Racialized Remittance Politics / 种族化汇款政治

Racialized remittance politics is the pattern where migrant remittances are interpreted differently depending on the migrant group’s racial and national status. In 168. 银与信：一部日本劳工移民的跨洋汇款史, Japanese and Italian migrants both send money home, but U.S. observers can treat Japanese remittances as a threat while normalizing similar behavior by other groups.

The concept becomes explicit through the [[DillinghamCommission|Dillingham Commission]], anti-Japanese organizing, school segregation, and West Coast fear after the Russo-Japanese War. Remittance is no longer only family support; it becomes a sign used in arguments about immigrant loyalty, wealth drain, and national danger.

Key Claims

• A host society may treat outbound remittances as family duty for some migrants and as extraction or disloyalty for others.
• “Scientific” immigration investigation can reproduce racial assumptions when categories and questions are biased from the start.
• Remittance politics intensifies when migration overlaps with geopolitical fear and domestic labor competition.
• Financial behavior is interpreted through racial narrative, not only through economic effect.

Connections

• [[DillinghamCommission|Dillingham Commission]] — main institutional example.
• United States, Japan, and Hawaii / 夏威夷 — U.S. receiving-country and Japanese migration settings.
• Japanese Labor Migration Remittances / 日本劳工移民汇款 — behavior being racialized.
• State-Mediated Remittance System / 国家中介汇款体系 — Japanese remittances became visible enough to be politically argued over.
• Qiaopi Remittance Networks — adjacent Asian remittance system that can face similar suspicion in receiving societies.