The Remittance Rush May Be Over For Good
The pandemic is depleting the flow of money from abroad, pinching the countries reliant on that income and threatening a long cycle of despair.
Lockdown comes at a cost.
Photographer: Oscar Espinosa/SOPA Images/LightRocket
As the coronavirus pandemic continues, Bloomberg Opinion will be running a series of features by our columnists that considers the long-term consequences of the crisis. This column is part of a package on immigration. For more, see an interview with the World Bank’s expert on migration and remittances, Tracy Walsh on preventing coronavirus from decimating refugee camps, Pankaj Mishra on changing global attitudes toward immigration, and the Bloomberg Editorial Board on fixing U.S. immigration policy.
“Gone to Gulf.” That phrase came up a lot in conversations among grown-ups that I overheard as a schoolboy in Kerala during the early 1980s. My father, who managed a lobster-export business in the port of Kochi, was constantly griping about workers who quit on short notice — or none at all — to take up jobs in the Gulf cities of Muscat, Doha or Jeddah.