat, andthat has happened in the past. All of us, all ourfamilies can only survive because we getmoney from abroad. The living conditionscannot be compared: those with relativesabroad live in houses, the others live in shacks.’

Living arrangements for those who do notreceive remittances are usually hard, even prim-itive, as this woman living in a nearby shackrelates:

‘Well, what can I say? . . . We live in a shack. . . we live in very difficult conditions . . . eightpeople together . . . we have nobody abroad.My only son is married and lives here with hiswife and three daughters. We live on socialsupport, about $25 per month for all of us. Wetry and make do with what we have. I bakebread in the oven at home, we live with whatthe garden produces. We don’t have water, orelectricity. My son can’t leave because he is theonly man in the family here . . . now he isunemployed . . . we are lucky if he gets workone day a week.’

Beyond improvements in the household’sbasic living conditions, other priorities for usingremittances are related to the wish to secure therespect of the extended family by allowing themto witness important events such as baptisms,weddings and funerals. These events are hugelysignificant because they mark the history andfuture of the family, and its status and honour.



Such ceremonies may also have a powerful long-term economic rationale: spending remittancesand migrant savings on weddings, for instance,is often parlayed against the plan that the inter-family networks and alliances created by such‘social investment’ will pay off in anothertime–space. Some of these issues are well illus-trated in this family interview in a village inKukës district:

‘When the older son came to visit us fromGreece the first time, he fixed the waterpipeline to the house . . . the younger one alsocame back from Greece and offered to movethe toilet indoors and to improve the kitchenwith new appliances . . . then we had to marryfour daughters and that is a lot of money . . .about £2000 each . . . that’s British pounds,because it was our son in England who helpedus with the last marriage. I mean, all of this fur-niture, everything you see here, the televisionset, the heater, that sofa you are sitting on, webought it all thanks to their work abroad.’

However, the sending and utilisation of remit-tances also depend on often complex interlock-ing factors to do with earning capacities indifferent countries abroad (highest in the UK,lower in Italy, lowest in Greece), legal status inthe destination country, and the shifting plans ofthe migrants to stay abroad, form new families(abroad or at home), or return. Gender rolescross-cut many of these processes. This next tes-timony, from the mother of two sons living inItaly and the UK, reveals how both the way thatremittances are spent, and the migratory projectas a whole, are shaped by hegemonic family pat-terns, gender roles and economic necessities.

‘I have two sons and three daughters. Only thetwo younger daughters are here with me now,they are still at school. One son is in the UK,the other is in Italy, with his sister. He is theone who could help us more, as he can rely onhis sister for everything. She cannot help us asshe has got her life. . . . I mean she is marriedand must help her new family. She sends ussome presents, but that is all she can do per-sonally . . . but she also helps us in other waysbecause she takes care of her brother andorganises everything [for him]. Because helives with her, he gives her everything heearns, and then she saves some for us and

gives him back something for his everyday life. . . she is like a “regulator”. The one in the UKnow has lost the welfare assistance and has gotto pay for everything. So now he is not helpingmuch, but he used to send so much moneybefore. . . . I mean there was nothing herebefore my children left, and with the moneythey all sent we brought the water to the house,bought new furniture and a new heater, weimproved the little food shop I run . . . and weeven bought a piece of land in Shkodër to builda new house for when we will be old and thechildren will be back, if they will ever comeback.’

At the end of the above extract there is refer-ence to future plans to move to Shkodër, the maintown in northern Albania. Other intervieweesalso referred to similar projects, demonstratinghow international migration can be used tofinance an internal migration to a place seen asmore desirable for the family’s future (King,2004). As an aside, the interlocking betweeninternal and international migration is an under-researched field in population and migrationstudies (Skeldon, 2006). The next quote exempli-fies a family migration project which sees thesequence reversed: first, an internal move awayfrom the remoteness of village life in northernAlbania to a place in central Albania, which thenacts as a platform both for a better life for thefamily as a whole, and for the emigration of someof its younger members.

‘We moved from Tropojë to Durrës in 1992.Then my older son went to Greece for sixmonths. He did not like it there but he helpedus a lot . . . thanks to him we built a new homefrom scratch . . . before we used to live in ashack made of wood and metal. . . . He thenwent to Italy and sent money from there too.Now he lives in London, he’s been there twoyears.’

