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A project examining the remittances sent by immigrants to Canada from low- and middle-income countries and how they are shaped by Canada's foreign aid policies and practices.

Immigrants and migrants to Canada send money back to their home countries to support their families and communities. These financial transfers are referred to as remittances. In 2017, immigrants and migrants to Canada from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) sent more than $5 billion CAD in remittance back to their home countries. Indeed, global remittances are now estimated to exceed $550 billion annually, and growth in remittances has been significant in recent years. Remittances are now nearly four times greater than the flow of official foreign aid from wealthy countries, and in Canada remittances to low- and middle-income countries exceed the total amount of Canada’s official foreign aid to those countries. Because of this sharp growth in remittance sending, the importance of remittance funds to the livelihoods of families and communities in migrants’ home countries and to the development of those countries is greater than ever before. For this reason, researchers have paid more attention than ever to remittances as a source of development financing, theorizing that remittances play a key role in the migration-development nexus. Are remittances replacing aid? Can they complement aid? Is the level of remittance sending related to the foreign aid sent abroad by wealthy donor countries? Better understanding of these questions are essential to enabling communities in LMICs and the aid donors with whom they partner to capitalize on the potential development benefits of remittances. Developing a better understanding of how remittances and foreign aid are related is the goal of this project.

In the past, the very limited availability of data regarding actual remittance amounts and behaviours, led many researchers to rely on broad national- and regional-level statistics and estimates when examining the migration-development nexus. This project will overcome this challenge by linking cutting edge Statistics Canada survey data on remittance sending by immigrants to Canada with the latest country-level data on aid flows and development measures in immigrants’ countries of origins. Using multi-level quantitative analysis of this novel combination of data, and a migration-development nexus theoretical framework the project will attain its research objectives by asking: (1) what is the relationship between Canada’s foreign aid remittances sent to those countries; (2) how the purpose of remittances vary by gender of the sender and home country context; and (3) how the aid/remittance relationship varies across home country contexts.

Additional Researchers outside the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences