A four-year-old World Bank study, largely buried since its publication, has suddenly re-entered the spotlight in Keralam after resurfacing on social media this August. What began as renewed online attention gathered momentum when Carnegie Endowment scholar Milan Vaishnav and economist Shamika Ravi highlighted its findings, followed by Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor sharing the study on August 23 and calling its findings “disturbing”.
Media reports soon brought the issue into the mainstream, reopening a question that Keralam’s celebrated Gulf migration story has rarely confronted. When migrants return with billions in remittances, do they also bring back the social and cultural attitudes of the societies in which they worked? The World Bank’s findings on Saudi returnees make that question particularly uncomfortable.
For decades, Keralam’s migration to the Gulf has been presented primarily as an economic success story. Families receive money, houses are built, children are educated and the State benefits from a massive inflow of remittances. Yet a World Bank study raises a question that is far more uncomfortable. What else returns with the migrant besides money?
The answer offered by the study is “social remittances”, ideas, behaviours, identities, attitudes and social norms transferred from a migrant’s destination to the society of origin. The March 2022 World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9966, ‘Beyond Money: Does Migration Experience Transfer Gender Norms? Empirical Evidence from Kerala, India’, examines whether return migration from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries has altered social attitudes in Keralam.
The study makes a significant finding that migration does not merely move labour and money across borders; it can also move cultural and social norms. The researchers explicitly note that migration can transmit changes in religious practices, dress codes, social and moral values and other cultural norms.
That opens a larger question for Keralam. If financial remittances have transformed its economy, what happens when social and ideological influences travel through the same migration networks?
Saudi Arabia emerges as the critical Gulf case
The World Bank’s findings become particularly striking when Saudi returnees are separated from migrants returning from the other Gulf countries.
The researchers divided the GCC into two categories: Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the UAE. This distinction was deliberate because the researchers recognised substantial differences in the social environments of these countries. The paper describes Saudi Arabia as more conservative than several other Gulf countries and investigates whether those differences are reflected in the attitudes brought back by migrants.
The results were substantial. Compared with people without migration experience, returning migrants from Saudi Arabia displayed attitudes towards gender-based violence that were 3 standard deviations more conservative. Returnees from the other Gulf countries, by contrast, were 0.5 standard deviation less conservative on the same measure.
Migrants returning to Kerala from Saudi Arabia tend to exhibit conservative values re: gender-based violence & extreme attitudes pertaining to the perpetration of physical violence against women–when compared with those who have no migration experience https://t.co/Y72htlkQEP pic.twitter.com/698ZImfAFV
— Milan Vaishnav (@MilanV) August 21, 2026
The difference also appeared in the study’s measure of extreme gender attitudes. Saudi returnees were 2.6 standard deviations more conservative than non-migrants, while returnees from the other Gulf countries were 0.7 standard deviation less conservative. This is precisely why the Saudi case cannot simply be dismissed as a generic “Gulf effect”.
The study’s methodology attempted to address the obvious problem of migrant self-selection. People who choose to migrate are not a random sample of society. More conservative people could choose conservative destinations that more liberal people could choose different destinations. The researchers therefore used instrumental-variable techniques and a two-stage least-squares approach to deal with migration and return-migration selection.
The study therefore provides more than anecdotal observations of returning migrants. It attempts statistically to isolate the relationship between migration destination and attitudes.
The numbers behind the conservative social remittance
The paper’s underlying survey provides an unusually detailed picture. The researchers used the Keralam Migration Survey 2013, covering 14,575 households, all 14 districts and 63 taluks. The study’s selected analytical sample included 322 returning migrants from Gulf countries excluding Saudi Arabia, 256 returning migrants from Saudi Arabia, and 8,614 non-migrants.
The researchers constructed gender-attitude indicators from 35 questions covering employment, general attitudes, household decision-making and gender-based violence. Responses were coded into conservative and non-conservative categories and combined into composite indices using Principal Component Analysis.
The questions were not abstract. They dealt with whether women should work outside the home, whether it is shameful for a wife to earn more than her husband, whether women should leave important decisions to men, whether a man should have the final word at home, and whether women’s mobility should be restricted.
The GBV section examined attitudes towards wife-beating, sexual assault, women’s clothing, reporting molestation and the treatment of rape victims.
The descriptive figures are disturbing. 20.3 per cent of Saudi returnees believed women should not work outside the home when economic conditions were better, compared with 17.3 per cent among other Gulf returnees. 12.9 per cent of Saudi returnees believed women taking employment meant they were taking jobs away from men, compared with 10.5 per cent among other Gulf returnees.