But as sons and daughters emigrate, they mayget married and form their own families abroad,at which point their remittances are either lost ordecrease markedly. The inevitability of this wasaccepted by the interviewees in Albania – afterall, for their children to get married is exactlywhat they would want – but it also raised ques-tions about whether they will return, and if so, to where in Albania. A return to the harsh



mountains of northern Albania is seen as obvi-ously problematic, since the developmentalpotential of this region remains limited; resettle-ment in the more urbanised lowland of centralAlbania may be more attractive. Even in thismore developed part of Albania, however, parentsare skeptical about whether their sons anddaughters will return. The next interview extract,from peri-urban Tirana, shows a typical case ofhow, after a first phase in which the migrantsends home as much as he can to improve theliving conditions of the entire family unit, he thenstarts investing in his own family, building a sep-arate household close to the parents’ house. Italso reveals how the purpose of houses builtfrom remittances changes along with the migra-tory project. When the reality of returningbecomes more unlikely, these houses become sig-nifiers of belonging and proof of achievement, tobe enjoyed only during visits or holidays.

‘In the beginning the first son helped us a lot,me and my wife, but then he started thinkingabout his own family and sent 100,000 Lek[$1000] to get his wife and his children to theUK. . . . Then he helped his brother and hislittle sister, she’s still going to school, withmoney. With the money he sent us we fixed theplace . . . overall we spent about 300,000 Lek toimprove it, new furniture and stuff, but thenwe also had to go to hospital and that waswhere the rest of the money went. However,each of the three brothers built a place forwhen they will be back . . . for holidays, I mean. . . because if they get documents they will allstay abroad . . . they will not come back for real. . . they will live and work there and returnhere more often.’

Alongside the obvious use of foreign earningsfor day-to-day living expenses and improvementof housing and other material aspects of life, wealso investigated whether migrant householdswere using remittances to finance a businessproject. We found very little convincing evidenceof meaningful business investment of remittanceincome in northern Albania. This example ofmodest agricultural improvement indicates thelimited horizons of business development in thispart of the country:

‘Well, we hired somebody with better tools, inorder to work the land deeper. We do not have

the tools or the strength to work the land. . . . Iam the only man in the family and I am over70 years old. . . . Then we bought some betterseeds. . . . But we lack an irrigation system hereand it is very hard work to carry the bucketsfrom the well around the field. We bought a pigonce, to feed him up and then eat him, but heused to eat more than all of us together!’

Down on the coast and around the main urbancentres of Albania the prospects for a more pro-ductive investment of migrant remittances aresomewhat better, as Nicholson (2001, 2004) foundin her field studies in southern Albania quotedearlier. Along some stretches of coast there areembryonic tourist developments underway,although the international market for tourism toAlbania remains extremely small – most ‘tourists’using these beach areas are returning migrantson holiday, the small Albanian elite from Tirana,and foreign personnel (especially aid andhumanitarian workers) based in Albania. But ingeneral the risks involved in developing touristfacilities are seen as too great and the level ofinvestment required is way beyond what mostmigrants are willing to commit.

As yet there is little evidence of definitivereturn migration. During the mid-1990s somereturns occurred of migrants who had been partof the first mass exodus of 1991–92 to Greece andItaly, but the pyramid crisis interrupted this trendand drove many returnees abroad again, sometimes to new destinations such as the UK.Now there are signs of another return wave(Labrianidis and Hatziprokopiou, 2005), but thescale is still relatively small, and it is still mainlyfrom Italy and Greece. Given the recency ofAlbanian migration to the UK, most having leftin the late 1990s, return is so far only discussed,rather than acted upon. Evidence from UK-basedmigrants suggests that much would have tochange in Albania before return could be seri-ously contemplated. Here is one typical reactionfrom a young woman in the UK:

‘If only I had the money I would invest every-thing I have here . . . for my own future, butmost of all for the future of my new family hereand the well-being of my family back inAlbania. . . . What would have to change inorder for me to return to Albania? Everything,from water to electricity, the government . . . Imean, everything.’



In fact, return is probably less attractive towomen than it is to men. Although most womenhave followed a traditional, male-led migrationmodel, their objective conditions of life are betterin England than they would be in Albania, andthey identify strongly with their children’s futurechances of success abroad, and so they are reluc-tant to return. In this sense, women do gain acertain measure of freedom and authority withinthe family when they migrate abroad. For menthere is the return to their parents’ dynasty andextended family, a relocation and restoration oftheir family status and masculinity; for marriedwomen the return is towards the family environ-ment of their in-laws where their mother-in-law,in particular, can play a dominant and constrain-ing role.13 For the small number of more inde-pendent, single women in the UK, the return toAlbania is likely to be an even less attractiveoption. Similar findings emerged from Orgocka’sstudy of skilled Albanian female migrants in theUS: many contemplated return, but concernsover ‘personal security, professional satisfactionand economic benefits’ weighed against actualis-ing the desire to go back (Orgocka, 2005: 149).

