Brokering immigrant transnationalism: Remittances,family reunification,and private refugee sponsorship in neoliberal Canada

Introduction

In October 2021, a month after US troops withdrew from Afghanistan, President Biden launched an emergency initiative that allowed private Americans to sponsor Afghan evacuees. A year later, ordinary Americans had helped resettle 600 Afghan and 30,000 Ukrainian refugees, and the US State Department stated its intention to make private sponsorship ‘an enduring element’ of US refugee policy (Montoya-Galvez, 2022; Watson and Taxin, 2022). Albeit unprecedented in the United States, this initiative was modeled after long-standing Canadian institutions: Canada’s private sponsorship of refugees (PSR) programs and the combined public–private blended visa office-referred (BVOR).

Unlike the government-assisted refugee (GAR) program, the PSR (in which sponsors select the refugees they help resettle ¹ ) and BVOR (in which the government assigns refugees to sponsors) allow private citizens to take responsibility for their sponsored refugees during their first year in Canada. During the sponsorship year (and often longer), private sponsors financially support refugees either partially (BVOR) or completely (PSR). Sponsors also serve as newcomers’ main conduit for resources, including housing, transportation, healthcare, employment, language learning, and even, as we will show, maintaining cross-border ties with family members in the homeland.

While there has been much academic interest in Canada’s private resettlement programs (Labman and Cameron, 2020; Reynolds and Clark-Kazak, 2019), and particularly, private sponsors’ role as agents of resettlement (Elcioglu, 2021; Haugen et al., 2020; Lenard, 2019), we know less about how these sponsors shape newcomers’ transnational ties to their homelands. Migration scholars have shown that immigrants’ cross-border ties often hinge on the support of various actors, like hometown associations and governments (Waldinger, 2015). ² We introduce another social actor: non-immigrant civilians in the hostland.

This study shows how Canadians who volunteer as private sponsors end up with discretionary power over the newcomers they help resettle. Drawing on interviews with sponsors (n = 23) and representatives of sponsorship-overseeing social service organizations (n = 2) as well as participant observation of an 8-week online course, we show how the private refugee sponsorship program allows non-immigrant civilians to broker refugees’ transnational practices. By transnationalism we mean ‘the processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and country of settlement’ (Glick-Schiller et al., 1992: 1). Transnational practices can encompass many kinds of cross-border activities, including remittances (Duquette-Rury, 2020), transmission of information to facilitate chain migration (Kibria, 2011), and participation in homeland politics from abroad (Andrews, 2018).

In this study, we focus on two forms of transnationalism – remittances and preservation of cross-border ties with family. We show how newcomers rely on the discretion of their civilian sponsors for these practices. Specifically, this article illustrates how citizen sponsors can discourage ‘their’ refugees from sending remittances, believing that this practice thwarts newcomers’ assimilation. Yet, sponsors may also facilitate refugees’ cross-border ties when they agree to sponsor their charges’ loved ones.

Which transnational practices are encouraged or discouraged is shaped by sponsors’ conceptions of successful resettlement. ³ While sponsors consider remittances a sign of refugees’ backward-looking (and unhealthy) orientation to a pre-Canadian past, family reunification is thought to signal refugees’ forward-looking (and healthy) orientation to a Canadian future.

That ordinary citizens can influence immigrant transnationalism has conceptual implications. First, it nuances a key framework in the sociology of migration – transnationalism – by troubling the assumption that cross-border linkages tend to be state- or immigrant-led. Second, by examining how sponsors navigate common transnational practices, we show how neoliberalization heightens the power that civilians in the hostland wield over refugees. We conclude by linking private resettlement to the broader trend in North America to devolve the management of noncitizens from the federal to the local level, and from state authorities to ordinary citizens.

The privatization of refugee resettlement

Governments normally control refugee admissions and settlement. However, for over 40 years, the Canadian government has also relied on private Canadian citizens and permanent residents for refugee settlement. In fact, the PSR and the BVOR, established in 1976 and 2013, respectively, have facilitated the resettlement of 48% of all Canadian refugees over the last four decades (Van Haren, 2021).

Private sponsorship originally supplemented government-assisted sponsorship, but over the past decade, the program has become the primary way that refugees can resettle in Canada (Labman, 2019). Government sponsorships were almost double the number of PSRs between 1995 and 2012. By 2019, however, the reverse was true (Van Haren, 2021). Canada intends to continue devolving refugee resettlement to private citizens. For the next 3 years, each year Canada will admit up to 23,550 refugees (45.9%) through the GAR program, 250 refugees (0.5%) through the public–private BVOR scheme, and 27,505 refugees (53.6%) through the PSR arrangement (IRCC, 2022).