On the question of whether it was shameful for a wife to earn more than her husband, 25.4 per cent of Saudi returnees held that belief. Nearly 78 per cent of Saudi returnees believed the most important role of women was taking care of the home and children. 84.8 per cent believed a woman who failed to perform domestic chores properly would lose community respect. Among other Gulf returnees, the corresponding figures were 81.9 per cent and 78.6 per cent.
The numbers become even more revealing when authority and mobility are considered. 75.3 per cent of Saudi returnees believed that a wife or daughter moving freely outside the home caused the man to lose respect in the community, compared with 67.7 per cent of other Gulf returnees.
Around 85 per cent of Saudi returnees believed that a man who could not control his wife lost community respect, compared with almost 81 per cent among other Gulf returnees.
64.8 per cent of Saudi returnees believed a man should have the final word at home, compared with 61.1 per cent among other Gulf returnees and 58.3 per cent among non-migrants.
On participation in self-help groups, 55.9 per cent of Saudi returnees believed men should decide whether women participated, compared with 50.6 per cent among other Gulf returnees and 42.1 per cent among non-migrants. These are not merely questions of private belief. They concern women’s employment, mobility, household authority and participation in public life.
From conservatism to the more extreme attitudes
The study’s most troubling evidence concerns gender-based violence. Approximately 43 per cent of Saudi returnees believed a man had the right to beat his wife if she disobeyed him, compared with 37 per cent among other Gulf returnees.
Around 32 per cent of Saudi returnees believed a woman should tolerate aggressive behaviour by her husband to keep the family together; among other Gulf returnees the figure was 35.2 per cent.
On sexual violence, approximately 22 per cent of Saudi returnees believed a woman should not report sexual molestation to avoid bringing shame on her husband. Among other Gulf returnees, the figure was 20.5 per cent.
Nearly 53 per cent of Saudi returnees believed a woman or girl who went out alone after dark was herself to blame if she was molested; the corresponding figure among other Gulf returnees was 50.3 per cent.
These are disturbing reports. Kerala has long been host to a liberal, progressive practice of Islam, fully in tune with the coexistence and communal harmony prevalent across the state. Kerala is proud of its record of educating Muslim girls and women to the same levels as boys… https://t.co/mzcBfWXaNp
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) August 23, 2026
Approximately 70 per cent of Saudi returnees believed women’s “immodest” clothing provoked men to behave badly, compared with 61.4 per cent among other Gulf returnees. Almost 50 per cent of Saudi returnees believed that a woman raped had usually done something careless to put herself in that situation; the figure among other Gulf returnees was 42.5 per cent.
Approximately 52 per cent of Saudi returnees believed that in a rape case one had to question whether the victim was promiscuous or had a bad reputation, compared with 53.6 per cent among other Gulf returnees. Finally, 68 per cent of Saudi returnees believed a sexually assaulted woman lost community respect, compared with 59.6 per cent among other Gulf returnees.
The figures expose something important: the social cost of migration cannot be measured exclusively in rupees.
Keralam’s Gulf dependency and the unanswered radicalisation question
Keralam’s dependence on Gulf migration is enormous. The World Bank paper records that the first Keralam Migration Survey found nearly 1.4 million Keralam migrants in GCC countries in 1998. By 2013, the number had risen to 2.4 million, while annual remittances had risen sharply. Between 1998 and 2013, migration from Keralam to the UAE more than doubled, from 421,959 to 898,962; migration to Kuwait increased from 68,163 to 183,239, while Qatar rose from 62,969 to 106,107.
The scale makes the question of social influence impossible to ignore. The World Bank explicitly describes social remittances as ideas, behaviours, identities and social capital moving from receiving countries back to migrant-sending societies. Such transfers can operate through families, neighbours and organisations and can eventually scale up from local effects to wider social change. This is where the Keralam debate should move beyond the simplistic argument that Gulf migration is either an economic blessing or an economic necessity.
If migration can transmit attitudes about women’s employment, mobility, family authority and sexual violence, policymakers and researchers should also examine the wider ecosystem of ideas travelling through migrant networks: religious practices, social conformity, attitudes towards pluralism, community authority and political mobilisation.
The real warning contained in the World Bank study is therefore larger than the title of the research paper suggests. Keralam has spent decades calculating the financial remittance from the Gulf. It has paid far less attention to the social remittance.
Money can build houses. It can educate children. It can transform consumption and living standards. But ideas travel with people. And when the destination environment is substantially more conservative, those ideas can return home, become embedded in households and communities, and potentially reshape social attitudes over generations. For Keralam, that is the uncomfortable question that the Gulf migration success story has largely avoided that what is the social price of the money coming home?.
