Introduction
Transnationalizing Social Protection: A Proposed Framework
In June 2020, the New York Times reported that Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago had conducted “the first known lung transplant in the United States for Covid-19” (Grady 2020). Dr. Ankit Bharat, the director of the lung transplant program, performed the surgery. Born in India, Dr. Bharat attended medical school there before emigrating to the United States, following a well-worn path laid down by many of his colleagues— one in every seven doctors in the United States is of Indian origin. India sends more doctors to the United States than any other country. In fact, the COVID-19 crisis has thrown the United States’s dependence on immigrant health care workers into sharp relief: 16 percent of registered nurses, 29 percent of physicians, and 38 percent of home health aides in the United States are foreign born (Gelatt 2020).
While many stories tell of foreign-trained medical staff who emigrate to work in US hospitals, a less familiar narrative is how these same hospitals establish outposts and partnerships overseas. Johns Hopkins University, for example, works in collaboration with multiple partners abroad, including two in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Again, Indian workers are central to the success of these endeavors: 3.5 million Indian citizens live and work in the UAE, making it the top destination for Indian emigrants (Connor 2017). In this case, though, Indians are less likely to be working in hospitals and more likely to be building them. They come as laborers rather than highly skilled physicians. And unlike the life of a surgeon in Chicago, these workers face deplorable conditions: pay is meager and living and working conditions are difficult. Any attempt to improve them meets with severe reprisals, including mass deportations (Mauk 2014). Yet every year, thousands of laborers from across the subcontinent join thousands of workers from other poor countries to work abroad because their families back home cannot afford food, medicine, or school fees without it.
Moving abroad to support one’s family is a common but risky strategy. Chittam Malaya was one of the 10,000 residents from the southeastern Indian state of Telangana who go to work in the Persian Gulf every year. Unfortunately, he is also one of the nearly 450 migrant workers who have died on the job in Dubai since 2014 (Reuters 2017). But although rural Telangana suffers from water shortages that make it almost impossible for farmers to stay afloat, Hyderabad, its capital, is a thriving hub for global tech companies and hospital centers. Apollo Hospitals, a national chain with an international reputation, established Asia’s first “health city” there more than thirty years ago. It offers centers of excellence across a number of clinical departments (Apollo Hospitals 2019). In fact, many private hospitals in India have become international health care providers. They are magnets for Indian doctors who want to return home and wealthy patients from across the globe who seek lower cost, readily available, high-quality care (Block 2018; Mathai 2015). Given that medical expenses are now the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States, it is not surprising that an increasing number of Americans look outside the country’s borders to get the attention they need. These experiences bring to light how an array of actors—states, corporations, nonprofit organizations, communities, and households— mitigate risk in a world on the move. They challenge traditional narratives about social welfare as something provided by states to their citizens in a single place. They show how illness and poverty in one part of the world are deeply connected to another part (Gingrich and Kongeter 2017). They also drive home that individuals face very different levels of risk. To emigrate as a doctor is not nearly as perilous as emigrating as a day laborer. Working in a liberal democracy like the United States or the United Kingdom brings with it different opportunities and challenges from working in an authoritarian state like the UAE (A. Paul 2017; Parreñas et al. 2019). Moving capital to invest in a health care partnership is often easier than moving people. Gender, age, education, socioeconomic status, and nationality all mediate risks and rewards and shape access to social protection, giving rise to an extraordinarily stratified set of opportunities and vulnerabilities for migrants and nonmigrants alike (Constable 2014; Mingot and Mazzucato 2018b; Fitzgerald 2019).
