The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality

Cati Coe is associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers Universtiy. She is the author of Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools: Youth, Nationalism, and the Transformation of Knowledge, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07224-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07238-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07241-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226072418.001.0001

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Coe, Cati, author.

The scattered family : parenting, African migrants, and global inequality / Cati Coe.

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Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-07224-1 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN 978-0-226-07238-8 (paperback : alkaline paper)

ISBN 978-0-226-07241-8 (e-book)

1. Foreign workers, Ghanaian—United States.    2. Families—Ghana.    3. Children of foreign workers.    4. Foreign workers’ families.    5. Transnationalism—Social aspects.    I. Title.

HQ696.8.C64 2014

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2013008861

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

The Scattered Family

Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality

CATI COE

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION. A Scattering of Families

ONE. A History of Family Reciprocities: Material Exchanges between the Generations in Akuapem

TWO. Distributed Parenting in the Twentieth Century

THREE. International Migration and Fosterage: How US Immigration Law Separates Families

FOUR. Work and Child Care in the United States

FIVE. Borderwork: A Repertoire Made Conscious

SIX. The Dilemmas of Fostering the Children of Transnational Migrants

SEVEN. Children’s Expectations of Care: Love, Money, and Living Together

CONCLUSION. Barriers and Openings

Notes

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has benefited from the support of many people and institutions. The support came in numerous forms: through advice, providing me with a place to stay, trudging with me up and down the hills of Akropong, listening to recordings and transcribing them, reading my work and commenting on it, and giving me the financial resources to make it all happen.

First and foremost, I am so grateful to all my informants and their families in Ghana and the United States for letting me know about their lives and experiences. Two individuals in particular focused my attention on this line of research eight years ago, when I had only a vague notion of what I might be doing. Several Ghanaian churches on the East Coast welcomed me.

Kweku Aryeh, Joe Banson, and Margaret Rose Tettey helped immensely with my research in Akropong, helping me conduct interviews and focus group discussions, come up with questions, and guide the research itself. Kweku Aryeh walked with me for days on end in the hot sun without complaint so that we might make contact with as many households as possible. Through Kwesi Yankah’s aid, Rogers Krobea Asante, Bright Nkrumah, and Emmanuel Ofori Amo were stalwarts in the frustrating and slow task of transcribing the many recordings. They helped me realize how much Akuapem people used Asante Twi. Later, Joe Banson and Margaret Rose Tettey helped me translate the more opaque bits of the transcriptions. Without all their efforts, this work could not have been completed. The home of Kwame and Mrs. Adu-Bediako in Akropong provided a calm place for thought and reflection after busy days of interviews and interpretation.

Earlier versions of these chapters were presented at different conferences and workshops, and I am grateful to many colleagues for their thoughts in response and in subsequent conversations: Erdmute Alber, Caroline Bledsoe, Deborah Boehm, Joanna Dreby, Esther Goody, Michelle Gilbert, Valentina Mazzucato, William Murphy, Catrien Notermans, Rachel Reynolds, Carola Suárez-Orozco, Sjaak van der Geest, and Ann Whitehead.

Emmanuel Ayesu, Carol Brandt, Vibiana Bowman Cvetokovic, Mary Ebeling, Inma Garcia-Sanchez, Kathy Howard, and Rachel Reynolds gave me feedback and encouragement on initial drafts of this manuscript. Jon Landau, an immigration lawyer in Philadelphia, made sure that my presentation of US immigration law was accurate. The most extensive commentary on the manuscript came from my mother and father, Robert P. Coe and Jane Meleney Coe, who know Ghana well from living there in the late 1960s and early 1980s, and Cheryl Shipman, who approached my writing with a keen eye for inconsistency and confusion. Three anonymous reviewers provided extremely helpful and thoughtful comments. To all of you, I am thankful for your suggestions regarding theoretical clarity, organization, and gaps in information.

