Do Remittances Increase Support for LGBTQ+ Rights?

• In Event: 50 Years of LGBTQ Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference: Framing and Accessing LGBTQ+ Rights in Democracies

Abstract

People who have migrated to new countries send billions of dollars in remittances to family members each year. Receiving remittances influences the recipient’s voting, political engagement, and beliefs. Our project asks: do remittances increase the recipient's support for gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) rights? We suggest that they do. We theorize that migrants send social as well as economic remittances to relatives in their home countries and that these remittances include ideas about civil rights. We argue that when people move to a country with robust LGBTQ+ rights, they may change their beliefs about LGBTQ+ people and communicate that change to their relatives. We further argue that when the person sending remittances is out as LGBTQ+, they can have a particularly strong effect on their relatives’ beliefs. We hypothesize that social and economic remittances can travel through several pathways: 1) where migrants tell relatives about rights and protections in the host country, relatives are more likely to support similar rights in the home country; 2) where relatives rely on LGBTQ+ family members’ remittances, they are more likely to accept their identities; 3) where relatives see LGBTQ+ people being successful in another country, they are more likely to support LGBTQ+ rights in the home country. To evaluate the hypotheses, we analyze three sources of data: public opinion data from across Latin America that includes information about remittances and attitudes towards gay rights, interviews with LGBTQ+ people who send remittances to family members, and a set of online survey experiments with Mexican respondents who live in migrant and non-migrant households. We find that people who receive remittances are more supportive of LGBTQ+ rights than people who do not receive remittances.

Authors

• Callan Hummel, University of British Columbia

• Sarah Andrea Berens, University of Bremen