There is a popular meme online that refers to Australia as the eighth province of Nepal. Given the share of international students that Nepalis constitute, it is understandable where this jovial exaggeration stems from. And yet, it is not just Australia but many different countries where the Nepali diaspora is aggregating. The movement from developing parts of the world to more developed parts is one of the most common and most rational processes to unfold. If a person from the far west or the east can spend nine hours travelling to Kathmandu to find work, which is something considered entirely understandable, why would they not spend nine more hours, if that, should they be able to afford it, to reach any other part of the world and double, triple, or quadruple what they could earn here?
The media, including social media, tend to show the tears streaming down people's faces on departure day as evidence of their reluctance to leave the country. But they rarely highlight the celebration dinners offered after one receives a visa, or the relief of a family that now has a plan. The fact of the matter is that going abroad, from a purely rational standpoint, offers benefits for most that are simply not available to those living here. And yet, it would be wrong to say that migration comes without challenges. The emotional narratives that dominate public discourse, however, often drown out the more important structural considerations. Once we move beyond the tears, we begin to see how migration is quietly reshaping a myriad of facets of life in Nepal.
Nepal Labour Migration Report 2022 launched
The money migrants send home has received considerable attention. Far less attention has been paid to the other things they send: a set of expectations, comparisons, and political attitudes that are quietly reshaping how Nepalis think about their own government. The financial flow that accompanies migration is the most visible and therefore is quite prominently discussed. Remittances as a share of GDP, which tend to hover between twenty to thirty percent—one of the highest ratios in the world—dominate development narratives for Nepal. Yet fiscal transfer is just one phenomenon that occurs in the process. Sociologist Peggy Levitt uses the term social remittances to describe something that purely economic accounts miss entirely, namely that migrants do not only send money home but also transmit the ideas, norms, behaviours, and social capital they accumulate abroad.
Given that the movement of people outside Nepal occurs, in general, for better pay and a higher standard of living, what that entails is the emigration of the Nepali diaspora to more affluent countries. This tends to be accompanied by a mode of governance more efficient than back home, which is expected on account of the fact that more developed economies are facilitated by robust institutions and better state capacity. Regular interactions with family and friends back home might feature the struggles of living alone and personal challenges, but at the same time they also include the portrayal of what an efficient and developed state looks like: a road that does not flood every monsoon; a government office where things actually get done without bribes; a clean city with ample public space, parks, and nature. While not consciously done as part of a political endeavour, over time these exchanges quietly recalibrate expectations of the home state, setting a benchmark against which it increasingly falls short, without always accounting for the contextual and historical distinctions that explain the gap.
The reshaping of expectations is only one dimension of what migration sets in motion. Along with increased expectations on one side, the financial flows into the country, made to fulfil the needs of the family, also enable people to access essential services through the private sector, rendering government provisions somewhat obsolete. While such a substitution, when observed in isolation, is quite harmless, the implications are anything but, especially taking into account the socialism-oriented posturing in Nepal's constitution, where legitimacy seems to rest on certain paternal responsibilities of the state. The money flowing in from abroad has become the primary means through which families access healthcare, education, and other basic needs—not through public institutions but through the market, financed by a family member working thousands of miles away. When your family's welfare depends not on what the government provides but on what your migrant relative sends, your dependency on the government diminishes. In doing so, migration is quietly eroding something the state has tried to project as its prerogative: its role as the primary provider of welfare and the loyalty that role was supposed to generate.
The cumulative effect of this is a population that is simultaneously more demanding and less dependent. In the past, the state's provision of welfare often came with a Bismarckian logic of encircling people in a cycle of dependency, ensuring that citizens had a material stake in the government's continued functioning and therefore a reason to remain compliant. The Nepali household that no longer relies on state services for its basic welfare has considerably less to lose from expressing dissatisfaction with the government. And if that same household has spent years normalising a set of comparisons that make the government's efforts seem inadequate, the conditions for a more demanding citizen base are firmly in place. This is not to say that migration has been or will inevitably be a driver of political upheaval. It is to say that the process of migration is gradually reshaping the terms on which political authority rests, without anyone having intended it, and without the government having yet seriously reckoned with what that means.
