How do individuals protect and provide for themselves in a world where so many people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship? The conventional wisdom is that access to social protections is limited by proximity—by citizenship, by geographic proximity, and by social networks—which all place natural limits on the availability of social protection. The authors believe this conventional wisdom is sorely out of date.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 has changed dramatically. Among other topics, the authors examine the relationships between residents without membership and members without residence; professional-class migrants who carry two passports and poor, low-skilled, and undocumented migrants. This book analyzes how these changes are transforming social welfare as we know it. The authors argue that a new set of social welfare arrangements has emerged that they call Hybrid Transnational Social Protection (HTSP). This book finds that HTSP sometimes complements and sometimes substitutes traditional modes of social welfare provision. Migrants and their families unevenly and unequally piece together resource environments across borders from multiple sources. Changing understandings of how and where supranational rights are granted will aid migrants and nonmigrants in their efforts to protect themselves across borders. In fact, the authors suggest four logics upon which rights are based: citizenship, personhood/humanity, the market, and community. The conflicts between these different logics are at the core of the contemporary controversies over what can and should be done to protect dispersed individuals and families from risk, danger, and precarity.
How do individuals protect and provide for themselves in a world where, by choice or by force, so many are long-term residents without full membership and long-term citizens without residence in the places where they are entitled to rights? The introductory chapter discusses what has changed about social welfare provision in this world on the move where states are backing away from their role as social welfare providers. This chapter describes a new regime of hybrid transnational social protection (HTSP) which brings to light how migrants (and nonmigrants) piece together resource environments across borders from multiple sources, including the state, the market, nongovernmental organizations, and social networks. This chapter identifies four logics upon which social protection is based. In addition to the traditional logic of citizenship which entitles people to protection on the basis of their constitutional rights, people also see the logic of personhood/humanity, the logic of the market, and the logic of community. In each logic, social protection involves choices and ranges of actors: local, subnational, national, and supranational potential providers, some only accessible through international migration. Migration thus becomes a form of social protection, transforming how and where individuals and families provide for themselves. HTSP is by no means a panacea. It redistributes inequalities rather than ameliorating them, creating new winners and losers.
Chapter 5 examines the ways older people’s rights to protections are transformed under the circumstances of transnational migration. This chapter highlights four groups at the intersection of aging, transnational migration, and social protection: (1) international retirement migrants, (2) parents whose children emigrate abroad, (3) older immigrants who return to their countries of origin, and (4) migrant elder care workers. Differences across these groups underscore the stratified nature of resource environments for the elderly and their families. While some seniors are able to create plentiful resource environments, the exchange of people, money, services, and information between societies also creates new dilemmas and controversies. As states redefine social and legal citizenship—and, by so doing, extend, block, regulate, and outsource social protections for noncitizens and residents—market actors emerge as important purveyors of services for those who can afford them. Market-based care, however, leaves behind those who lack resources and exacerbates already stark inequalities. Among the most vulnerable are elder care workers themselves.
This book argues that a new set of social arrangements, hybrid transnational social protection has emerged creating enhanced protections for some, increasing precarity for others, and raising new policy conundrums for governments and citizens around the world. Whatever we, as citizens and policymakers, decide to do moving forward, we must recognize that a fundamental shift in the organization of social life is already well underway. It is up to us to reimagine the communities to which we belong and to which we are responsible and to redefine our rights and obligations accordingly.
Chapter 4 focuses on health care, the sector that is perhaps the most transnational and hybridized. This chapter explores the transnational dynamics of care from six perspectives: (1) health care professionals on the move, (2) medical institutions that operate transnationally, (3) individuals accessing medical care through remittances, (4) the provision of health care for undocumented migrants, (5) medical tourism and travel, and (6) the global governance of health care in the context of transnational migration. This analysis reveals the core tension at the heart of the emergent hybrid transnational social protection regime: increased social protection for some may come at the expense of increased precarity for others, whether a public health system in the Global South decimated by brain drain or the shift of health care resources away from local patients to well-heeled international patients. In the middle of these competing factions lies the state, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, governments and their citizens ignore the integral role of transnational actors in public health—both as providers and as patients—at their own peril.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.