Remittance micro-worlds and migrant infrastructure: circulations, disruptions, and the movement of money

Remittances are increasingly central to development discourses in Africa. The development sector seeks to leverage transnational migration and rapid innovations in financial technologies (fintech), to make remittance systems cheaper for end-users and less risky for states and companies. Critical scholarship, however, questions the techno-fix tendency, calling for grounded research on the intersections between remittances, technologies, and everyday life in African cities and beyond. Building on this work, we deploy the concepts of “micro-worlds” and “migrant infrastructure” to make sense of the complex networks of actors, practices, regulations, and materialities that shape remittance worlds. To ground the work, we narrate two vignettes of remittance service providers who operate in Cape Town, South Africa, serving the Congolese diaspora community. We showcase the important role of logistics companies in the “informal” provision of remittance services and the rise of fintech companies operating in the remittance space. These vignettes give substance to the messy and relational dynamics of remittance micro-worlds. This relationality allows us to see how remittances are circulations, not unidirectional flows; how they are not split between formal and informal, but in fact intersect in blurry ways; how digital technologies are central to the story of migrant infrastructures; and how migrants themselves are compositional of these networks. In doing so, we tell a more relational story about how remittance systems are constituted and configured

Migration data in the Caribbean

Long-term migration patterns in the Caribbean1 can be characterized by two principal dynamics. The first, and most prominent, is emigration out of the region, mainly toward Northern America (with the United States being the main destination country) as well as Europe. The second is intraregional migration, characterized in large part by migration from Haiti to the Dominican Republic and in lesser part by emigration from Haiti and the Dominican Republic to other island territories and countries in the region, including the Bahamas (IOM, 2018). Intraregional migration and mobility, both permanent and temporary, of nationals between the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) member countries / territories has also become more prominent in recent years

Are migrants left behind? How COVID-19 hinders better migration data

Migrants worldwide play an important role in sectors vital to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic but are also exposed to higher risks of contracting the virus. Collecting, analyzing and using data on migrants has become increasingly important in light of both of these factors, including to advocate for their inclusion in national vaccination plans to leave no one behind. Despite this, the implementation of extensive local and international mobility restrictions and reprioritization of resources have exacerbated pre-existing challenges to migration data collection. A series of surveys conducted by the World Bank and the United Nations Statistical Division showed that the pandemic hinders many data-related activities and heightens existing data inequalities. This message was echoed by migration data experts from across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas in the recent Migration Policy Practice outlook on human mobility in 2021. The implementation of planned censuses in the current 2020/2021 round, surveys, and other sources of data on migrants and human mobility have all been negatively affected

Total number of international migrants at mid-year 2020

An updated global map from 1990-2020 regarding various Migration topics such as immigration, emigration, migrant flow, forced Migration, Migration policy, et