To not connect what happens in the places to which migrants travel with the places they leave behind is to miss a key piece of this picture. Dr. Bharat is clearly an asset to his patients, but he is no longer an asset to India. What does it mean for the Indian public health system when so many of its skilled
physicians work abroad? And what does it say about the US health care system when it employs some of the world’s most skilled physicians but millions of its own citizens cannot afford their care? Hospitals in the United States and the UAE are built and staffed by immigrants. But half a world away—in Mexico, or India, or the Philippines—who is taking care of these workers’ children and parents? Private urban hospital centers in India, Thailand, and the Gulf states that cater to global patient flows may keep domestic medical staff from emigrating abroad and may even entice expats home (Cohen 2015; Johnston et al. 2010). But what are the implications of these kinds of resource allocations for basic health services, especially in rural areas? How do we square the fact that, as we write, many countries in the Global North have made remarkable progress toward vaccinating their citizens against COVID19 while a shortage of vaccines throughout the Global South is keeping morbidity and mortality at all-time highs?
Traditional answers to questions about managing risk and precarity generally focus on the state. These top-down narratives only partially explain how social protection regimes are being reconfigured to respond to today’s widespread migration and mobility. In the absence of the state, the family must step in, especially when it comes to the care of children or the elderly. Some families also have the financial means to purchase services via the market or the opportunity to access free or subsidized alternatives through nonprofit community organizations. Which ever way individuals and households piece together social protection, the underlying assumption is that access is limited by proximity: membership in the nation-state via citizenship, geographic proximity to the distribution of services within a given territory, and embeddedness in specific local family or social networks all place natural limits on the availability of social protection.
We believe this conventional wisdom is sorely out of date. How and where people earn their livelihoods, the communities with which they identify, and where the rights and responsibilities of citizenship get fulfilled have changed dramatically (Smith 2006; Levitt 2007; Ho 2019). Societies are increasingly diverse—racially, ethnically, and religiously, but also in terms of membership and rights (Vertovec 2007; Wessendorf 2014; Shams 2020). There are increasing numbers of long-term residents without membership who live for extended periods in a host country without full rights or representation. There are also more and more long-term members without residence who live outside the countries where they are citizens but continue to participate in the economic and political lives of their homelands. There are professional-class
migrants who carry two passports and know how to make claims and raise their voices in multiple settings, but there are many more poor, low-skilled, and undocumented migrants who are marginalized in both their home and host countries.
Our goal in these pages is to analyze how these changes are transforming social welfare as we know it. How do individuals and families protect and provide for themselves when they are born in one country, and then study, work, and become legal residents of multiple countries over the course of their lives? What happens when they do so at a time when many states are stepping back from the social welfare functions they traditionally provided?
What our opening anecdotes suggest—and what our book argues—is that a new set of social welfare arrangements has emerged that we call hybrid transnational social protection (HTSP). We find that HTSP sometimes complements and sometimes substitutes for traditional modes of social welfare provision. Migrants and their families unevenly and unequally piece together resource environments across borders from multiple sources, including the state, the market, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and their social networks. Local, subnational (i.e., states and provinces), national, and supranational (i.e., regional and international governance bodies) actors are all potential providers of some level of care. Changing understandings of how and where rights are granted that go beyond national citizenship will aid migrants and nonmigrants in their efforts to protect themselves across borders. In fact, we suggest four logics upon which rights are based: the logic of citizenship, the logic of personhood/humanity, the logic of the market, and the logic of community. Each brings with it a different set of assumptions about the sources, scope, and rationales behind HTSP. Indeed, as the state steps back, the burden is increasingly on individuals to navigate their way through this complex set of opportunities and constraints. Variations in their ability to do so is another major source of inequality.