Interviews with ‘residual households’ – typically the parents of migrants in the UK –reveal an ambivalent narrative, a kind of ‘mythof their children’s return’. They certainly hope,and would want, their children to return, for only then can the ‘normal’ Albanian multi-generational family recompose itself and be complete, and lend status and fulfilment to theirlives as household and family heads; but theyalso acknowledge that, both from an economicpoint of view and because emigration brings cul-tural change, the return may never happen. Inthis next interview exchange with a middle-agedcouple in Albania, further interesting gender differences can be noted in the father’s andmother’s attitudes towards the likelihood ofreturn, and any cultural changes that their threesons in the UK might have undergone. First, thefather:

‘They like their life over there . . . and theydon’t want to come back. . . . I have found awife for one of them but he does not come back. . . in fact he can’t come because he’s got nodocuments. . . . I haven’t seen my sons in fouryears; if only I had the money I would go thereand see them for a week or so.’

Aren’t you afraid that they will have changed, thatmaybe now they don’t want to marry any more?Maybe they want to live a different life?

‘No, we don’t have these problems here.’

However, when the mother spoke, a morenuanced understanding emerged:

‘Well, the first one is very determined [to comeback and live in Albania] but the second andthe youngest one . . . they have abandoned ourtraditions a bit . . . they say they don’t want tomarry, especially not an Albanian girl. . . . I amnot sure they will come back; they say that theylike it there.’

CONCLUSIONS

This paper has attempted a gendered analysis ofAlbanian migration and remittances, based ondata drawn from 72 interviews with Albanianmen, women and household units in the Londonarea and in various parts of Albania. The choiceof this migration stream is apposite becauseAlbanians in the UK mainly originate fromnorthern Albania where strongly gendered liferoles are still deeply entrenched. We draw on theargument that both men and women shape thegendering of remittances and that patriarchy pro-vides one lens through which this relationshipcan be understood in the Albanian context. Thecase study presented demonstrates how genderoperates both as a structure and as a process,behind and within migration. It vindicates theargument that ‘gender organises migration . . .and that gender relations both facilitate and con-strain women and men’s migratory practices’(Nyberg Sørensen, 2005: 3, emphasis ours).

Let us round up and reinterpret out findings inthe light of key concepts set out in the introduc-tion to this paper. Firstly, the notion of gender asa relational concept, in which the migration ofwomen is predicated on the time–space strategiesof men (Bjerén, 1997: 226), comes across loud andclear: women’s ‘strategies’ of migration are, inmost cases, absolutely dependent on the priormigration of their male partners – husbands,fiancés, ‘protectors’. We have observed a very‘traditional’ model of migration, where womenmigrate after their male partners to join themabroad. Once in the UK, the woman’s role is tosupport her husband, look after children and the



home, and to send remittances to his parents in thecountry of origin. The gendered geography of poweris maintained throughout this migration process,even enhanced in strength through the economicimpact that remittances introduce into the inter-and intra-family dynamics. So, as a transformatoryexperience (cf. Phizacklea, 1998), Albanianfemale migration has its limitations: the gen-dered structures of power inherent in Albaniansociety, and maintained throughout the migra-tion cycle, are constraining rather thanenabling.14

This generally negative conclusion does,however, need further elaboration. Some changeshave been observed, and the situation has to becompared with what the women’s lives wouldhave been like had they not migrated. In somecases we noted a re-balancing of remittanceflows, so that not all were channelled to thehusband’s family in Albania, although the ‘toolof compromise’ here was often to call the remit-tances sent to the wife’s parental household ‘pre-sents’ rather than regular cash flows. Thus, therewere subtle rather than profound changes in thepower geometry of remittance flows – note that,even where the destination of remittances hadbeen re-negotiated, all the responsibility foraccounting and managing the sending of moneyremains with the husband, except in those fewcases where partial evidence suggested the exis-tence of ‘secret’ remittance transfers activated bymarried women to their parental households.Much the same conclusion was found in theremittance receiving context. Household patri-archs – males/husbands/fathers – were incharge, with only tokenistic involvement ofwives, and no involvement of other femalehousehold members such as daughters or emi-grant daughters-in-law. Where decision-makingpower over the management and sending ofremittances has been modified, it has been acrossthe male generation, not across the genderdivide.

Many of these subtle and partial changes areencapsulated in this final quote, which comesfrom one of the few interviews undertaken in thesouth, in Lushnjë district. The interviewee is afarmer, a former agronomist under the commu-nist regime, who had been able to utilise remit-tances from his son in the UK to developintensive agricultural production, includinggreenhouse cultivation, in this fertile part of the

country – one of the rare examples of long-termproductive use of remittances we came across.

