Welfare and Mobility: Migrants’ Experiences of Social Welfare Protection in Transnational and Translocal Spaces

As migrants throughout the world make important contributions to their families’ social welfare, migration often implies changes in the ways in which individual’s and families’ needs for economic and social-welfare protection are met. This book contributes to the existing literature on transnational mobility and social protection by bringing in empirical evidence from across the globe which illustrates the multitude of mechanisms in which welfare concerns shape individual and family decisions about mobility and vice versa. By focusing on individuals, households and families rather than on nation states, the book’s contributors distance themselves from the macro and nation-state level of analysis in the field of migration and welfare research. Despite the emphasis on migrants’ subjective rationalities, the book’s chapters often highlight the political nature of many dilemmas faced by migrants and their families and expose national-welfare systems’ inherent sedentary bias. This book is designed for a broad range of audiences, from established scholars and policy-makers to graduate students of Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology and Human Geography who are interested in transnational mobility and social protection. We hope that the readers will find the contributions to this book insightful and valuable for their understanding of migrants’ experiences of social-welfare protection in a globalised world.


Introduction
International migration can be understood not only as movements across the physical borders of nation states but also as mobilities across different social-welfare systems. These latter can be defined as multi-dimensional social protection mechanisms -constituted by a variety of different interlinkages between state, family, market and the third sector -which provide solutions for protecting their members against social risks. As migrants throughout the world make important contributions to their families' social welfare, migration often implies changes in the ways in which individual's and families' needs for economic and social-welfare protection are met. Employing both a transnational and a translocal perspective, this book aims to illuminate the role of social-welfare considerations in individual and family mobility (and immobility) through the lens of migrants' lived experiences and, thus, from their point of view. Through a variety of qualitative approaches, which include in-depth interviews, participant observation and multi-sited ethnography, the chapters collected in this volume shift the focus from the dominant -for this field of research -level of the state to the level of the migrants and their migratory trajectories, motivations and directions. Thus, instead of asking how the welfare state is challenged by immigration (cf. Bommes and Geddes 2000;Brochmann and Hagelund 2012;Olwig et al. 2011), this book explores how migrants' actual and desired mobility is shaped by their welfare repertoires (Righard 2008) or welfare resource environments (Levitt et al. 2017) and how their mobility or immobility, in turn, re-configures their welfare protection strategies.
This book goes beyond the Eurocentric understanding of the welfare state, which emphasises nation-state membership as the primary condition for entitlement to social protection. In order to overcome this bias, the chapters in the volume consider both institutionalised and non-institutionalised social-protection mechanisms and address different domains of social welfare, including unemployment and social protection, healthcare and education, child and elderly care and old-age pensions, etc. Concerning the sources of social welfare, we distinguish four main welfare providers or actors -namely the state, the family, the market and the third sector. Similarly, instead of treating migration as a one-time movement from place A to place B, this book defines it as a form of mobility, i.e. as an actual or imagined movement across space -not necessarily across a nation-state border -and as a practice with meanings attached (Adey 2017). The book's chapters address different types of mobility, among which immigration, emigration, circular migration, return migration and rural-to-urban migration within the same country.
The volume contributes to the existing literature on transnational mobility and social protection by bringing in empirical evidence from across the globe which illustrates the multitude of mechanisms in which welfare concerns shape individual and family decisions about mobility (and, sometimes, immobility) and vice versa. By introducing empirical findings and authors from across a variety of both Western and non-Western contexts, the book invites the reader to reflect on the role of global social inequalities in shaping migrants' motivations, aspirations and trajectories.

