Understanding the Role of Migration, Culture and Transnational Ties in Family Financial Assistance With Home Ownership.

Abstract

Family financial assistance with home ownership has attracted significant scholarly attention in recent years. However, the role of culture and ethnicity, transnational ties, and migration in this practice remains significantly under-addressed. By drawing on interviews conducted with donors and recipients of family financial assistance with home ownership in Australia who had personal and recent family experiences of migration, this article begins to address this topic. The findings show that participants from migrant backgrounds often evoke culture and ethnicity while discussing family cultures of transmission and cultural preferences for owner occupied housing, and that they use culture as a means of deflecting potentially uncomfortable questions about fairness and equity. The findings also suggest that family financial assistance can be considered to facilitate a final stage of migrant settling which may take place years after the migrant arrives in Australia. Finally, the findings show that transnational families remain highly interconnected both emotionally and financially, and may provide financial assistance with home ownership as part of family wealth strategies through which transnational families pool resources for collective advantage. Drawing on these findings, the article shows that migration plays a crucial, and underappreciated, role in the provision and receipt of family financial assistance with home ownership. It ultimately argues that popular conversations and academic studies in the multicultural societies in which debates about the asset economy are most active (the US, the UK, Australia) have been dominated by Anglo-centric experiences, and have not considered how these arrangements may extend beyond national borders, and invites scholars in this area to more fully consider the role of migration in research on families and wealth.