The status of remittances in policy discourse has undergone significant recent changes, oscillating between "guilt-money" gifts and "heroic" entrepreneurial investments. Remittances represent the scarce emoluments which fail to make up for the structural losses to a country's economy induced by out-migration. They also represent opportunities for foreign capital to access depressed domestic economies, wherein immigrants anchor transnational networks that, while institutionalized globally, contribute to domestic growth.
Yet a third framework focuses on remittances as embodying a process of commodification within the broader financial marketplace. With mainstream institutions increasingly pursuing the remittance market - staging stark competition for migrants as clients - traditional money transfer operators have developed marketing campaigns to profile their brand distinctiveness to target different audiences with culturally-specific vernaculars and symbol systems.
Working at the intersection of political economy, rhetoric, branding analysis and international law, this paper aims to detail the financial and market packaging of remittances in terms of social, political and economic inclusion. We will examine how banking and branding incorporate as clients the targets of exclusionary immigration rhetoric and regulation - namely, documented and undocumented migrants - as the basis for commodification. Focusing on specific financial products and a global commercial campaign, we highlight the forms of differential inclusion produced as banks and brands re-work some of the control dispositifs of national immigration systems.
Tracing the genealogy of these financial transactions within the banking system and the world of brands, we contribute to new understandings of identity and the layers of membership in national economic prosperity.
