In 2024, migrants around the world sent home more money than every government’s foreign aid budget and every dollar of foreign direct investment, combined. Almost none of it moved through a government program, a development agency, or an aid organization. It moved because hundreds of millions of individual people, separately, decided to send it.
The International Organization for Migration’s World Migration Report 2026, published in May, puts a number on something that rarely gets treated as a single story: remittances — money migrants send back to family and communities in their home countries — reached an estimated $905 billion in 2024. Of that, roughly $685 billion flowed specifically to low- and middle-income countries. By the report’s own accounting, that sum now exceeds official development assistance and foreign direct investment to those countries combined. There are an estimated 304 million international migrants worldwide, about 3.7 percent of the global population, and international migrant workers alone grew by more than 30 million between 2013 and 2022.
Why this kind of money behaves differently
Foreign aid moves through governments and institutions, with all the delay, overhead, and political conditionality that implies. Foreign direct investment chases returns and can leave quickly when conditions sour — capital flight is a real and recurring feature of how FDI behaves during a downturn. Remittances move differently: household to household, with no intermediary deciding whether the money is well spent, and with a track record of holding up even when everything else pulls back, because the motivation sending it isn’t a return calculation — it’s a parent, a sibling, a spouse. That structural stability is a large part of why development economists have spent the last decade paying closer attention to remittances than to headline aid figures. It also means the world’s largest single channel of cross-border development finance runs on a decision made separately, and repeatedly, by hundreds of millions of individual people who mostly never appear in any report about it.
The same report is candid about where access to that system is unevenly distributed. Migration pathways have expanded fastest for people who already live in wealthier countries, while remaining tightly constrained for people trying to leave lower-income ones — meaning the ability to migrate, and therefore to remit, is itself a resource concentrated where it’s least structurally needed. The report’s broader argument is that restricting migration pathways doesn’t reduce movement; it redirects it toward riskier, less regulated routes, while doing nothing to address the underlying reasons people leave.
The other number in the same report
Displacement is the darker half of the same document: more than 120 million people were living in displacement by the end of 2024 — refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people combined. Most of that displacement happens within national borders rather than across them, and the report identifies conflict, environmental pressure, and structural vulnerability as increasingly overlapping drivers rather than separate categories — a flood and a war and a collapsed local economy are, in a growing number of cases, the same displacement event viewed from different angles.
Read together, the two halves of the report describe a system running on two very different logics at once: a genuinely enormous, self-organizing flow of private money that has become the world’s de facto largest anti-poverty program, sitting alongside a still-growing population of people displaced by forces no remittance can address. Governments and aid agencies tend to get measured on the second number. The first number, larger and quieter, is mostly running on its own — one transfer at a time, decided by people the report never names, at a scale no single government program comes close to matching.
Sources: International Organization for Migration, World Migration Report 2026, published May 2026 (worldmigrationreport.iom.int; summary via reliefweb.int).