In poorer areas experiencing out-migration, like rural Kentucky, nostalgic trade can provide opportunities for local businesses to capture niche markets and get higher income. Nostalgic trade is the polar opposite of “local consumption”: you buy something because it is from far away (i.e. home). Yet it is intensely local, disproportionately providing revenues for traditional sectors and small businesses tightly connected to migrant-sending communities. Nostalgic trade is a win-win way for migrants who “make something of themselves” to get something valuable for themselves and promote development in their home region. By and large, there are few legal barriers to such trade in the US (besides alcohol control laws), but still many practical barriers. But by connecting with diaspora communities, local businesses can build niche markets for themselves as “authentically Kentucky” products.

Nostalgic trade in Ale8 and bourbon doesn’t have very many profound policy ramifications. I wish I could say that there was a really important public policy point to studying Ale8 and bourbon but, honestly, there’s not, except for development organizations looking for projects to carry out.

But by demonstrating the existence and size of nostalgic trade through an easily-administered survey, I’ve also demonstrated the potential for wider studies of diaspora economic engagement. Why aren’t we surveying North Dakotan oil field workers about remittances sent home? That’s a huge economic question if we want to understand what impact fracking has on communities and the economy at large. Why aren’t we surveying how alumni networks transfer financial resources to home states, and viewing it as an essential economic development activity? We aren’t we looking at parental support for colleges as a wealth transfer from migrant-sending regions to migrant-receiving regions? One reason is that there are data limitations.

But I think a bigger reason is cultural limitations. We don’t survey these things because we just assume we’re a homogenous nation. In fact, we’re not. We’re a megadiverse third of a continent replete with extraordinary difference and massive asymmetries and imbalances. Furthermore, if we were to start collecting this data, we might arrive at inconvenient conclusions: college and hospital towns in poor states may soak up the accumulated financial wealth of poorer areas, a far more pernicious trend than “brain drain” itself. States that pride themselves on their environmental record may depend on financial transfers from workers in out-of-state oil fields. Investment capital may flow through migrant information networks.

Or maybe not— maybe I’m wrong. But the point is, we don’t know, because too little research is done on such topics (there is some; I don’t want to say such research is nonexistent). The result is that state and local policymakers are often flying blind with regards to how policy changes actually impact specific communities.

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Follow me on Twitter. Follow my Medium Collection at In a State of Migration. I’m a grad student in International Trade and Investment Policy at the George Washington University’s Elliott School. I like to write and tweet about migration, airplanes, trade, space, and other new and interesting research.