Author Description

"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 and where many states are reneging on their contract to provide basic social welfare to their citizens? The conventional wisdom is that access to social protections is limited by proximity-membership in the nation-state of residence 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 We believe this conventional wisdom is sorely out of date.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 has changed dramatically. Societies are increasingly diverse-racially, ethnically, and religiously, but also in terms of membership and rights. 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 life 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 book analyzes how these changes are transforming social welfare as we know it. We argue 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