investment at the community level that, in turn, would have contributed to an overall improvement of living
conditions in the home society.
In an attempt to quantify the non-monetary costs in financial terms, KNOMAD reports that “aggregate losses due to
deficiencies in the conditions of work abroad represent at least 30 percent of total promised wages or 27 percent of
total actual wages, and are twice as high as the recruitment and travel costs incurred to effectuate the migration.” 15
The costs for undocumented workers are likely to be even higher. The implications of these losses, however, go
beyond numbers: the migration experience is a crucial opportunity for millions of migrant workers to improve their
circumstances and their household’s well-being. Enduring inhumane working conditions that hamper the possibility
of migrant workers to thrive and the migration experience to last, results in an improper denial of survival prospects,
of life opportunities for the workers themselves and for the future generations. Being deprived of one’s own money
through withheld or reduced payments is not only theft and a breach of the right to live in dignity with sufficient
means, but also a significant obstacle to human development. Ignoring the brunt borne by migrant workers beyond
the monetary losses means continuing to undermine the efforts of many to alleviate suffering in the world and to
deny the respect of fundamental rights. This cannot be ignored if we are now to build back better.
Remittance flows and the impact of COVID-19
The Migration Data Portal defines remittances as private “money or goods [i.e. cash or noncash items] that migrants
send back to families and friends in origin countries.” 16 Similarly, the 2009 Balance of Payments and International
Investment Position Manual suggests that “remittances represent household income from foreign economies arising
mainly from the temporary or permanent movement of people to those economies.”17 KNOMAD data18 shows that
in 2019 the estimate of recorded remittance inflows worldwide amounted to 714 Billion US Dollars, 77.60% of which
were sent to low- and middle-income countries, i.e. 554 Billion US Dollars.19 In 2019, India was the largest recipient
of remittances by total received, followed by China, Mexico and the Philippines. For countries such as Tonga, Haiti
and South Sudan, remittances represent more than 30% of their Gross Domestic Product.
Over time, remittance flows have consistently grown and today are considerably larger than Official Development
Assistance. Since last year, remittance flows have surpassed the total Foreign Direct Investments as well. As Ratha
puts it, in the recent panel discussion “Transitional Justice: Towards “Building Back Better”, this is a quite remarkable
milestone. It means that the money sent back home by migrant workers through small transactions adds up to
become larger than the entirety of the money flowing through all the multinational companies in the world.
Data from the International Labour Organisation (ILO),20 indicates that migrant workers represent around 4.7% of
the global workforce, i.e. roughly 164 million workers, almost half of which are women. Asia (13.3%) and the Arab
States (13.9%) combined are second only to Europe (32%) by presence of migrant workers.21 A report by the World
Bank (WB) and KNOMAD suggests that migrant workers are especially vulnerable to the effects of economic
downturns22 and vulnerable categories are those most likely to be hit by the effects of the current pandemic.
15
Ibid.
Migration Data Portal, Migration & Development. Remittances (last updated 10 June 2020)
https://migrationdataportal.org/themes/remittances
17 International Monetary Fund, Balance of payments and international investment position manual (2009) Sixth Edition,
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/bop/2007/bopman6.htm
18 To download data sets, please visit Knomad, Remittances Data https://www.knomad.org/data/remittances (last accessed
01/08/2020)
19 In reality, remittance flows are bigger than the calculated data. Limitations to a precise calculation are due to informal transfers,
mis-categorisation of expenditures, and possibilities of unreported formal amounts by banks. For a more comprehensive discussion
see,
for
example,
Migration
Data
Portal,
Talking
Migration
Data:
Remittances
and
the
G20,
https://migrationdataportal.org/blog/talking-migration-data-remittances-and-g20
20 International Labour Organisation, ‘ILO Global Estimates on International Migrant Workers Labour Migration Branch Conditions
of Work and Equality Department, Department of Statistics. Results and Methodology’ (ILO Labour Migration Branch & ILO
Department
of
Statistics,
2018)
https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/--publ/documents/publication/wcms_652001.pdf
21 Migration Data Portal, Labour Migration (last updated 09 June 2020) https://migrationdataportal.org/themes/labour-migration
22 Ratha, D., et al., Migration and Development Brief 32: COVID-19 Crisis through a Migration Lens (KNOMAD and World Bank 2020)
https://www.knomad.org/sites/default/files/2020-06/R8_Migration%26Remittances_brief32.pdf
16
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