Welfare and Migration as a Research Field
The welfare and migration nexus is an established research field which, in the past few decades, has produced a rich body of literature. The main bulk of it, however, has traditionally resorted to the use of quantitative data and favoured the nationstate perspective with states being either the units of analysis or the key policy actors in the field. In his seminal work, which subsequently shaped the dominant line of inquiry in research on migration and welfare, Borjas (1999) found that the immigrants in the US who received welfare support were more heavily concentrated in more-generous welfare states compared to the US-born or to immigrants who did not receive welfare. This finding formed the basis for the 'welfare magnet hypothesis' which posited that interstate differences in welfare benefits act as magnets on the immigrant population. Since then, the welfare magnet hypothesis has undergone a great deal of scientific scrutiny. Thus, Giulietti et al. (2011) have analysed the effect of unemployment-benefit spending on immigration within and to Europe and found no effect of it on the patterns of internal migration of EU nationals and only a moderate effect on the immigration of third-country nationals, which partly confirmed Borjas' claims. In addition to the issue of self-selection among low-skilled versus high-skilled immigrants, the question of whether immigrants benefit more from the national welfare than natives has been examined. Though sometimes contradictory, findings from the US, Sweden and Germany tend to agree that, when compared to natives, immigrants resort to welfare provision more frequently and for longer periods of time (Borjas and Hilton 1996;Gustafsson 2011;Hansen and Lofstrom 2003). In the UK, however, Blanchflower and Lawton (2009) found that, prior to the global financial crisis of 2008, the newly arrived immigrants from the EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe were more likely than natives or third-country nationals to be employed, signalling their positive contribution to the public finance. Other studies explored the patterns of welfare participation among different group of migrants. A recent study commissioned by the Migration Advisory Committee in the UK reported that, over their lifetime, immigrants from EU member states make an overall positive contribution, whereas immigrants from outside the EU make an overall negative contribution to public finance (Oxford Economics 2018). In Germany, the descendants of immigrants were found to be more likely to resort to public-welfare provision than first-generation migrants (Riphahn et al. 2010) while, in Spain, findings show that migrants with long-term residence were more likely to resort to public-welfare provision than migrants with shorter lengths of residence (Rodrígues-Planas 2012).
The sheer growth in the volume of quantitative studies examining the welfaremigration links can be explained by Western governments' rising concerns over increasing immigration as a threat to the sustainability of welfare states. Such concerns are rooted in what is known as the (ethnic) 'threat hypothesis' (Putnam 2007), a theory that assumes that growing ethnic or cultural diversity, which migration certainly contributes to, may undermine intergroup solidarity and trust which, in turn, are believed to be essential for the sustainability of the welfare state (Freeman 2009;Geddes 2005). Following the repercussions of the 2008 global financial crisis and the austerity measures introduced in its aftermath in a number of Western countries, migration in general and migrants' access to public welfare protection in the host country in particular, are again a hotly debated topic (Barrass and Shields 2017;Kalogeraki 2013;Powell 2017). From the mainstream media portraying migrants arriving en masse (Nordland 2015) to governmental bodies procuring evaluations on 'welfare tourism' (Ekhaugen et al. 2016) or 'the fiscal impact of immigration' (Oxford Economics 2018), migrants are being villainised, their 'genuine' motivations scrutinised and their rights to move and/or seek protection questioned. Since the macro-level perspective caters best for answering the dominant questions as uttered in the media and politics, it is thus no surprise that the consolidated field of research on the welfare-migration nexus has overwhelmingly favoured macro-and, to some extent, meso-level perspectives.
On the contrary, the micro-level aspects of the welfare-migration nexus, pertaining to migrants' decisions about migration, their needs for social protection and the (transnational) organisation thereof, have been largely overlooked. A more-recent scholarship on migration and welfare has employed a transnational paradigm, influenced by the seminal works on transnational migration by Glick Schiller et al. (1992) and Basch et al. (1994). More precisely, Basch and her colleagues define transnationalism as 'the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement', emphasising that 'many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders ' (1994, 7). The transnational turn in migration studies also highlighted the need to avoid methodological nationalism, defined by Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002, 302) as 'the assumption that the nation/state/ society is the natural social and political form of the modern world'. Accordingly, Righard (2008) points to the inherent dilemma between migrants' transnational mobile livelihoods and the national immobile protection frames to which they are subjected, while Levitt et al. (2017) conceptualise transnational social protection as 'social protection parcels' that are simultaneously 'stitched together' out of welfare provisions from both sending and receiving states, as well as the family, the market and the third sector. The literature on the micro-foundations of migrants' welfare concerns and decisions to migrate is growing but remains relatively fragmented. For example, scholars have studied separately the provision of care (Lutz 2008) and health services (Bada 2014) to migrants, the role and meanings of dual citizenship (Harpaz and Mateos 2019), migrants' agency for access to transnational social protection (Speroni 2018) and reciprocity between sending remittances and caregiving arrangements (Saksela-Bergholm 2019) from the perspective of transnational social protection. However, this body of literature still suffers from the lack of an integrated dialogue 'that sees health, education, secure retirement, and social security as increasingly constructed within and beyond the nation-state' (Levitt et al. 2017, 4). This book therefore aims to bridge this gap by focusing on welfare and mobility provisions from a transnational space approach.