This research was financially supported by numerous organizations: from the first by my home institution of Rutgers University, through the Research Council and the Childhood Studies Center, which paid for short trips to Ghana, Basel, and Northwestern University, where the Polly Hill Papers are located. Later stages of research were supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, which allowed me to live in Ghana for five months in 2008 and for the follow-up fieldwork in 2009.

From the bottom of my heart, I am grateful to all of you for the contribution you have made to this work. May I be able to support you in some way in the future.

INTRODUCTION

A Scattering of Families

Port Authority bus terminal in New York City can be a dark and scary place, but it can also be exciting, as it is a crossroads of people with different pasts and trajectories. As I was standing in line for a long-distance bus one summer, a striking middle-aged woman in an outfit made of African cloth stepped into line behind me. Because I had spent time in Ghana, a small country in West Africa, I was intrigued. I greeted her and learned, to my delight, that she was from Ghana. We chatted while we waited for the bus and sat together after it arrived, glad for each other’s company on the long ride.

Vivacious, outgoing, and a lively storyteller, Irene told me about her life during our bus ride that afternoon and evening. I learned that she had lived in the United States for over twenty years and was a US citizen. She had worked for the past eight years as a live-in home health aide, a job in which she lived with frail elderly people in their homes for days or months at a time, helping them with cooking, grocery shopping, clothes washing, and other housework until they recovered or needed more extensive care. Irene had just returned from a trip to Ghana and was now on her way to a job in Massachusetts. Although she would have liked to recuperate a little bit more after her trip, she was concerned that if she did not take this position, the agency that had called her would not contact her again.¹ She was feeling trepidation about the new job: would the elderly woman to whose house she was traveling be nice or want her to be working all the time? Would the woman be racist or angry, feelings exacerbated by dementia or pain, as Irene had experienced in some situations in the past? Would Irene have her own room or would she have to sleep on a cot in the living room? Would she stay for a long time, or would the woman improve or decline rapidly? Irene tended to go far afield for her jobs, to suburbs and rural areas five or six hours away from her home in central New Jersey. Because she did not know if she would be able to buy ingredients for the Ghanaian dishes she liked or international phone cards in the neighborhood to which she was traveling, she had brought some of these items in her bags.

One of the reasons Irene brought phone cards was because in the spring she had given birth to a baby boy. After recovering for a short time from the birth, she spent nine weeks in Ghana with her family. When she came back to the United States, she left her baby behind with her parents, who were also looking after her two older children, a boy of thirteen and a girl of six, also born in the United States.² She told me in a later conversation:

As much as it is hard, but at times it is the best way because you know they are with family, and secondly, they will be well taken care of, and you will also get the chance to go to work here and come back with the mind, that, Okay, I don’t have to worry about how my baby was taken care of.

She was not abandoning her children; rather, she called her children and parents in Ghana for long chats once a week and was able to visit them every two or three years. In fact, she saw herself as providing the best care for them she could.

As an immigrant, Irene is not unusual in being separated from her children. Contemporary flows of international migration are fueling particular kinds of family arrangements in which families are scattered and living in different countries. Spouses can be separated and a child can live apart from one or more parents and one or more siblings for several years. It can be hard to find statistics of this phenomenon, but those that exist suggest it is common for the children of immigrants to be separated from their parents for a period of time. One study based on interviews with 385 adolescents born in China, Central America, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico and now living in the United States found that 85 percent of them had been separated from one or both of their parents for two years or more (Suárez-Orozco, Todorova, and Louie 2002). A larger survey of 8,573 US-based immigrants who had just received permanent residency (a green card) and their children found that 31 percent of children who themselves immigrated had been separated from at least one parent for two years or more (Gindling and Poggio 2008).³ A study by Hirokazu Yoshikawa (2011) found that many Chinese immigrants in New York City sent their infants to China for grandparents to raise. Suggesting a similar phenomenon among Ghanaian immigrants, in 2008, children under the age of fifteen represented only 7 percent of the Ghanaian-born population in the United States, whereas they constituted 20 percent of the total US population and (for 2009) 36 percent of the total population in Ghana (UNESCO Institute for Statistics n.d.).⁴ Although some of the children of Ghanaian immigrants are US-born and therefore do not show up within the Ghanaianborn statistics, Irene’s and other immigrant parents’ stories indicate there are US-born children sent to be raised in Ghana and Ghanaian-born children who will eventually join their parents in the United States who are not represented in the US figures. Whether the higher (85 percent) or lower (31 percent) numbers pertain, it is clear that this phenomenon is common, and common enough that we need to better understand why it is occurring and what its effects are on families, children, and their communities abroad and in the United States. These family members may eventually be reunited, whether those left behind join the migrant abroad or the migrant returns home, but they may also be more permanently separated, through divorce, premature death, or irreparably damaged relationships.

