The Money Hackers by Daniel P. Simon

Author:Daniel P. Simon [Simon, Daniel P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harpercollins Leadership
Published: 2020-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

On what was easily the luckiest day of his life, Ismail was picked up by a stranger driving a dump truck out of Hargeisa. “The guy who helped me took a big risk. I acted as a worker helping him, while he hid my passport in the truck.”

At the border to the neighboring country of Djibouti, Ismail was able to use his student visa to gain legal entry and escape the Somali Civil War—though he was still a long way from London and had no money to get there.

Almost the entire population of Hargeisa was in flight, scattering to any nearby region that would harbor them and with no good way to stay in touch with one another. Ismail’s family, like many of Somaliland’s refugees, wound up in Ethiopia—and when they couldn’t find Ismail in any of the refugee camps there, they assumed he had been killed. It was only through word of mouth that the family discovered that all of its far-flung members had survived the attacks. When the family learned that Ismail was stuck in Djibouti without any way to continue on to London, his brother-in-law in Saudi Arabia wired him money for a plane ticket, and Ismail was finally able to get to school—and safety.

Remittance—the practice of sending money to another country—is something that the vast majority of contemporary Americans have not experienced firsthand. But go back a generation or two or three or five, and sooner or later, you’ll likely find the story of a family member who migrated to the United States to try to make money and then remitted some of that money to the people back home.

Somaliland is no stranger to this cycle of migration and remittance. In the 1970s and 1980s, while the Siad Barre regime was inflicting economic instability and civil war throughout the Horn of Africa, just across the Red Sea, the oil-rich nations of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar were booming. Tens of thousands of men migrated from Somaliland to work in the oil fields and in the other industries that sprang up around the new accumulation of Middle Eastern oil wealth. The jobs were often undesirable, but way more lucrative than anything they could have found back home. “It was like a gold rush for us,” Ismail remembered. “Whether you were a clerk or a construction worker, if you crossed the Red Sea, you could make a lot of money.”

The migrants who worked these overseas jobs then sent money to their families back home, in staggering amounts: since the 1970s, remittance has accounted for up to 40 percent of Somaliland’s GDP, and after the bombing and the civil war, remittances from refugees rebuilt the Hargeisa economy.

Wherever there has been migration, there has been some system for moving money back across the distance. The practice is as old as time itself.2 And, of course, for as long as people have been moving money, moving money has been complicated: it is slow, cumbersome, and dangerous.

In the eighth

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