The economic side of social remittances: how money and ideas circulate between Paris, Dakar, and New York

This paper shows how economic remittances undergird the circulation of social remittances between New York, Paris, and Dakar. It compares the transnational practices of Senegalese-born migrants living in France and in the United States during the 2012 Senegalese presidential campaign to demonstrate how economic and political transnational practices mutually reinforce each other. This paper contributes to scholarship in three key ways: it confirms the benefits of combining qualitative and quantitative transnational data, collected from origin and destination countries. It offers a welcome geographic extension to a literature on social remittances from which Africa remains absent. It makes a significant theoretical contribution by connecting economic sociology and migration studies to illuminate the impact of migrants’ transnational practices.