While the scattering of families among nonimmigrants is increasingly occurring through a decrease in stable marriages and an increase in blended households, family separations among international migrants are primarily driven by a particular contradiction: it has become easier to move money and goods across national borders over the past forty years, but a similar freedom for the mobility for people is not available. As Saskia Sassen (2006) argues, although economies are increasingly untethered from the nation—buffeted by domestic unrest in oil-producing countries and bank failure in the European Union, for example—politics are still or perhaps even increasingly bounded to the nation-state, putting public pressure on the easing of immigration restrictions.

Yet a mobile labor force is encouraged, in part by the mobility of finance and the increasing ease of transportation that allow for the flow of goods and capital. Foreign investments in, say, a factory generate connections and networks that enable people to migrate abroad (Arcelin 1983; Sassen 1998; Weiner 1987), as well as encouraging migration within a country to work in new forms of employment. Furthermore, conditions for making poorer countries attractive to foreign investment imposed by international financial institutions have resulted in those nations’ disinvestment in social welfare, causing the middle class—the primary beneficiaries of most state support in poorer countries—to want to migrate to maintain their middle-class standards of living (Parreñas 2004; Reynolds 2002). Finally, labor-intensive sectors in destination countries that are hard to mechanize—such as fruit and vegetable farming and health care—have found immigrants attractive as a cheap and compliant labor force (Sassen 1998; Waldinger and Lichter 2003).

Because of conditions at home and their imaginings of abroad, many people want to migrate, and some are successful at doing so, using their networks (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992). However, it is hard to migrate to the United States because US immigration laws do not recognize that supposedly unskilled migrants have employment opportunities, favoring family reunification and scarce technical skills as rationales for migrants’ residence and work in the United States. Myron Weiner has commented, U.S. legal immigration is largely independent of the demands of the labor market because two-thirds of it occurs through family reunification (1998, 12). Despite the prominence of family reunification as a route to legally living and working in the United States, it is difficult to migrate as a family unit. Spouses, siblings, and parents and children may be separated from one another for many years as they gather together the funds and documents for applications and wait for them to be approved.

This reason was not significant for Irene’s separation from her children, since she had become a citizen over her long years of living in the United States, and her children, born in the United States, were also citizens. However, her salary and working conditions as a home health aide—a poorly paid and labor-intensive occupation—made raising them in the United States difficult. Thus another reason driving the scattering of families is that wages in the sectors where immigrants work do not always support a family in the United States but are sufficient to support dependents in the home country with a lower cost of living.

Family separation is one consequence of the general difficulties migrants face in navigating immigration laws and making a living in destination countries. Contemporary arrangements between global capital and national governments are creating a new kind of family: one in which separated family members are connected emotionally and are in communication with one another, like Irene, but are divided by borders, in the words of Joanna Dreby (2010), who has studied separated families in Mexico and the United States.