In the absence of a coordinated system of material support and information, refugees sponsored through the PSR or BVOR programs are at the mercy of sponsors’ capacity, resources, and knowledge (Elcioglu, 2021; Lenard, 2019), including problematic cultural assumptions they may have (Agrawal, 2018; Haugen et al., 2020; Kyriakides et al., 2018). We echo scholars who have emphasized the power discrepancy between sponsors and ‘their’ refugees. Sponsors often continue providing financial support beyond the year-long sponsorship period (Elcioglu, 2021; Lenard, 2019), which is invaluable in places like Ontario, where social assistance rates currently stand far below the actual cost of living (Chandler, 2021). However, it also means that responsibility for refugee welfare is transferred from the public to the private sphere, congruent with neoliberal ethos (Silvius, 2016).

By facilitating this shift, the government also effectively asks private citizens to individually overcome systemic challenges triggered by neoliberal rollbacks on social provisions (Elcioglu, 2021). Limited social housing means that sponsors must help newcomers find housing in an expensive private rental market (Oudshoorn et al., 2020). Sponsors may unwittingly foist bad housing and location choices on their refugees, who must depend on their sponsors’ recommendations. Moreover, the reluctance of Canadian employers to recognize foreign credentials and work experience (Creese and Wiebe, 2012) and sponsors’ preferring that ‘their’ refugees be employed and not on social assistance (Lenard, 2019), means sponsors may encourage refugees to accept deskilling survival jobs (Agrawal, 2018: 954). We argue that this context – where refugees are structurally dependent on their sponsors for access to limited resources – also empowers the latter to influence the former’s homeland connections.

Neoliberalization and refugee transnationalism

The transnational framework has helped correct misleadingly unidirectional accounts of migration and it has done so by sensitizing scholars to immigrants’ and refugees’ cross-border activities and their importance for newcomer integration into host societies. For instance, transnational scholars have documented how families must negotiate being scattered across multiple countries because reunification is protracted, costly, and uncertain (Gabaccia, 2000). Remittances help maintain family ties, allowing senders to be ‘good’ family members to those left behind (Peter, 2010). Often, sending money is fueled by the hope of eventual family reunification (Huennekes, 2018), which, in turn, can facilitate immigrants’ economic adjustment to the receiving society (Bragg and Wong, 2016). Conversely, delays in bringing loved ones together can harm immigrants’ employment and wages in the interim (OECD, 2019), reducing household purchasing power and, concomitantly, access to social rights (Grace et al., 2017).

The transnational lens has also brought attention to the landscape of actors, beyond immigrants themselves, who broker newcomers’ ties to their homelands: sending and receiving states (Waldinger, 2015) and immigrant-led civil society organizations (Andrews, 2018). In this article, we introduce another set of actors – non-immigrant private citizens in the receiving society. Without any material incentives from the state, sponsors voluntarily take on the responsibility of hosting refugees in Canada. As they do so, they discourage certain transnational phenomena (remittances) while facilitating others (family reunification), even though the two are interrelated.

The large body of scholarship on transnationalism, however, has unfortunately neglected the relationship between immigrant transnationalism and neoliberalization, understood as an ‘always-incomplete’ process of ‘market-oriented, market-disciplinary, and market-making regulatory restructuring’ that iteratively destroys and creates infrastructures and norms (Peck et al., 2018: 7). This oversight is surprising given that ‘activists beyond borders’ were an empirical impetus for the transnationalism framework. These international advocacy networks bridged the North–South divide to wage campaigns against the ruthlessness of neoliberal globalization (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Waldinger and Shams, in press). In fact, early transnational scholars argued that neoliberal globalization gave rise to the very conditions that made this cross-border political mobilization possible. For instance, market-bolstering state interventions have helped make transnational corporations fixtures in the neoliberalized economy; yet, these corporations have also ‘inadvertently’ offered workers ‘shared targets’ against which to wage an international struggle (Evans, 2008: 288–299). In its original formulation, therefore, transnationalism was always tied to neoliberalizing processes. However, once adopted by migration scholars, transnationalism was largely stripped of discussions about how pro-market policies, tendencies, and institutions interact with newcomers’ cross-border activities.

