Transnational social protection: setting the agenda

This special volume is dedicated to the memory of Sarah Van Walsum, our dear colleague and friend, who cared deeply about the ideas and issues explored here, made valuable contributions to their elucidation, and hoped to do much more research. We carry on in her honour.

Abstract

Social welfare has long been considered something which states provide to its citizens. Yet today 220 million people live in a country in which they do not hold citizenship. How are people on the move protected and provided for in the contemporary global context? Have institutional sources of social welfare begun to cross borders to meet the needs of individuals who live transnational lives? This introductory paper proposes a transnational social protection (TSP) research agenda designed to map the kinds of protections which exist for people on the move, determine how these protections travel across borders, and analyze variations in access to these protections. We define TSP; introduce the heuristic tool of a ‘resource environment’ to map and analyze variations in TSP over time, through space, and across individuals; and provide empirical examples demonstrating the centrality of TSP for scholars of states, social welfare, development, and migration.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for their sponsorship of an exploratory seminar on global social protection, where many of these ideas were developed, and we thank Jason Beckfield, Helma Lutz, Paolo Boccagni, Jennifer Leaning, Oliver Bakewell, Nina Glick Schiller, and Alvaro Lima for their contributions to our seminar and to this project. We also thank the regular participants of our Transnational Studies Initiative workshop at Harvard University, who graciously read and commented on early version of this paper, including John Arroyo, Isabelle Berribi-Hoffman, Katrina Burgess, Simone Castellani, Tuen Yi Chiu, Vincent Gengnagel, Tiffany Joseph, Alex Kentikelenis, Eva Ostergaard-Nielson, Irene Pang, Amanda Shriwise, Sarah E.K. Smith, and Yasuko Takezawa.

Notes

This special volume is dedicated to the memory of Sarah Van Walsum, our dear colleague and friend, who cared deeply about the ideas and issues explored here, made valuable contributions to their elucidation, and hoped to do much more research. We carry on in her honour.

1. These are organizations of migrants from the same community of origin who now live among their own communities abroad and who work to maintain social ties and send material resources back to their home community.

2. We thank Chris Lilyblad and Alvaro Lima for their contributions to the ideas developed in this section.

3. Undocumented immigrants are eligible for Medi-Cal, and legal non-citizen residents do not have to meet the five-year eligibility requirements required for federal benefits programmes.

4. Such facilities include the ‘Sonnenhaus’ in Senec, Slovakia, and the ‘Gemütlichkeit’ in Galanta, Slovakia.