Let us briefly clarify our terminology before we proceed. Our use of the term transnational extends far beyond a simple back-and-forth dynamic between two states. Rather, it includes all the possible sites and scales from which social protections are accessed and aggregated. We use the term hybrid to capture how mixed, fluid, and contingent these configurations can be. Hybrid transnational social protections are the policies, programs, people, organizations, and institutions that provide for and protect individual migrants and their families across borders—whether these are voluntary, forced, settled, short-term, or circular movements. We include grounded
actors that provide for and protect people who move transnationally; transnational actors that provide for and protect grounded individuals; and transnational actors that provide for and protect transnational individuals (Levitt et al. 2017). Our definition of social protection is in line with that of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with an expanded focus on education and labor rights.1
We see migration as a form of social protection and as a catalyst for transforming how and where protection is provided. We also see clearly that hybrid transnational social protection redistributes inequalities but does not eliminate them. It enhances vulnerability for some and empowers others by offering them more meaningful, achievable choices about how and where to provide for themselves. The stories we tell in these pages are about the messy overlap between empowerment and exploitation and about the new winners and losers that arise as a result. Our intention is to provide a comprehensive, big-picture view of these changes—across the stages of life, social protection sectors, and the world. We do not offer a state-of-the-art, all-inclusive discussion of developments in each of the sectors we cover. Instead, we provide a broad overview of changes affecting people as workers, learners, health care seekers, caregivers and members of their families and communities, and highlight the connections between them. We hope that this book will inspire policymakers and researchers alike to dig deeper into each.
The New Context of Social Protection
The considerable changes in the where and by whom in social protection we describe result from equally dramatic changes in patterns of migration and in the social contract between citizen and state.
Ever larger numbers of people are on the move, either by force or by choice, temporarily or for extended periods, and with great success or great struggle. Deepening global economic interdependence, declining birth rates and aging populations that leave industrialized economies dependent on migrant labor to function, and structural underdevelopment that excludes the highly educated and lower skilled from viable employment in many poor countries are just some of the root causes of these flows. In 2020, there were 281 million people living “voluntarily” outside their countries of origin, up from 173 million in 2000. The number of refugees and asylum-seekers who fled conflict, persecution, violence, or human rights violations also doubled
from 17 to 34 million between 2000 and 2020 (The United Nations 2021). Paradoxically, 80 percent of the countries that host refugees and asylumseekers are low- and middle-income countries rather than high-income societies in the Global North (The United Nations 2021; FitzGerald 2019). This does not include the large numbers of people who move temporarily or circulate regularly to work or study, for short or lengthy stays, without the intention or ability to settle permanently.
A second factor driving changes in social protection is the decline of the welfare state. For much of the twentieth century, citizens in most industrialized countries relied on services offered by national and local governments for social protection. They held the state responsible for the benefits they received as citizens or workers. Even in countries where workers received benefits based on their employment, the state played an active role in regulating the market and costs.
Today, deindustrialization, neoliberalism, and austerity mean that, in many cases, both expectations about the state and its actual role as a guarantor of basic protections have radically changed. Around the world, supranational financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank require countries needing loans to slash government spending and implement austerity measures to reduce budget deficits. Deindustrialization swept across much of the Global North from the 1970s onward, driven by shifts in production to lower cost countries in Asia and Latin America and technological changes that made a large industrial workforce obsolete (Gough and Wood 2004; Sassen 2006; Kubalcíková and Havlíkovâ 2016). With the loss of industry came the decline of the industrial unions that had been key guarantors of safe working conditions and decent health and retirement benefits. Deindustrialization and offshoring went hand in hand with—and were often facilitated by—the emergence of neoliberalism, which emphasized deregulation, privatization, and reduced government spending. After 1989, in the post–Cold War era, the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe meant that jobs and social protections previously guaranteed by the state were limited or done away with. As the state stepped back and the market became a more important site of social protection provision, socioeconomic rather than citizenship status became a more important determinant of access to social welfare. Even in cases where the state still provides social protection, albeit limited, benefits are often restricted to citizens living inside its borders. This ever-narrower scope of social protections increases stratification and deepens risk.
What happens, then, when the welfare state in decline meets a world of mobility and migration? We see three major ongoing shifts that cause and are consequences of HTSP.
The Disaggregation of Citizenship and Social Rights
One of the most influential takes on the idea of social rights as a function of citizenship was T. H. Marshall’s Citizenship and Social Class (Marshall 1950) Using the United Kingdom as his example, Marshall mapped the long march toward social protection from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. This period witnessed three key stages in the evolution of citizenship: the development of civil rights, political rights, and social rights, respectively—social protection in the form of the welfare state that emerged as the working class gained the right to vote. Here, citizenship is a status, a state’s legally binding recognition of an individual’s full membership. But membership is only open to a relatively exclusive club. Indeed, Marshall himself acknowledged that his analysis was “by definition, national” (Marshall 1950, 9).
