Remitting amid autocracy: Venezuelan migrant remittances to relatives enduring widespread structural violence

Homeland conditions shape how migrants and refugees perceive the purpose and impact of their remittances (i.e. financial support). Countries of origin with low violence and stable conditions allow migrants to remit with hopes of improving their non-migrant relatives' long-term material circumstances, while homelands with armed conflict limit remittance objectives to securing recipients' immediate safety and basic survival. However, scholarship has under-theorized how homelands with widespread structural violence-economic devastation resulting in deprivation for most of the population-impact migrants' remittance practices and perceptions. Drawing on in-depth interviews with forced Venezuelan migrants in Chile and Argentina-whose homeland has an emerging autocrat and economic sanctions that have resulted in widespread structural violence-we find that interviewees are highly concerned about relatives' survival in Venezuela. They remit with resignation to secure relatives' bare subsistence while grappling with their inability to counter the economic deterioration, infrastructural decay, and essential goods shortages that are decreasing their relatives' lifespan. Broadly, findings indicate that widespread structural violence reshapes migrants' transnational care; as deprivation spreads in the homeland, migrants are increasingly aware that the impact of their remittances is diminishing and seek to fulfill their relatives' immediate basic needs.