‘Well, I receive the money and in the end I amthe one to make decisions . . . but we all takepart in decisions, especially my wife, but nowalso my son, since he is an adult. We have todecide together because we also work alto-gether. We all work for the same enterprise, ourenterprise. My daughter goes to school, butwhen she comes back she prepares food andcleans the place. My wife takes care of thehousehold administration, my son helps meout with everything else. Now we are betterthan when we used to live only on remittances.We earn more and do not need the money fromabroad anymore.’

In this quote we see both a re-mapping of gen-dered and generational responsibilities withinthe family enterprise, but also a rather ruthlessthrowaway reference to the daughter cominghome from school and then preparing food anddoing cleaning.

To sum up our findings on Albanian migrationand changing gender relations, we return to thetwo binary types set out in the introduction, andthen briefly contextualise our Albanian findingsin relation to literature on other countries. Ourevidence generally does not support the notionof migration to the UK as emancipating forwomen, since this migration is articulatedthrough the traditions and power geometries ofnorthern Albanian society, and represents a con-tinuation of those structures in the UK, with onlyminor modifications. Whether migration to theUK can be seen as simply adding to the ‘multi-ple layers of oppression’ (the second type) is alsoa moot point. Compared with what their liveswould have been like in the mountains of north-ern Albania, or in the mud of an unplanned peri-urban district of Tirana, women in the UK areprobably economically better off, although this istempered by separation from family and friendsin Albania and by (in most cases) uncertaintyabout how long they will stay in Britain.

How much can we draw from this case studyto help us understand the gender dynamics ofremittancing more widely? Mahler and Pessar(2001: 441–2) posed the question as to whetherremittances have the effect of reaffirming orreconfiguring gender ideologies and relationsacross transnational spaces. Like most



binary-type questions, the answer is to someextent ‘both’. On the one hand, northern Albaniadoes seem to be an extreme case given theintensely patriarchal character of gender rela-tions, so that emigration has generated newmeans for men to exploit women, for instancethrough trafficking for sexual exploitation (Mai,2001; Schwandner-Sievers, 2001), or through theconstrictive channelling of female-earned remit-tances to husbands’ families in Albania. On theother hand, we have presented evidence to showthat, in some cases, remittances do triggerchanges in social relations within families, whichbecome a site of struggle and negotiation over thedistribution of resources, mediated by gender,patriarchal and generational relations.

Above all, we demonstrate that exploring thegender dimensions of remittances producescomplex and contradictory findings. Our Albanian evidence, on balance, questions the‘new wisdom’ that women remit more than men.This view, in any case, is predicated on a simplesexual division of remittance flow management.As Kunz has recently pointed out (2006: 12), it isvitally important to take into account the culturalspecificity of remittance practices. Research byZontini (2003, 2004) on Filipina and Moroccanmigrants in Bologna and Barcelona is revealingin this regard, and has interesting parallels withthe Albanian results. Zontini finds that the oblig-ation to send remittances is not as strong forMoroccan women as it is for Filipinas. ManyMoroccan women do not send remittances at all,as they migrate to escape rigid gender roleswithin their society of origin (including abusivehusbands). Those who remit do so often to theirwidowed mothers – an example of female-onlyremittance chains (Zontini, 2004: 1123, 1128).Zontini also finds evidence, as we did in London,of women sending money secretly because theirhusbands would never approve (2003: 253). Inthis way remittances become ‘agile transactions’(Ramírez et al., 2005: 15) through which womenare not only able to improve the lives of theirfemale relatives back home, but also function asa site of resistance against patriarchy.

We must acknowledge, finally, that our find-ings are to some extent conditioned by the natureof our sample, which was deliberately focused onworkers at the lower-status end of the labourmarket. We did not, for instance, interview anyAlbanian students at university in the UK, at

least not specifically for this research. For femalestudents this is regarded as a legitimate inde-pendent migration route, not dependent upon aprior male migrant. They may see migration tothe UK as a way of escaping the patriarchal andconservative mores of Albanian society; however,they achieve this by ‘conforming’ to the highly-valued quest for education, thereby bringingprestige (and hopefully some future economicbenefit) to their parents’ family. The theme ofAlbanian highly-skilled female migration hasbeen opened up by Orgocka (2005) in the UScontext; further work needs to be done in European destinations, particularly insofar asgeographical proximity might make such womenmore likely to return (than their North Americansisters) to challenge the post-communist reasser-tion of male hegemonic power in Albanian politics and society.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Oxfam GB and the Fabian Society forjointly sponsoring this study, and to OxfamAlbania for arranging local transport and facili-tating some of the interviews in northernAlbania. Thanks also to Pamela Young, OxfamGB, and Adrian Harvey of the Fabian Society fortheir keen interest throughout. Our greatest debtis to the interviewees for their time, patience andhospitality. Finally, thanks to Richard Black, JulieVullnetari, Rahel Kunz and two anonymous ref-erees for comments on an earlier draft of thispaper, which was first presented at the session‘Perspectives on Transnational Migration:Gender, Development, Space’, Royal Geographi-cal Society Annual Conference, London, 31August–2 September 2005.