Legal citizenship, however, does not guarantee social or political rights. Marshall, after all, based his analysis on relatively wealthy liberal democracies. In poor countries, in spite of voter demands, states often lack the capacity to offer extensive social protections or implement the protections they promise because their institutions are too weak and their coffers too empty. In authoritarian states, social rights may be on offer while political rights are not. As a result, what political philosopher Seyla Benhabib (2004) calls “disaggregation,” or the decoupling of rights from citizenship status, is increasingly common. Even affluent, liberal democracies are backing away from the generous social rights previously afforded to their citizens. The latest trend in welfare state retrenchment is “flexicurity,” a model that combines flexibility (in the labor market) and security through state-sponsored social protection (European Commission 2021).
Today, the everyday lives of ordinary people are out of sync with this linear model of citizenship and social rights. National policies vary but, in some places, noncitizens without political rights do have access to some social rights (Cuadra 2012). Anyone who can show proof of residency in Spain, for example, is eligible for care through the national health service (Parella Rubio et al. 2019). After six months in the country, Argentina also offers all residents access to its public health system, regardless of citizenship.
Any student can enroll in the Mexican public school system. Similarly, unauthorized immigrants in some United States cities and states, such as San Francisco and Massachusetts, are entitled to limited health care even though they lack political voice (Marrow and Joseph 2015). In the context of liberal democracies, the degree to which noncitizens are eligible for social rights generally depends upon the type of welfare state in place, the relative political power of progressive political actors, and how key state agents see their roles and missions as social services providers (Sainsbury 2012; Marrow 2009).
Not only are states extending limited social rights to non-citizens, they also sometimes offer political rights as well. Increasing numbers of countries allow noncitizen voting in city and provincial elections. This is particularly the case in Europe. According to EU law, EU nationals who live in another EU member state have the right to vote in local elections, as well as for the European Parliament (Groenedijk 2008). In countries like Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, nonnationals can vote in elections for regional or national representative bodies. Immigrants resident in Chile for more than five years are eligible to vote in national elections (Finn 2020). In Ireland, the state not only allows all noncitizens who are of age to vote in local elections, but has also invested in ensuring they know they have this right (Dobbs 2017). Some countries extend noncitizen voting rights for legal residents as part of reciprocal voting agreements. They exchange the right of their citizens to vote in the countries where they are living for migrants’ right to vote (Arrighi and Bauböck 2017). For example, Spain’s decision to grant local voting rights to immigrants from South America depended upon those states extending the same rights to Spanish citizens living within their borders (Arango 2013). Subsequently, immigrant voting rights and immigrant access to the welfare state are increasingly related: expanding political rights to noncitizens leads to calls for more generous welfare provisions as politicians try to attract new immigrant voters through social spending (Ferwerda 2021). We must, therefore, examine the complex, changing interplay between citizenship and sociopolitical rights. Indeed, determining just how much rights and citizenship can be disaggregated is one of the key challenges to understanding who wins and who loses when social protection extends across borders.
That said, in most countries, opposition to granting noncitizens full access to social rights is quite common. Citizens also disagree over what rights legal versus undocumented migrants should be eligible for. In their research on public attitudes toward the social rights of migrants in the United States,
for example, sociologist Irene Bloemraad and her colleagues found most respondents were against allowing immigrants without documents “access to public elementary and high schools, in-state tuition to public colleges and universities, social security for workers and their families, emergency health care, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, or welfare benefits” (2016, 1662). While misconceptions are rampant about how much noncitizens actually access the welfare state, the perceived threat these immigrants represent fuel the fires of far-right populism across Europe and the United States (Norris and Inglehart 2019; Schierup et al. 2006).