That many people are moving between countries is widely recognized. In destination countries, such awareness is fueling anger and fear: of being physically invaded, of having a national heritage diluted, of being economically displaced. In sending countries, migration generates fantasies and hopes of a better life, an abroad as paradise, in the words of one Chinese migrant (Fong 2011). But that families are scattered by such migration is less commonly recognized, particularly by social service agencies and governments in destination countries. The press and governments in migrant-sending countries tend to be more aware of the children left behind than those in destination countries, some blaming mothers for their love of money and fearing youth delinquency (Parreñas 2004; Rae-Espinoza 2011).

Given the paucity of public rhetoric on this topic, families are largely left on their own to figure it out. They respond by adapting their existing beliefs, practices, and resources of family life—I call this their repertoire—to their migration experience, checking in with their network of friends and relatives to help them evaluate their options and decisions. These repertoires are a set of cultural resources or frameworks—ways of speaking, thinking, and feeling about family—that mobilize material resources and people in ways that are considered normal and natural. Repertoires help organize the vastness of what people think, feel, and experience. Sometimes certain aspects of repertoire are brought to consciousness and attention, and a new language is used to articulate and share that conscious understanding with others. Repertoires provide interpretations by which people can evaluate a situation and be prompted to particular emotions like love and anger (Hochschild 2003; Reddy 2001). I’ll give a fuller explanation of what I mean by repertoire below, but for now, this may suffice as a working definition.

What I want to suggest is that the repertoire of migrants and their families affects how they separate and how they feel about their separation. The level of suffering and pain that separation creates for families varies, because they, as individuals in touch with others grappling with similar problems, creatively enact their repertoire of family life in the situations they encounter. Some migrants have repertoires in which separation is normal and natural because of a long history of migration in their communities; others find they need to construct new ideals and ideologies to justify the transformation of their roles, causing tension and conflict within their families, because these ideals are not fully accepted by all involved. This book, then, is about the problems migrants and their families confront and the feelings that emerge in these situations, which they interpret and respond to through the frameworks available through their repertoires of family life. This book specifically examines how Ghanaian immigrants and their families adapt their repertoires to the parent-child separation a parent’s international migration causes.

The experiences of Ghanaians, like other West African immigrants, can illuminate the variation and complexity in people’s responses to the scattering of migrant families. West Africans have long been mobile, engaging in long-distance and trans-Saharan trade across different ecological zones, from the Atlantic Coast to the Sahel to the Mediterranean Sea, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Myths and historical legends of kingdoms, such as the oral epic Sundiata (Niane 1965), document the movements of people and the significance of hunters who roamed far and wide, gaining knowledge and founding new settlements. Such movement continued after borders were erected by European powers as they carved out spheres of influence and dominion across West Africa, borders that often cut across families, trade linkages, and sometimes kingdoms (e.g., Odotei 2003). Family traditions in West Africa have been shaped by long histories of migration and of women’s work, in which relations can be sustained across long distances. Irene draws on this repertoire when she talks matter-of-factly about her children in Ghana and relies so readily on her parents to raise her children.

At the same time, Irene thinks carefully about how to raise her children. The responsibility of parenthood weighs heavily on her as she feels that her actions will have enormous consequences on her children’s future. She described an early morning with her newborn baby in Ghana, when the two of them were alone together.

And this came into my mind like, this little thing, his life depends on me. Whatever I do, it’s either going to make him good or make him bad. So it’s up to me to make good decisions to give him the best I can. . . . I was just crying. I said, God, please give me the strength and give me the wisdom to be able, you know, to raise my kids the best way I know how.

Although she brings her repertoire of family life to bear on this problem, her actions leave her feeling uncertain. Some parents I interviewed, similarly anxious, hoped this book would be a parenting manual in the American self-help tradition, recommending whether children should be raised in Ghana or the United States, and, if in Ghana, for how long and to what age.

From my conversations with Ghanaian immigrant parents and their children, I did not gain a clear sense of what advice to give, given the variation in people’s experiences with their children and my own personal unease in giving advice about other people’s complex situations. Instead, what I learned is how Ghanaians are adapting their repertoires of family life in a search for solutions to the problems they face. In essence, the problem they and other immigrants face is that they are a mobile labor force simultaneously encouraged to migrate by job opportunities, social networks, and images of a desired future and discouraged from full political and social belonging in the countries to which they migrate by immigration laws and lack of social supports for raising children.