NOTES

(1) Curiously, one of the few quantitative compar-isons between remittance patterns from male andfemale Filipino migrants found that males remit-ted more, contrary to the commonly acceptednotion that it is Filipino women migrants who are the ‘better’ remitters (see Semyonov andGorodzeisky, 2005).

(2) This ‘fortune-seeking’ migration continued in theearly decades of the twentieth century by newmigration chains, almost exclusively from south-ern Albania, leading to the US and Australia.



However, we should acknowledge that this his-torical framing of kurbet as a ‘heroic migration’also reflects the ways in which social categoriesare created and mobilised in order to control pop-ulations. Migration may be seen as an act of resis-tance against poverty created by repression, butfocusing on migration should not lead us awayfrom an appreciation of the true historical-structural nature of that repression. This point,and this period of Albanian migration, are dealtwith in more detail in King and Vullnetari (2003:17–22) and Papailias (2003).

(3) The project represented Oxfam’s first significantexpression of interest in the home-country devel-opment potential of international migration, andAlbania was attractive as a manageable casestudy, not least because it was known that Alba-nians had recently become quite numerous asworkers supporting the low-skilled informallabour market in the London area. The projectlasted for one year over 2002–03, and the generalresults were published as Exploding the MigrationMyths (King et al., 2003). Dalipaj’s MPhil thesis(2005) also spun out of this research.

(4) However, we must acknowledge that the ‘scene-stealing’ by the male household head in thefamily interviews and the difficulty in talking towomen on their own (except single widows) havesome implications for our data. The female voicedoes emerge quite strongly in the interviewextracts quoted in the paper, but to get women totalk individually would have required a moreethnographic approach to our fieldwork than waspossible within the time and financial constraintsof this project.

(5) For a much more detailed analysis of regionalvariation and of transitions into and out of com-munism, see the excellent reference text by DerekHall, although his section on the position ofwomen (1994: 82–90) is not the strongest part ofthe book, and his overall account of the post-com-munist era is becoming increasingly outdated bythe fast pace of change since the early 1990s.

(6) For a typical example of this, see Robert Carver’sThe Accursed Mountains (Carver, 1999: 302–12),and for a brief but devastating critique of the util-isation of the kanun as the ‘master template’ forexplaining all aspects of Albanian social actors’behaviour since the fall of communism, see Pandolfi (2002: 205–6).

(7) Although even this image has its limitations.There is some evidence that Hoxha’s wife Nexhmije held considerable decision-makingpower, especially in Enver’s last few years priorto his death in 1985. One suggested scenario is ofan old and incapacitated dictator weakened byseveral illnesses including diabetes and dementia,

while his wife and Ramiz Alia (Hoxha’s eventualsuccessor) held the reins of the country in theirhands. There is more than a hint of this in thestandard histories of modern Albania (e.g.Vickers, 1995: 207–9; Vickers and Pettifer, 1997:10–12).

(8) The ‘kidnapping for sex work’ scenario needsmajor qualification. Media hysteria has exagger-ated the problem, as have some of the ‘victims’themselves who find that they receive more helpand sympathy from NGOs and law-enforcementagencies if they report themselves as kidnappedrather than ‘voluntary’ sex workers. Furthermore,girls who disappear are often reported by theirparents as kidnapped, whereas they may simplyhave eloped or run away.

(9) Other Albanians in the UK include students andintellectuals, with whom we have also held dis-cussions, but not within the remit of this project.

(10) In the last three years (i.e. since the fieldwork forthis paper), it has become more difficult to cross this border, due to the enforcement of theSchengen visa regime in Greece and the surveil-lance of the border area by anti-trafficking unitsin accordance with intergovernmental agree-ments between Albania and Greece.

(11) This fast and short crossing was curtailed at theend of 2002 by the Albanian authorities underpressure from Italy and the EU, leading to thedevelopment of new, more circuitous routes northand south out of Albania.

