Remittances Manipulation: Money Transfer Monopoly

African-migrants

The Afro News Report : The world has seen a big shift from mass immigration for the last 50 years as power of democratic and good governance are much needed in most of the unstable countries. The West have benefited tremendously on this immigrant power to build there economies often forgetting to protect this working immigrant force. They seem to be taken advantage of sometimes by some multimillion dollar corporations who are profiting enormously with their monopoly in the market place.

Over the decades Western Union Company, Money Gram and others have dominated the market of money transfers around the globe. This has opened eyes to many of the new companies that are in the same business. This monopoly of the money transfer business has been a recent study by Simon Fraser University of British Columbia (SFU).

This study looked at some of the cultural and economic factors involved in the payment of remittances by immigrant workers in Metro Vancouver, Canada. Remittances – regular or occasional payments of money by individuals to geographically distant family members or others on the basis of personal or institutional bonds – are an increasingly important component in global flows of wealth remittances often representing long-¬term commitments on the part of senders, where people make payments on a regular basis over many years. The World Bank (2012) estimates that worldwide in 2012, more than US $ 400 billion changed hands in the form of remittances.

The 48 pages of research have demonstrated and underlined that the monopoly of some of the company’s like Western Union and MoneyGram have been discriminately charging transfer fees for the African the Caribbean markets and others after interviewing many immigrants who use or rely on this service to help the family back home in their birth countries.

Immigrants send money to their friends and families in their countries of origin for a variety of reasons. These include occasional gifts, but many immigrants send small regular sums of money to assist relatives with ordinary expenses. The support from immigrants to their kin is similar to the financial support non-¬immigrant Canadians give to their own relatives. It includes: 1) Support for aging parents; 2) Money to cover medical bills or skilled nursing care for sick or elderly relatives; 3) Loans to kin to start businesses, make investments, or pay legal expenses; 4) School and university tuition for children and siblings; and 5) Repayment of earlier support provided to the sender. While all remitters pay fees to send money, the research revealed that immigrants, whose families are the most in need of support, necessarily send small sums of money frequently. These are the senders who are most disadvantaged by the lack of government regulation.

Besides remittance fees and exchange rate premiums there are also a number of non-¬economic factors that influence how a sender chooses a service, such as speed of transfer and security of funds. Respondents showed considerable desire for Canadian governments to legislate to regulate and cap fees.

Research data provided by the Students of the Spring 2013 Simon Fraser University course SA356: Qualitative and Ethnographic Research Methods.

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