Editor’s note: Professor David López-Carr provided the following article, which is at once a fitting tribute to an exemplary ex-graduate student, as well as an excellent example of the mentoring and support that Geography faculty give to their students.
Jason Davis successfully completed two long gestations this spring. He defended his PhD dissertation, International Migration, Remittances, Fertility, and Development: Quantitative and Qualitative Evidence from Central America, in March. In April, his wife, Jess, gave birth to their first child, Jackson Diego Davis.
Jason came to our department following an MS in Environmental Management at Duke University and seven years working as a Biologist for the Endangered Species Division of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Jason’s committee, chaired by David López-Carr, included Berkeley Demographer and National Academy Fellow Ronald Demos Lee; former Population Association of America President, SDSU Geographer and Director of the World Population Center, John Weeks; and our former colleague, Hallie Eakin.
Jason’s dissertation focuses on how international migration from Central America to the United States, and the subsequent return of remittances to migrant-sending households, influences four measures of community development: fertility, agriculture, consumption, and education. Demographic results indicate that the odds that a birth would occur are negatively associated with an increase in U.S. remittance receipts and an increase in a wife’s migration duration. Land use analyses suggest that households receiving remittances are significantly more likely to invest in livestock than are non-remittance receiving households. Results from Jason’s six months of ethnographic field work in the Western Highlands of Guatemala suggest that home building and investments in children’s education are the main consumptive uses of remittances. Jason observed that, while remittances improve basic living conditions, allowing children to attend school for longer periods, remittance investment in education comes with a cost: a lack of parental discipline in the home contributes to the disruption of childhood education for many children.
Lee calls Davis’ dissertation “excellent.” He highlights several aspects of the importance of his findings, particularly “the greater effect on fertility of women’s than men’s migration plausibly interpreted here in terms of the value of time economic theory of fertility, with an awareness of the many additional more sociological, effects as well. Men’s migration has purely an income effect; women’s also has a substitution effect arising from the expansion of women’s economic opportunities.” Lee was further “struck that remittance income seemed to have so little effect on agricultural production, with the main effect being on investment in homes and in children’s human capital. This last, in particular, seemed like a very promising outcome until the striking consideration of the children’s psychological, social, and motivational problems that result from the absence of migrant parents.” Weeks noted that Jason put a “lot of work into this, and it shows.” Eakin was fascinated with the potential for remittances to ameliorate household vulnerability through myriad avenues presented in the dissertation. Lopez-Carr exclaimed that it is hard to imagine Jason succeeding more than he did. “He entered our program with a 2 year TAship and, following a first year of earnest proposal writing, never requested another cent from his advisor or the department, garnering funding from a Jacob Javitz Fellowship, a Pacific Rim Fellowship, a NASA Earth System Science Fellowship, International Union for the Scientific Study of Population Fellowship, Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers Fellowship, and winning paper awards from the Latin American and the Population Specialty Groups of the American Association of Geographers.”
Jason became a geographer because he wanted to better understand human impacts on the environment. In Jason’s words, his inspiration “is a strong desire to determine how indicators of population growth, affluence, and consumption impact our planet’s most valuable environmental resources and, by extension, the human condition.” Jason continues, “When I was applying for graduate school, a perspective graduate advisor asked me if my interest in studying and effecting policy to protect the environment was to help humankind or the environment for its own sake. Even though it was his opinion—perhaps a minority opinion—that the environment should be protected for its intrinsic qualities, I felt then and still feel today that the form that humankind strives to shape the environment, be it through exploitation or protection, truly is a human construct.” To Jason, human-environment dynamics are central to why he chooses to study developing regions of the planet and their human condition. As Jason explains, if we accept the supposition that the “ultimate justification to protect the planet and its environment is to benefit or perpetuate humankind, then understanding how the environment will be impacted as developing regions of the planet raise their levels of affluence may provide indications for what natural resources will remain when development has been completed. As we are currently consuming approximately 1.2 times more natural resources on an annual basis than the planet can replenish and human population continues to rise, I fear that poverty and inadequate access to resources will become a fait accompli.”
With several publications already under his belt, and several more in submission, Jason is well on his way to carving out an important niche for himself in the growing population-environment field. Kudos to Jason for his recent academic accomplishment and welcome, Jackson Diego Davis!