(12) The reasons for this are complex and to someextent reflect the myths held about the UK, andLondon in particular, by Albanians. It is seen(mainly correctly) as a place where it is easy tosurvive and get a job as an ‘illegal immigrant’,with few controls (no ID cards). It is also seen(more inaccurately) as a place where it is easy to‘get papers’ and become ‘legal’. This reflects, tosome extent, the experience of Kosovan Albani-ans who gained asylum status (and some ‘true’Albanians presented themselves as Kosovans anddid gain entry and support in the UK in this way).For young men in particular, London is also seenas a liberal, exciting, cosmopolitan ‘world city’where their life-dreams can be realised – where‘anything goes’ and ‘everything can happen’.

(13) In the Albanian family hierarchy, if the father (in-law) is head of the family, the mother (in-law) isthe head of the womenfolk.

(14) Interestingly, research on Kosovo Albanians inLondon by Kostovicova and Prestreshi (2003:1086) came to a rather different conclusion. Themigration of Kosovo Albanian women to Britain‘has been an empowering experience’, albeitwithin certain limits defined by their community,such as the proscription of ‘marrying out’. Key



elements of this ‘limited liberation’ are the reduction of the social (and ethnic) pressuresexperienced in Kosovo, newly-gained personalindependence following arrival in the UK, andsupporting themselves by working.

REFERENCES

Abdi CM. 2006. Diasporic Lives and Threatened Identities: Gender Struggles of Somalis in America.DPhil thesis in Sociology, University of Sussex,Brighton.

Anthias F. 2000. Metaphors of home: gendering newmigrations in Southern Europe. In Gender and Migra-tion in Southern Europe, Anthias F, Lazaridis G (eds).Berg: Oxford; 15–47.

Arrehag L, Sjöberg O, Sjöblom M. 2005. Cross-bordermigration and remittances in a post-communistsociety: return flows of money and goods in theKorçë district, Albania. South Eastern Europe Journalof Economics 3: 9–40.

Bailey AJ. 2001. Turning transnational: notes on thetheorisation of international migration. InternationalJournal of Population Geography 7: 413–428.

Barjaba K. 2000. Contemporary patterns in Albanianemigration. South-East Europe Review 3: 57–64.

Barjaba K, King R. 2005. Introducing and theorisingAlbanian migration. In The New Albanian Migration,King R, Mai N, Schwandner-Sievers S (eds). SussexAcademic Press: Brighton; 1–28.

Bjerén G. 1997. Gender and reproduction. In Interna-tional Migration, Immobility and Development,Hammar T, Brochmann G, Tomas K, Faist T (eds).Berg: Oxford; 219–246.

Bonifazi C, Sabatino D. 2003. Albanian migration toItaly: what official data and survey results canreveal. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29:967–995.

Carver R. 1999. The Accursed Mountains: Journeys inAlbania. Flamingo: London.

Castles S, Miller MJ. 2003. The Age of Migration.Macmillan: London.

Dalipaj M. 2005. Albanian Migration to the UK: A HiddenMigration? MPhil thesis in Migration Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton.

de Rapper G. 2005. Better than Muslims, not as goodas Greeks: emigration as experienced and imaginedby the Albanian Christians of Lunxhëri. In The NewAlbanian Migration, King R, Mai N, Schwandner-Sievers S (eds). Sussex Academic Press: Brighton;173–194.

De Soto H, Gordon P, Gedeshi I, Sinoimeri Z. 2002.Poverty in Albania. A Qualitative Assessment. WorldBank Technical Paper 520: Washington, DC.

de Zwager N, Gedeshi I, Germenji E, Nikas C. 2005.Competing for Remittances. IOM Tirana: Tirana.

Faist T. 2000. The Volume and Dynamics of InternationalMigration and Transnational Social Spaces. ClarendonPress: Oxford.

Gammeltoft P. 2002. Remittances and other financialflows to developing countries. International Migra-tion 40: 101–131.

Gedeshi I, Mara H, Preni X. 2003. The Encouragement ofSocial-Economic Development in Relation to the Growthof the Role of Remittances. Center for Economic andSocial Studies, Report for UNDP and Soros Founda-tion: Tirana.

Giddens A. 1984. The Constitution of Society. PolityPress: Cambridge.

Gjecov S (ed.) 1989. Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit – The Codeof Lekë Dukagjini. Gjonlekaj: New York.

Government of Albania. 2004. National Strategy onMigration. Albanian Government in cooperationwith the International Organization for Migration:Tirana.

Hall D. 1994. Albania and the Albanians. Pinter Refer-ence: London.

Horst C. 2002. Xawilaad: the Importance of Overseas Con-nections in the Livelihoods of Somali Refugees in theDahaab Camps in Kenya. Transnational CommunitiesWorking Paper WPTC 02-14, University of Oxford:Oxford.

INSTAT. 2002. The Population of Albania in 2001. MainResults of the Population and Housing Census. Institutii Statistikës: Tirana.