The De-territorialization of Social Protection
In a nationally bounded model, states offer social protection to their citizens within their borders and citizens who emigrate no longer receive social protection from their home countries. Nor is there an expectation that receiving states will extend significant protections to immigrants or to their citizens who live outside the country for extended periods. Eligibility for a nationstate’s social protections therefore requires membership (i.e., citizenship) and residence within its territories (i.e., territoriality). Contemporary migration also strongly challenges this idea. Today, a wide range of countries of origin and destination routinely, if grudgingly, provide social services to the noncitizens within their borders or to their citizens living abroad.
While source countries have always assisted their emigrant citizens through consular relations, in recent years they have significantly expanded their migrant engagement policies (Iskander 2013; Cano and Délano 2007; Cook-Martin 2013). Indeed, over half the countries in the world now have some sort of diaspora policies in place (Gamlen et al. 2019). More than thirty countries have gone so far as to create a special government ministry dedicated to their diasporas (Gamlen 2019). These efforts add up to a kind of “state-led transnationalism” that extends the reach of the state to citizens living beyond its borders (Margheritis 2007). Indeed, the vice minister for Salvadorans abroad reflected these sentiments when he characterized his mission as transcending “the exclusive protection of citizens within a specific territory. Protecting sovereignty also means protecting the human rights of Salvadorans, wherever they may be” (Délano Alonso 2018, 20).
There are many reasons for this. According to the World Bank, in 2019, remittances to low- and medium-income countries reached a record of
US$554 billion (World Bank 2020). Many countries now depend upon these revenues, not just for the well-being of individual households but to subsidize infrastructure, education, and health care (World Bank Group 2019). They want to make sure that these monies keep flowing. Some emigrants have also become politically powerful enough that they can favorably sway receiving-country foreign policy toward their homelands (Délano Alonso 2018; Levitt 2001; Lopez 2015). Both democratic and authoritarian states use a variety of tactics to engage, assist, surveil, and control their expatriate citizens to achieve their political and economic goals (Gamlen 2019; Tsourapas 2021).
Organizations like the World Bank, the International Organization for Migration, and the Global Forum on Migration and Development promote these policies as drivers of economic development and as potential tools of global governance. They recognize that states are remittance-dependent and that transnationally oriented migrants are potential investors, political lobbyists, or drivers of economic growth (De Haas 2010). These policies do not just address the needs of long-term migrants—they are also aimed at temporary migrants, students, and highly mobile citizens, who live aspects of their lives simultaneously in several countries. Citizens who emigrate, to paraphrase A.O. Hirschman (1970), therefore, are no longer choosing between exit and voice—rather, they are exiting with voice and states are carefully listening (Duquette-Rury 2019).
While these developments transform the geography where the social contract between citizen and state is fulfilled, national territory remains important. We do not mean to suggest that states are driven by altruism. In fact, countries of both origin and destination use social protection and immigration policies to care for, coerce, and/or keep out different groups, sometimes pursuing all three seemingly contradictory agendas at the same time.
Decentering the State
The third major shift in conventional wisdom about social welfare is that the nation-state is no longer the key purveyor of rights and protections. We see a state that is both downsizing and supersizing and that protects citizens and noncitizens alongside other actors. Its role in direct service provision is diminished by re-familiarization, or placing the responsibility for care back on the individual or family; privatization, or the shift away from the public
sector; and marketization, or the use of for-profit market entities to deliver social services (Kubalcíková and Havlíková 2016). The rise of neoliberal economic policies, based on self-reliance and minimal intervention in the market, transformed the market into an ever more important source of social welfare.2
As the state downsizes, and health care, pension funds, and education are increasingly privatized, states also back away from regulating firms and labor markets. Offshoring and outsourcing are now key strategies for firms pursuing growth and precarious employment is a fact of life for many workers. The rise of the global “gig” economy, in which individuals lack benefits, wage guarantees, predictable work schedules, and the expectation of long-term employment with a single firm, is the latest way in which the state is exempting itself from the social welfare business (Thelen 2019). That said, we must remember the difference between the state as provider and the state as underwriter. As the political theorist Chiara Cordelli notes, “What the new era has delivered is not smaller governments, but rather bigger, yet privatized, ones” (2020, 1). In contrast, as the rise in diasporic institutions makes clear, the state is also supersizing. It expands its footprint beyond its borders by creating such institutions and by enhancing consular services, by entering into bilateral agreements to manage its workers abroad, and by directly intervening in the domestic politics of states where its citizens live and work (Délano Alonso 2018; Gamlen 2019).