Yet, transnational migration ‘remains profoundly connected to market expansion and rapid flows of investment into new geographic regions’ (Mitchell, 2016: 120), just as immigration policies often dovetail with neoliberal programs (Binford, 2013; Mitchell, 2001). Indeed, a key instantiation of immigrant transnationalism – remittances – is best understood as a mitigating response to neoliberalization (Golash-Boza, 2015). To repay debts to international financial institutions, many global south nations have been forced to adopt structural adjustment policies, including privatization, trade liberalization, and reductions in social services. These policies have stunted local industries while reinforcing dependency on wealthier countries. Unable to subsist under these conditions, many in the global south rely on remittances from emigrants (Golash-Boza, 2015). As a result, remittances account for a substantial portion of gross domestic product in many sending countries; internationally, these transfers are valued at nearly $600 billion (World Bank, 2021a, 2021b). War-torn places – from which many refugees hail – particularly need these foreign incomes.

Another example of immigrant transnationalism – family reunification efforts – is also related to neoliberalization. In Canada, provincial governments have severely retracted supports for families (Shields, 2004). Immigrants often rely on the presence of ‘extended’ family because neoliberalization has rendered economic survival impossible without labor market participation (Grace et al., 2017). Grandparents, though considered dependents, are needed for childcare so that parents can work outside the home, afford basic necessities, and try to meet the neoliberal ideal of ‘self-sufficiency’ (Bragg and Wong, 2016). However, the pro-market focus on the economic benefits of immigration has devalued family-class immigration and narrowed avenues for family reunification (Root et al., 2014). Thus, the exigencies of family separation and reunification, just like remittances, must be understood in relation to neoliberalization.

Besides challenging unidirectional accounts of immigration, the transnational lens has also provided a much-needed sociological correction to homo economicus characterizations of immigrants by showing how multiple actors shape newcomers’ ability to forge and maintain homeland ties. We use the case study of private refugee sponsorship to revisit and strengthen this conceptual framework in two ways. First, we demonstrate how, apart from states and immigrant-led civil society organizations, non-immigrant civilians in host societies can also broker newcomer transnationalism. Given the global tendency to devolve resettlement work, we predict that non-immigrant civilian brokers may increasingly become fixtures of immigrant transnationalism.

Second, this article recenters neoliberalism in the study of transnationalism. We show how a market-oriented zeitgeist, coupled with the resource scarcities that pro-market institutional arrangements produce, help explain sponsors’ ideas, actions, and structural empowerment. At the same time, we heed Peck et al.’s (2018) caveat that ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ is not a totalizing project but instead, an uneven, incomplete one that is in ‘contradictory and conflictual cohabitation with non-neoliberal others’ (p. 7). We found, for instance, that several sponsors, despite having no prior experience with immigration bureaucracy, took it upon themselves to meet the high costs and numerous hurdles of reuniting the families of their formerly sponsored refugees in Canada. Sponsors agreed to these ventures not knowing when or if their efforts would bear fruit and without any guarantee that sponsored family members would ‘contribute’ to the Canadian economy. In line with earlier transnationalism scholarship, we thus show how cross-border ties can simultaneously reinforce and challenge processes of neoliberalization.

Methods

This article draws on 25 in-depth interviews between February and May 2020 and participant observation of an 8-week online course between January and March 2021. Recruited through snowballing, 23 of the interviews were with sponsors who had participated in private or BVOR sponsorship in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and Kingston, Ontario.

Most sponsorships in Canada occur under the aegis of sponsorship agreement holders (SAHs) (Van Haren, 2021: Table 3). ⁴ SAHs are nonprofit social service organizations. Their main function is to submit sponsorship applications to the government on behalf of prospective sponsors; SAHs then assume legal liability for the sponsors and refugees under their care (RSTP, n.d.). In our study, two of the 25 interviewees were key informants – the directors of an SAH overseeing more than half of the respondents.

To explore geographic variation, we recruited sponsors in Kingston, a mid-sized city with approximately 120,000 people, of which 13% are foreign-born, and the GTA, a region of nearly 6,000,000 residents, of which 46% are foreign-born (Statistics Canada, 2016a, 2016b). Predictably, Kingston has far fewer immigrant-directed resources than Toronto. However, despite these differences, sponsors from both cities had remarkably similar understandings. Moreover, being mostly white, middle-class, and elderly, respondents resembled the general population of private refugee sponsors (Macklin et al., 2018).

Most (96%) sponsors identified as white, and most were women (65%). Although respondents’ ages ranged from 32 to 78 years old, the average age was 62. Respondents reported middle-class incomes. ⁵ Sponsors had white-collar professional backgrounds. Most (87%) were homeowners. Nearly three-quarters of the sample were married (74%) and living in two-person households.