INSTAT. 2004. Gender Perspectives in Albania. INSTAT:Tirana.

International Organization for Migration. 2005. WorldMigration 2005: Costs and Benefits of InternationalMigration. International Organization for Migration:Geneva.

King R. 2003. Across the sea and over the mountains:documenting Albanian migration. Scottish Geograph-ical Journal 119: 283–309.

King R. 2004. Albania: interrelationships between pop-ulation, poverty, development, internal and interna-tional migration. Méditerranée 103: 37–48.

King R, Mai N, Dalipaj M. 2003. Exploding the Migra-tion Myths: Analysis and Recommendations for the European Union, the UK and Albania. FabianSociety/Oxfam: London.

King R, Vullnetari J. 2003. Migration and Development inAlbania. Working Paper C5. University of SussexDevelopment Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty: Brighton.

Kostovicova D, Prestreshi A. 2003. Education, genderand religion: identity transformations amongstKosovo Albanians in London. Journal of Ethnic andMigration Studies 29: 1079–1096.

Kule D, Mançellari A, Papapanagos H, Qirici S, SanfeyP. 2002. The causes and consequences of Albanianemigration during transition: evidence from microdata. International Migration Review 36: 229–239.



Kunz R. 2006. Remittances as transnational processes:outline of a gender-sensitive approach to remit-tances in the case of Mexico. Paper to InternationalStudies Association Annual Conference, San Diego,22–25 March 2006.

King R, Mai N. 2004. Albanian immigrants in Lecceand Modena: narratives of rejection, survival and integration. Population, Space and Place 10:455–477.

Labrianidis L, Hatziprokopiou P. 2005. The Albanianmigration cycle: migrants tend to return to theircountry of origin after all. In The New AlbanianMigration, King R, Mai N, Schwandner-Sievers S(eds). Sussex Academic Press: Brighton; 93–117.

Lawson C, Saltmarshe D. 2000. Security and economictransition: evidence from North Albania.Europe–Asia Studies 52: 133–148.

Lazaridis G. 2000. Filipino and Albanian womenmigrant workers in Greece: multiple layers ofoppression. In Gender and Migration in SouthernEurope, Anthias F, Lazaridis G (eds). Berg: Oxford;49–79.

Levitt P. 1996. Social Remittances: A Conceptual Tool forUnderstanding Migration and Development. Transna-tional Communities Working Paper WPTC 96-04,University of Oxford: Oxford.

Mahler SJ, Pessar P. 2001. Gendered geographies ofpower: analysing gender across transnationalspaces. Identities 7: 441–459.

Mai N. 2001. Transforming traditions: a critical analy-sis of the trafficking and exploitation of youngAlbanian girls in Italy. In The Mediterranean Passage:Migration and New Cultural Encounters in SouthernEurope, King R (ed.). Liverpool University Press: Liverpool; 258–278.

Massey D. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Polity Press:Cambridge.

Morokvasic M. 1984. Birds of passage are also women.International Migration Review 18: 886–907.

Nicholson B. 2001. From migrant to micro-entrepreneur: do-it-yourself development inAlbania. South-East Europe Review 4: 39–41.

Nicholson B. 2004. The tractor, the shop and the fillingstation: work migration and self-help developmentin Albania. Europe–Asia Studies 56: 877–890.

Nikas C, King R. 2005. Economic growth throughremittances: lessons from the Greek experience ofthe 1960s applicable to the Albanian case. Journal ofSouthern Europe and the Balkans 7: 235–257.

Nyberg Sørensen N. 2005. Migrant Remittances, Devel-opment and Gender. Dansk Institut for InternationaleStudier: Copenhagen.

Nyberg Sørensen N, Van Hear N, Engberg-Pedersen P.2002. Migration, development and conflict: state-of-the-art overview. International Migration 40: 5–50.

Olsen N. 2000. Albania. Oxfam Country Profile:Oxford.

Orgocka A. 2005. Albanian high-skilled migrantwomen in the US: the ignored experience. In TheNew Albanian Migration, King R, Mai N, Schwand-ner-Sievers S (eds). Sussex Academic Press:Brighton; 139–152.

Pandolfi M. 2002. Myths and new forms of governancein Albania. In Albanian Identities: Myth and History,Schwandner-Sievers S, Fischer BJ (eds). Hurst:London; 203–214.

Papailias P. 2003. ‘Money of kurbet is money of blood’:the making of a ‘hero’ of migration at theGreek–Albanian border. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29: 1059–1078.

Pessar P, Mahler SJ. 2003. Transnational migration:bringing gender in. International Migration Review 37:812–846.