The role of the nation-state in setting social policy is challenged not only from without but from within. Research reveals many examples in which national governments are purposefully or implicitly handing over responsibility for social welfare to subnational and nongovernmental actors. By doing so, they cede control over who gets access to what pieces of the social safety net. The “gray zones” created by disjunctures between urban, provincial, and national policies can be important windows of opportunity. They allow proimmigrant state and local governments to provide when the national government refuses to do so. In Spain, for example, regional and local governments flatly rejected national policies that restricted access to health care for undocumented immigrants and continued to offer services (Dobbs and Levitt 2017). In North America, immigrant hometown associations partner with home-country governments to match and magnify remittances that fund expanded social policies in communities of origin (Duquette-Rury 2014). Civil society and subnational government actors can, to some degree, counteract the effects of national governments’ downsizing efforts.
Perhaps the most powerful change neoliberalism has wrought is that it casts doubt on the state’s legitimate right to intervene in the market as a provider of health care, education, or retirement services. By doing so, it accelerates the disaggregation of rights from citizenship. Individuals are no longer worthy of social protections by virtue of their membership but on the basis of their ability to pay. In this new demos, “All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized” (Brown 2015, 10). While the private sector always played some role in providing social welfare, in many countries, it now trumps the state in terms of power and legitimacy—with serious implications for the social protection of citizens and noncitizens alike.
The Multiple Scales of Social Protection
A continued focus on the nation-state also misses the many ways in which national policy is supplemented, complemented, and subverted not only by subnational arrangements but by international law and supranational organizations as well. To accommodate people on the move, governments often enter into bilateral and multilateral agreements, backed by global intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations (UN), the International Labor Organization (ILO), the OECD, and the World Bank. International policy instruments like the UN Migrant Workers Convention and the ILO Migration of Employment Convention also provide frameworks under international law for such types of cooperation. To date, social protection for international migrants focuses primarily on workers. Some legal migrants (about 23 percent) enjoy indiscriminate access to social services and social security benefits in host countries on the basis of bilateral and multilateral arrangements. These guarantee that benefits are paid overseas. Eligibility and level are jointly determined by countries of origin and destination (i.e., totalization of benefits) (Avato et al. 2010). But where do these rights come from? And are they truly enforceable? This is a topic for its own book, so we touch only briefly on it here.
After World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which commits signatory states to its principles and obligations, included the right to social security and basic social rights such as food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services. In 1966, the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) also required its signatories to uphold certain social rights. At present, 162 states have signed. Special human rights treaties support and augment the ICESCR. For example, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities all contain the right to health care and the right to social security. These conventions guarantee rights on the basis of personhood rather than citizenship or residence. Under each treaty, a committee is charged with evaluating individual cases in which violations may have occurred (Kaltenborn 2015).
That the international community connects human rights to development also strengthens international cooperation around social rights. The right to an adequate standard of living (including access to food, water, and housing), health, and social security were at the core of the Post-2015 Development Agenda that was negotiated as the framework for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The ILO also introduced the idea of a social protection floor that includes basic social security guarantees for all, across the life cycle. By 2012, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the G20 countries all endorsed this approach. The Social Protection Inter-Agency Cooperation Board was established in 2012 to coordinate efforts to put this in place across international agencies (Deacon 2013).
In 2015, the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which outlines plans to reduce poverty; provide social protection; protect the planet; and encourage peace, justice, and inclusivity— in short, a vision of social protection for all, including migrant workers and refugees. In 2016, the UN Development Group published the Social Protection Coordination Toolkit as a step toward implementing these international mechanisms of social protection. It also established the Joint Fund Window for Social Protection Floors to guide countries in combining national and international resources to pay for social protection floors.