Unlike past scholarship about hostland civil society actors mediating refugees’ experiences (Landolt and Goldring, 2010; Riaño-Alcalá and Goldring, 2014), respondents in this study were not social justice or community activists. In fact, for the vast majority of respondents, sponsorship marked a new level of civic engagement and their first sustained contact with racialized, working-class newcomers. Most respondents (65%) had become sponsors in 2015 and 2016, in support of the Liberal Party’s commitment to resettle more Syrian refugees than Canada ever had before. In most cases, respondents were novices to sponsorship.

Our study is informed by the philosophy that unique cases offer opportunities to challenge and extend theory. Even a single case that does not align with extant theory creates an opening to reconstruct that theory so that it ‘absorb[s] the anomaly’ (Burawoy, 2021: 130). In our case, that sponsors tried to influence refugees’ cross-border activities provided the opportunity to reconceptualize transnationalism by broadening the scope of actors and social forces that can influence this process.

Nonetheless, we used additional data sources to determine whether our findings were being echoed at higher institutional levels. This study also draws on participant observation of an online course facilitated by a government-funded national organization that trains prospective sponsors, a resource that SAHs and sponsors take as guidelines for how to manage refugees. The free 8-week course ran between January and March 2021 and was open to the public. It covered many subjects, including budgeting settlement costs. The modules are created by training organization, which all course facilitators, regardless of positionality, present in a uniform manner. As an enrolled student, one of the authors (Elcioglu) was able to access the course curriculum.

Data for this article do not include refugees’ perspectives. Despite their attempts to intervene, therefore, sponsors may not have been always successful in changing refugees’ behaviors. However, what is sociologically significant is that sponsors attempted to intervene at all, reflecting the extent to which private resettlement program structurally empowers sponsors to shape refugees’ private, cross-border lives.

Data about sponsors were garnered through semi-structured interviews. Following Emerson et al. (1995), the transcribed interviews were open-coded to identify themes related to what sponsors found challenging about their work and how they made sense of refugees’ integration processes. Afterwards, responses were focused-coded. Once we identified the interviewees’ biggest difficulties, we categorized the sources that sponsors attributed to these challenges and their proposed solutions. The next section explores two recurring patterns in the codes, namely, concerns around how family separation and remittances impacted refugee integration.

Sponsors facilitating immigrants’ here–there connections: family reunification

Sponsors impeding transnationalism: discouraging remittances

Institutional support for citizen brokering

Kate, Joshua, and Patrick’s efforts to discourage remittances were institutionally supported. Many respondents first became aware of the ‘problem’ of remittances through online tutorials prepared by a national, government-funded sponsor training organization. The trainers encouraged sponsors to teach refugees about ‘budgeting’, including the necessity of curbing remittances. Separately, the organization characterized the idea that recently arrived refugees would have the finances to support family back in the homeland as a common ‘myth’. Addressing refugees directly, the website emphasized that their sponsor-donated funds were exclusively reserved for living costs in Canada.

SAHs also discouraged remittances. ‘That’s a big thing that they grill into you’, Kate explained. ‘[The sponsors] have to tell [the refugees] that they cannot send money home [because] if you send all your money [there], you won’t have any money here’. Her SAH’s handbook reinforced this approach. The high cost of living made remittances prohibitive, it stated, and for this reason, sponsors could not be expected to ‘fund’ overseas families of their charges.

Meanwhile, others, like Patrick, relied on their SAH for hands-on brokering of newcomers’ transnationalism. When his group quibbled with the Salmans over their remittances, Patrick called on Andrew, a long-time SAH director, to intervene.

If sponsors were not vigilant, Andrew declared, sponsorship funds could ‘all flush home’, leaving refugees in financially precarious circumstances. Andrew had many cautionary tales about remittances. One family had sold all their sponsor-donated furniture; other refugees had participated in petty crime. A particularly trying case involved a young mother of three, who, under pressure from her family, engaged in sex work to wire money. According to Andrew, refugees were always worse off when they remitted. The PSR program’s goal was not to ‘save’ everyone. Rather, it was to help people here, so that they could ‘flower in the Canadian mosaic’.

Remittances constituted the Achilles heel of the PSR program. When Justin Trudeau announced Operation Syrian Refugees, ‘a whole lot of people thought he was nuts and were very provoked’, Andrew explained. If sponsorship funds were allowed to ‘flush’ abroad, the political right would have the fodder to dismantle the program, while pursuing other restrictive immigration policies.

But how did one get a ‘handle’ on remittances? Within the first month after arrival, Andrew explained, sponsors should determine their charges’ overseas familial obligations. Even regular visits to refugees’ homes could ‘tip [sponsors] off to what’s going on’. Unlike sponsors, Andrew was fully aware of how family separation could foster remittances.