This set of contradictory pressures around the mobility of labor has been significant in the expansion of capitalism, as I discuss in the next section. This discussion further complicates any advice I might give Ghanaian immigrant parents, because it illustrates that their parenting decisions affect not only them and their children, but that wider contemporary relationships between political power and economic capital have shaped their decisions, the topic to which I now turn. Some readers may wish to skip or skim the remainder of the introduction, which lays out the theoretical underpinnings of my argument, and proceed to chapter 1.

Capitalism, Migration, and Families

Marxist anthropologists have argued that capitalist growth has been fueled by the continuous incorporation of new workers.⁵ Sometimes this is accomplished through the movement of people into areas where capitalist production is ongoing, as in the urban migrations of the agriculturally dispossessed during the Industrial Revolution in England, the trade in slaves and indentured servants in the production of cash crops in the New World, or the migration of people from poor and middle-income countries to wealthy economies today. At other times, it occurs through the movement of capital to new lands, such as American capital investment in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. What makes new workers so significant for profit is that employers can avoid the full expenses of the labor they employ and thus pay a worker a lower wage.

The full cost of a worker comprises the expenses of maintaining a worker across his or her lifetime, including periods when he or she is unable to work, for instance, during childhood, illness, disability, and old age. In childhood, furthermore, a person receives the social and emotional training and the sustenance for physical growth and strength necessary for future labor participation. Employers in the United States pay the costs of workers’ maintenance across the life course indirectly through, on the one hand, state mechanisms of redistribution and, on the other, reciprocal exchanges within families. An employer makes social security contributions and pays taxes on their profits, funds that are given to the state to, among other things, provide education, training, and health services. Employers also pay indirectly for the next generation of labor by paying their employees a family wage that is sufficient to support the care of nonworking dependents. This family wage is redistributed through long-term reciprocities and the emotional obligations to others whom employees consider family.

Migrants are a less costly source of labor because most migrants migrate when they are already adult and in the prime of their working lives (ages twenty to forty-five). Other governments to which an employer in the destination country does not pay taxes supported their care and education as children. Furthermore, if a migrant’s children and elderly parents are left in the country of origin, given differences in the cost of living between the two countries based on the exchange rate between the respective currencies, then a family wage to support these dependents can be lower. By hiring migrants at this lower wage, capitalist enterprises are better able to offer goods and services at a lower cost and thus compete with other companies across the city or world. That a migrant comes in the prime of his or her life and that his or her dependents do not come with the migrant is critical to the displacement of the costs of reproduction to migrants’ families, on the one hand, and to migrant-sending countries, on the other.

Transnationalism is key to this process. What is meant by this term is that although the standard conception, on which US immigration law and schooling rhetoric is based (Hamann and Zúñiga 2011), is that migrants are immigrants who have permanently left one country to become residents and potentially citizens of another; many contemporary migrants have hopes and dreams bound up in networks that cross borders.⁶ Irene, for instance, moves from one elderly person’s house to another in situations that lack stability, but she remains connected to those she is close to—her children and parents in Ghana, her friends in the United States and Ghana, and her siblings in Germany—by cell phone on evenings and weekends. Irene’s emotional life is entwined with people and events far from the people and events that make up her day-to-day existence: the shopping in new locales, the isolation of rural or suburban neighborhoods, the elderly person she is caring for, and their relatives who occasionally call or stop by. Irene longs to live in Ghana but cannot see how to support everyone, including herself, should she return for good. She seeks advice from friends on potential investment and business deals in Ghana but worries about the risks. In the meantime, she makes do: going to Ghana for weeks at a time when she has amassed some savings and returning to the United States when her money is exhausted to begin the cycle of working and saving again. Her children, while not migrants themselves, are also living transnationally, with some of their emotional life connected to their mother living in the United States, and their future hopes pinned on joining her, even as they live and go to school in Ghana. As Georges E. Fouron and Nina Glick Schiller (2002) note, even those who do not migrate participate in social fields that cross borders.