Therefore, at least in theory, if a state fails to provide or protect, an individual can appeal to any one of these international institutions or conventions. In reality, however, their power is often more symbolic than real. Due to several difficult challenges, they do not translate into significant sources of protection in people’s lives. For one thing, ratification numbers remain low. Too many states renege on fully complying with the commitments to which they
sign. Some states are reluctant to see social rights as human rights. When the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers and Members of their Families in 1990, only twenty-two countries ratified it. The convention took thirteen years to be fully implemented. While the ILO proposed various mechanisms to protect the rights of workers regardless of their citizenship status and argued for equal treatment of both native- and foreign-born populations, the principle of nondiscrimination did not gain much traction in practice (Vittin-Balima 2002; Olivier and Govindjee 2013). But although these efforts are uneven and often fall short of achieving their goals, they normalize the idea that international actors endow individuals with rights (Beckfield 2010; Buzan and Wæver 2003; R. Paul 2017). They also legitimize grassroots calls for greater cross-national coordination of social protections for footloose populations.
Changing Context, Changing Coverage
Although we start by acknowledging that we live in a world on the move, this is not to suggest, by any means, that free movement is easy. There is what political scientist Thomas Faist calls a “mobility paradox”—a mismatch between the desire of hundreds and millions of people around the world to move and their actual ability to do so (Faist 2018). We write at a moment when xenophobia and nationalism are on the rise. Native-born locals accuse migrants of overburdening the national social welfare system or taking jobs that they never wanted to begin with (Fujiwara 2008; Dreby 2015). Even in the context of perpetual cycles of populism and greater openness, however, we believe that the underlying institutional changes that drive forward the transnationalization of social protection will remain in place. They are an integral part of an ever more globalized economy and labor market and of the strategies used by more and more states to extend their boundaries to include members living outside them.
In sum, our book is about how these developments transform the ways in which individuals and families protect and provide for themselves. We investigate how the decoupling of social rights from citizenship has led to a reconfiguration of responsibility and a new division of labor among the actors engaged in risk management and basic care provisions. We identify how this reallocation of responsibility maps onto distinct logics of social rights
and use the concept of resource environment to show how migrants and their families piece together packages of protections from multiple sources in multiple settings across time and place. We also examine the additional work done by social protection policies or the tensions between what actually functions as social protection, social cooptation, and social repulsion and how migrants navigate their way between the three. By social cooptation, we mean the ways in which actors offer social protection in exchange for compliance with or active support of their social and political agendas. By social repulsion, we mean how social protection is actively used to marginalize or keep out certain groups.
Our Argument and Contributions
We argue that state-driven, territorially limited, and nationally bounded systems of social protection are giving way to or, at least operating in tandem with, transnational modes of social protection. Rather than treating the national and the supranational as strongly connected but still separate and discrete, as many prior studies have done, we see individual migrants and nonmigrants, and the national, regional, and supranational institutions and policies that affect them, as embedded in the same transnational social field. They protect themselves and their families using resources derived from the multiple sites and sources within that field. While the state is still a crucial actor, it by no means acts alone in providing social protection. Beyond countries of origin and destination, we include the market, NGOs, and communities as sources of support. Individuals use these in countries of both origin and destination to create resource environments that heighten vulnerability and risk for some and liberate and empower others.
Our argument, therefore, moves the conversation about social protection forward in several important ways. First, we analyze national and supranational laws and policies and the lives of individuals and their families in the same breath. Second, we use a multi-scalar, multi-sited approach that brings to light how subnational, national, and transnational actors complement, supplement, or subvert one another (Dobbs and Levitt 2017; Dobbs et al. 2018). By doing so, we unsettle the static relationship between citizenship, protection, and space. Third, we expand upon the notion of resource environments, which takes us beyond state actors as the primary providers of social protection. Fourth, we trace how the different logics of constitutional rights, human