If the [sponsor] group only has enough cash to pull off a family of four and [the mother and father] both have parents [living abroad], at some point they’re going to want to come [to Canada]. [. . .] So, if you’re not willing to sponsor them all [i.e. the family of four and each set of grandparents], [your refugees] will start sending money home.

Discussion

Although remittances allow immigrants to maintain family ties and are fueled by the hope of eventual family reunification (Huennekes, 2018), our study finds that sponsors interpret these two forms of transnationalism as separate and opposite. This bifurcated thinking originates from the imperatives of neoliberalization. Blaming welfare state spending for increasing national debt, governments, like that of Ontario, have sought to curb social provisions, including basic supports for immigrants and their families (Shields, 2004). At the same time, policymakers have progressively cast family-class immigrants and ‘dependents’ as having little economic value – and therefore distinct from their more desirable ‘economic-class’ counterparts. This understanding has led to the introduction of more eligibility restrictions for family-class and dependent categories, thereby narrowing official channels for family reunification (Root et al., 2014).

As a result, the burden of bringing kin over has shifted to private refugee sponsorship. Indeed, one national survey of 530 sponsors supporting Syrian refugees, found that over half had had been subsequently asked to assist in family reunification (Macklin et al., 2018). Frequently, interpersonal contact with refugees allows sponsors to see family reunification as a worthwhile pursuit – contrary to the dictates of neoliberalism. However, responsibilizing sponsors in this way means that the reunion of families depends on volunteers’ individual proclivities and capacities.

Sponsors feel more conflicted about remittances, which are also linked to neoliberal processes. Arguably, sponsor trainings that taught about the ‘problem’ of remittances were organized with a realist awareness of the fiscal pressures that both refugees and their sponsors face: a market saturated with low-wage jobs (PEPSO, 2013) that are still out of reach for newcomers with foreign credentials (Creese and Wiebe, 2012). This, paired with an inadequate social safety net, makes refugees’ economic integration a challenge.

Rather than problematizing these structural pressures, however, sponsors and institutional actors in the resettlement community problematized what they could manage: refugees’ budgets. Remittances became a key point of intervention. As the financial responsibility of refugees devolved from the state to civil society, private sponsors coped by deterring remittances. Thus, brokering refugees’ transnationalism was a way for private sponsors to mitigate neoliberalism’s effects.

Conclusion

For decades, scholars and advocates of sponsorship have noted the inadequacy of resources and training geared toward Canadian sponsors of refugees. However, we find a larger, structural problem. The retraction of the welfare state, the subjugation of newcomers to the bottom rungs of the labor market, the false decoupling of ‘economic’ and ‘family-class’ immigration along with the preference of the former to the latter, and the responsibilization of civil society for newcomers’ resettlement constitute the backdrop of sponsors’ actions. As a result, private sponsors respond differently to two common and interrelated forms of immigrant transnationalism in which they are structurally empowered to intervene. They encourage family reunification while discouraging remittances, although the former often depends on the fulfillment of the latter.

We thus encourage scholars of transnationalism to look down and investigate how non-immigrant private civilians in receiving countries shape newcomers’ cross-border linkages. We also urge them to look up and attend to the broader neoliberal context structuring the behavior of citizen brokers. This invitation is in line with the original intent of the transnationalism framework: namely, to (1) document seemingly unremarkable everyday behaviors that are remarkable for transcending borders, and (2) understand these dynamics in relation to processes of neoliberalization.

Future studies might continue to explore how states have devolved the management of their foreign-born populations to local actors, and the inclusionary and exclusionary consequences of such subnational jurisdictions (Marrow, 2009). For instance, the privatization of healthcare has burdened hospital administrators to distinguish between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ immigrants while distributing services (Horton, 2004). Even in Canada’s public medical insurance system, healthcare workers rely on individual discretion and narratives about deservingness to determine when and how to extend healthcare to precarious noncitizens (Landolt, 2022). Often, these categories of moral worth are based on neoliberal standards of individual responsibility and self-discipline – the same logics that private refugee sponsors use.

Relatedly, our findings also problematize how scholars conceptualize Canada in relation to the United States. Bloemraad (2006) shows that in the absence of an interventionist state, the work of US settlement is largely left to private, nonprofit actors, thereby producing more variation in the quality of immigrant-directed services, and consequently, more inequality. Contrastingly, Canada is understood to have a more centralized, government-run resettlement process and, therefore, more uniform service provision to newcomers. Yet, we show the centrality of private civilians in refugee resettlement and what is arguably a trend toward the same model of devolved and privatized governance of noncitizens in both Canada and the United States, a phenomenon that necessitates critical study. This article is one step in that direction.