Providing social protection to mobile populations: symbiotic relationships between migrants and welfare institutions

Abstract

Studies on migration and social protection have shown that a lack of access to formal welfare in receiving countries leads migrants to rely on their informal social networks for support. This paper argues that such clear-cut dichotomies between formal and informal social protection systems ignore the manners in which both welfarestate institutions and migrants work together at the interstices of the formal and informal to cater to national and transnational social protection needs. Based on empirical data collected during 14 months of multi-sited and partially matched-sample ethnography with Sudanese families across the Netherlands and Sudan, this paper investigates how migrants sometimes enter into symbiotic relationships with different welfare-state institutions, such as municipal offices, non-governmental organisations and other immigration institutions, which in turn rely on the support of these migrants to provide social protection to people who would otherwise escape their purview. While these interplays allow migrants, who are sometimes undocumented, to informally participate in the formal social protection system, such practices are embedded within power relationships that are at times risky, especially for migrants. ARTICLE HISTORY

Re-writing the domestic role: transnational migrants’ households between informal and formal social protection in Ecuador and in Spain

“…(Sabates-Wheeler & Feldman, 2011). Although it can be analytically useful to maintain the distinction between the two types of protection, scholars highlighted that in migrants' everyday lives the boundaries between formal and informal social protection are blurred (Bilecen, Barglowski, Faist, & Kofman, 2019;Serra Mingot & Mazzucato, 2018). Indeed their empirical studies show that migrants assemble different form of protections for coping with risks as well as negotiating access to social protection resources .…”

Securing Old-Age Pensions Across Borders: Sudanese Transnational Families Across the Netherlands, the UK and Sudan

“…As I show, despite the availability of formal socialprotection institutions in the first EU country of settlement, the informal circulation of resources within transnational families is deeply embedded in the practice of reciprocity and norms of social exchange rooted in the sending country. Analysing social protection from a transnational lens allows us to move away from nation states as the main 'containers of everything' (Serra Mingot and Mazzucato 2018). Welfare states thus become just one of the many resources that can be mobilised to provide generalised reciprocity and organise the old-age pensions of the different family members.…”

“Moving on” with gendered aspirations: Sudanese migrants navigating controlling welfare states, labour markets and migration regimes in the Netherlands and the UK

“…Despite the different institutional constraints throughout the asylum process and later on, asylum seekers and refugees do have a certain degree of agency. As discussed elsewhere, the degree of agency at the different migration stages is closely related to factors such as wealth, social networks, language skills or the "symbiotic relations" migrants are able to establish with formal authorities (Serra Mingot and Mazzucato 2018a). Such different degrees of agency play a crucial role in shaping the migrants' aspirations, which are highly gendered and intrinsically linked to the context in which they live, their individual views on their personal options, preferences and expectations, shaped by the cultural, political and socioeconomic conditions "back home" (Allsopp, Chase, and Mitchell 2014).…”