Remittances of Moldovan labour migrants back home

In this video two important interdependent questions rise: 1. children and transnational families (= families where one or more members live and work abroad), 2. remittances and transnational family welfare.

The astonishing fact that little children, whose parents are forced to work abroad and therefore are taken care of by their grandparents who hardly make the ends meet arise for our consideration such painful issues as the future of the children of immigrants. Obviously, in the case of Moldova, even with the financial aid of their parents through remittances, these children have scarce opportunities for proper education and breeding and, despite of living with their grandparents, are virtually left alone. The psychological trauma of being deprived of parents` love, attention, guidance and control will leave a clear imprint not only on their personal lives but, respectively, on society in general. The practice of leaving children behind in the care of distant relatives, neighbours or even alone is rather widespread in Moldova and Western Ukraine, where the scale of external work migration is large. 

From this video we find out that 1/3 of children in the village school have one parent working abroad and 1/5 have both parents overseas. With the first attempt of comparison of Moldova and Ukraine in terms of transnational families, here I would like to provide a short statistics of Ukrainian transnational families: according to a sociological survey, which studied a situation of Ukrainian females working in Italy and Greece, 94 % of interviewed women left their children behind in Ukraine. Most often children stay with their fathers, but in families of mothers or both parents working abroad, 66 % are left behind in the care of grandparents, and 33 % more stay unattended. Thus, we can come to a logic conclusion that in spite of being significantly better off than children of parents working in Ukraine and Moldova, these “transnational” children are deprived of natural experience of family socialization, lack pedagogical guidance and control, emotional and spiritual support and often get into the category of “problem children” with various criminal tendencies.

I also found interesting the fact that in the first part of the video, a child of an immigrant is presented as a victim, but in the second part (the example of a sewer at a textile factory) a child is depicted as a “stop factor” for a woman who is willing to go abroad for work but has nobody to take care of her child. 

With the quarter of the Moldovan population living abroad and understanding of immigration as “mixed blessing” for them, remittances play an important role both for the economy of Moldova and for the development of living standards in any individual case. So in case of Moldova is emigration more a negative or a positive phenomenon?.. The answer depends on the approach: whether we consider this fact from Moldovan or Greek point of view. The estimated volume of work migrants` remittances to Moldova, going up to one billion USD per year leads us to conclude that migration is economically profitable both for the Moldovan state and for the migrants` families. Nevertheless, the consequences for the economies of the receiving countries are not mentioned (this issue will be presented in upcoming posts).