01
How is migration financed?
The study examines the distinct debt and credit relations migrants establish to fund movement, arrival, and settlement.
Research 01 / Multi-sited ethnography
Financialization of migration + housing
Examining the financialization of migration and housing nexus through a multi-sited ethnography among Latin American migrants to Canada. Gloria C. Pérez-Rivera's current study follows the relations of debt and credit through which migration journeys and settlement in high-cost Canadian cities are financed.
Principal investigatorGloria C. Pérez-Rivera
Mount Royal University · Sociology & Anthropology
FundingSSHRC Insight Development
2025 · two-year award · $70,049
Field sitesCalgary + GTA
A multi-sited study across two high-cost Canadian urban regions.
Core relationsDebt / credit / settlement
Migration finance, housing, work, and capital accumulation.
The study
Following finance through migration
The project focuses on Latin American migrants who arrived in Canada from the United States and from Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and/or El Salvador since 2016, and who are now living and working in Calgary or the Greater Toronto Area.
Rather than treating the cost of migration and the cost of housing as separate problems, the ethnography asks how they intersect in people's everyday financial lives.
02
How does housing reshape those relations?
It asks how migration finance intersects with expensive housing markets to shape where financially precarious migrants live and find work.
Research context
Migration
Movement as a financial process
The project treats migration not only as geographic mobility but as a process made possible — and constrained — by relations of borrowing, lending, obligation, and repayment.
Housing
Settlement under high costs
The research follows what happens when those financial relations continue into rental and housing markets in Calgary and the Greater Toronto Area.
Ethnography
Relations across sites
A multi-sited approach makes it possible to examine how financial relationships travel across borders and remain active through settlement and work.
A longer research trajectory
From displacement to financial frontiers
The Canadian study develops questions that run through Pérez-Rivera's earlier research on forced displacement, debt, credit, and financialization in Colombia. Her previous work examines how precarious populations become sites of financial value extraction and how debt relations can connect displacement, aid, informal work, and longer processes of capital accumulation.
Her 2025 public talks also brought this research program directly into debates about Canada's housing crisis and the financialization of housing.
2023“Compounding Financial Frontiers: Capital Seeds and Seeds for Capital”
2022“Creating Financial Enclosures: The Confluence of Displacement, Aid, and Narcoparamilitary Credit in Colombia”
2025 talksCanada’s Housing Crisis and Migration / Financialization of Housing Across Canada
Sources + further reading