Alongside cash, migrants send back 'social remittances': ideas, behaviors, identities and social connections picked up in the new country. These reach people who have never travelled, carried by return visits, letters and phone calls, or simply by migrants behaving in new and unsettling ways.
Marriages change abroad when wives earn wages, husbands share chores and couples decide things together. Marriages back home change too, because people learn that things are done differently elsewhere. Just knowing another arrangement exists makes it possible to imagine changing your own.
Movement of people, money, influence and information can tie a home village and a foreign neighborhood into one social field, as if village life happens in two settings. Churches, political parties and development groups run in both places at once. The changes this brings can affect those who stay behind as much as those who leave, or more.
Money sent home supports families and fills village homes with goods bought by relatives abroad. It also reshuffles who ranks high in local status and pushes up land prices as migrants build dream houses they may never live in. And it creates new cash needs that only more emigration can meet.
It is wrong to treat ties to the homeland as the opposite of settling into the new country. Migrants can put down roots and stay active in their home country's politics, economy and social life at the same time. Keeping a foot in both places may become the normal way people join a new society, not the exception.