This chapter discusses some of the moral economic and kinship-based affective issues that influence the decisions of rural youth from South Wollo to move to Saudi Arabia as irregular labour migrants. This goal is achieved by examining the kinds of culturally expected entitlements and sentimentally enforced norms that both prospective migrants and sending parents effectively mobilize at different phases of the migration process. The focus is on ethnographically observed decision dilemmas especially at the initial stage when financing the cost of prospective immigration and later when anticipated migration remittances and gifts are distributed. The analysis complements works that tend to amplify the agency of individual migrants, while dumbing the equally worth studying moralistic and affective consequences on the households and communities they left behind.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197631942.001.0001