Phizacklea A (ed.) 1983. One Way Ticket. Migration andFemale Labour. Routledge and Kegan Paul: London.

Phizacklea A. 1998. Migration and globalisation: a fem-inist perspective. In The New Migration in Europe,Koser K, Lutz H (eds). Macmillan: London; 21–38.

Phizacklea A. 2003a. Gendered actors in migration. InGender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Europe, AndallJ (ed.). Berg: Oxford; 23–37.

Phizacklea A. 2003b. Transnationalism, gender andglobal workers. In Crossing Borders and ShiftingBoundaries, Morokvasic M, Erel U, Shinozaki K (eds).Leske + Budrich: Opladen; 79–100.

Piper N. 2005. Gender and Migration. Global Commis-sion on International Migration, Paper 10: Geneva.

Piperno F. 2005. Albanian migrants’ remittances: adevelopment opportunity? In The New AlbanianMigration, King R, Mai N, Schwandner-Sievers S(eds). Sussex Academic Press: Brighton; 118–138.

Portes A, Guarnizo LE, Landolt P. 1999. The study oftransnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emer-gent research field. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22:217–237.

Pribilsky J. 2004. ‘Aprendemos a convivir’: conjugalrelations, co-parenting, and family life amongEcuadorian transnational migrants in New YorkCity and the Ecuadorian Andes. Global Networks 4:313–334.

Ramírez C, García Domínguez M, Míguez Morais J.2005. Crossing Borders: Remittances, Gender and Devel-opment. United Nations INSTRAW Working Paper:Santo Domingo.

Russell SS. 1986. Remittances from internationalmigration: a review in perspective. World Develop-ment 14: 677–696.

Russell SS. 1993. Migrant remittances and develop-ment. International Migration 31: 267–287.

Salazar Parreñas R. 2001. Servants of Globalization:Women, Migration and Domestic Work. Stanford University Press: Stanford.

Sander C. 2003. Migrant Remittances to DevelopingCountries: A Scoping Study. Bannock Consulting for



the Department of International Development:London.

Schwandner-Sievers S. 2001. The enactment of ‘tradi-tion’: Albanian constructions of identity, violenceand power in times of crisis. In Anthropology of Vio-lence and Conflict, Schmidt BW, Schröder IW (eds).Routledge: London; 97–120.

Semyonov M, Gorodzeisky A. 2005. Labor migration,remittances and household income: a comparisonbetween Filipino and Filipina overseas workers.International Migration Review 34: 45–68.

Simon RJ, Brettell CB (eds). 1986. International Migra-tion: The Female Experience. Rowman and Allanheld:Totowa, NJ.

Skeldon R. 2006. Interlinkages between internal andinternational migration and development in theAsian region. Population, Space and Place 12: 15–30.

Tacoli C. 1999. International migration and the restruc-turing of gender asymmetries: continuity andchange amongst Filipino labor migrants in Rome.International Migration Review 33: 658–682.

Tastsoglou E, Maratou-Alipranti L. 2003. Gender andinternational migration: conceptual, substantive andmethodological issues. Greek Review of Social Research110: 5–22.

Taylor E. 1999. The new economics of labour migrationand the role of remittances in the migration process.International Migration 37: 63–86.

UNDP. 1998. Albania Human Development Report 1998.UNDP: Tirana.

UNDP. 2005. National Human Development ReportAlbania 2005: Pro-Poor and Pro-Women Policies andDevelopment in Albania. UNDP: Tirana.

Uruçi E, Gedeshi I. 2003. Remittances Management inAlbania. Working Papers 5/2003. Centro Studi diPolitica Internazionale: Rome.

Vertovec S. 1999. Conceiving and researching transna-tionalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22: 447–462.

Vertovec S. 2004. Migrant transnationalism and modesof transformation. International Migration Review 38:970–1001.

Vickers M. 1995. The Albanians: A Modern History. I. B.Tauris: London.

Vickers M, Pettifer J. 1997. Albania: From Anarchy to aBalkan Identity. Hurst: London.

Zezza A, Carletto G, Davis B. 2005. Moving away frompoverty: a spatial analysis of poverty and migrationin Albania. Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans7: 175–193.

Zontini E. 2003. Family formation in gendered migra-tions: Moroccan and Filipino women in Bologna. InThe Mediterranean Passage: Migration and New Cultural Encounters in Southern Europe, King R (ed.).Liverpool University Press: Liverpool; 231–257.

Zontini E. 2004. Immigrant women in Barcelona:coping with the consequences of transnational lives. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30:1113–1144.



Gendering migration and remittances: evidence from London...

Documents

Transcript of Gendering migration and remittances: evidence from London...