While a relatively recently coined term, transnationalism was also characteristic of previous generations of immigrants who wanted to return to their homelands after a period of successful migration and retained ties to their loved ones in the home countries (Foner 2005). Even those who migrate internally within a country remain connected to their home regions in translocal, if not transnational, ways. Strategies Ghanaians use to raise their children, for instance of sending their children back to the place of origin, have also been used by American rural-to-urban migrants, such as African-Americans during the Great Migration (1910–30). Claude Brown, in his gripping autobiography Manchild in the Promised Land (1965) about his childhood in Harlem in the 1950s, described how his parents, recent transplants, sent him, at the age of eleven, to live with his grandparents in North Carolina for a year because his mother was so concerned about his bad behavior, influenced by his associates in Harlem. Bebe Moore Campbell (1989) described growing up in Philadelphia in the 1960s with her mother and maternal grandmother, but much of her emotional life was fixed not on them, but on her father, with whom she spent summers in North Carolina after her parents’ separation. Translocality, in the sense of maintaining connections to people in more than one place, is not solely a phenomenon that occurs across national borders.

Migration and translocality—key to the scattering of families without their dissolution—are spurred in part by people’s desire to seek the resources they need across their own life course and those of the people they care for. Anthropological research has shown that concerns about paying for children’s schooling (Boehm et al. 2011) or concerns about a parent’s health care (Empez Vidal 2011) can prompt migration. Because these resources are not available locally, people manage their connections to multiple places to access them: in the case of Claude Brown’s parents, for example, work was available in New York City, but protection for their son from the dangers of the street was not, and so they sent him to North Carolina for a year of his adolescence.

Work conditions and state welfare policies in destination areas may increase migrants’ translocal connections. A study of Zambian urban migrants found that a weak formal welfare system and low wages encouraged them to maintain their ties to their hometowns as a kind of insurance policy in hard times (Ferguson 1999). Rural kin could provide access to a means of livelihood—such as farmland or housing—for urban workers in case of illness, disability, or retirement. Similarly, transnationalism becomes a survival strategy for immigrant families who mobilize the different opportunities available in different locales through their kin and nonkin connections (Schmalzbauer 2004). In the case of Ghanaians, as I explore in chapter 4, one reason Ghanaians like Irene send their babies and young children, born in the United States, back to Ghana is the lack of affordable, high-quality day care in the United States and the low wages in the jobs most available to them, insufficient for health care and day care. The lack of social supports for young children in the United States, in comparison to what is available to them in Ghana, in part through their remittances, makes raising children in Ghana attractive.

The state is involved in the scattering of families of contemporary migrants in at least two ways: it regulates the movement of migrant workers and their kin, and it is involved in the redistribution of funds to provide a safety net to care for workers across their lifetimes. States play a key role by determining the extent of social welfare for workers and nonworkers—dependent children, the disabled, and the elderly. Over time, states have assumed some responsibility for care, through the provision of public education for children, and of health services for the elderly and disabled. However, those priorities are in competition with keeping banks afloat or maintaining a country’s bond ratings and ability to borrow funds (Katz 2001; Sassen 2006). Under the rationale of a smaller state, some countries are turning over their care functions to the market and decreasing their care obligations (Rose 1999). Scholars in Latin America, Britain, and the United States, countries that have increasingly experienced these kinds of policies since the 1980s, have called them neoliberal because the philosophical underpinnings of these policies are indebted to the liberal political philosophy of Adam Smith in which the freedom of the individual to enter into private contracts (in the marketplace) is given paramount importance. Liberal in this sense does not refer to the way this term is used in American political discourse, as the opposite of conservative. (In fact, these policies to roll back the state are considered politically conservative by observers.) Although neoliberalism