Moving Beyond the Nation-State-Centred Approach
Esping-Andersen (1990) used the degree to which states assume the role of ensuring its citizens against social risks as a criterion to distinguish between different welfarestate regimes. Whereas in most European countries -and notably, though not only, in the Nordic countries -the state tends to offer some form of universal socialinsurance schemes, market-based solutions are more common in liberal welfare states such as the US and other Anglo-Saxon countries. In many other countries, ranging from former communist states in Central and Eastern Europe to developing economies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where neither the state nor the market succeeded in ensuring against social risks, family continues to play a vital role in individual social-welfare protection. In addition, actors from the third sector, such as charitable and faith-based organisations, are also important providers of socialwelfare protection in both developed and developing countries. This book adopts a broader understanding of social-welfare protection, acknowledging the role of not only institutionalised (e.g. publicly funded/market-based schemes or third-sector organisations) but also the non-institutionalised sources of welfare, such as family and friends. It is addressed in relation to both the different actors catering for migrants' social-welfare needs (family, state, market and the third sector) and the different domains of welfare provision (e.g. unemployment and social protection, healthcare and education, child and elderly care and old-age pensions).

Key Issues
Employing both a transnational and a translocal perspective, the main aim of this book is to illuminate the role played by individual and family social-welfare considerations in migrants' decisions about mobility (and immobility) and how such decisions, in turn, shape their own and their family's social welfare. It does so by focusing on the interplay between the different welfare-provision actors -the family, the state, the market and the third sector -in various socio-economic and geographic settings, for different domains of social welfare and in the context of a number of types of mobility.
Family is, without a doubt, an important source of social welfare and, thus, can shape individual aspirations for and actual practices of geographical mobility in a multitude of different ways. Zooming in on the role of family, the life-course and life-events perspectives are particularly useful in studying mobility choices and trajectories. The different chapters of this book ask how intergenerational care arrangements within families and individual life-course decisions (e.g. reproductive choices, retirement strategies) as well as the individual entanglements with existing gender power hierarchies, influence migrants' aspirations for and actual practices of geographical mobility. For instance, parents' concerns over their children's future education, combined with the family's challenging economic situation, can force them, in the first place, to seek employment abroad and, later, as demonstrated in Chap. 5, motivate them to settle permanently in the country of immigration. However, strong intergenerational family care expectations, deeply embedded in the national gender-making discourses, as shown in Chaps. 3 and 7, can sustain circular migration and, eventually, trigger return migration. Some specific cultural and economic family structures, such as the one-child family policy in China (see Chaps. 2 and 4), have the potential both to facilitate outmigration -for example, by encouraging the only child to move abroad for studies -and, later, to restrain it, by communicating moral expectations for the child to go back home to take care of his or her ageing parents in China.
State-provided or employment-related social-welfare provisions also affect individual and family mobility. For example, in countries with virtually non-existent or only rudimentary public-welfare provision accompanied by meagre employment opportunities -as in the case of Timor-Leste (see Chap. 12) -some may often find themselves forced to leave and seek work overseas to ensure a better future for themselves and their families left behind. While mobility may provide opportunities for socioeconomic betterment, the idea of sedentariness, deeply engrained in the logic of European welfare states, may constrain it, punishing mobility and encouraging immobility, as demonstrated in Chap. 10. In some cases, mobility which, in the first place, was caused by deficiencies in state-or market-provided social-welfare protection, may actually lead to the further accumulation of social risks, as illustrated by secondary movements of Spanish-Ecuadorian citizens in the EU (Chap. 11). Similarly, other groups of migrants, such as the retired expatriate wives returning to Sweden after many years spent abroad (Chap. 9), may unexpectedly realise that their absence from the national labour market has undermined their rights to state-funded old-age social protection. Yet, those in possession of globally demanded or well-paid professions, such as the healthcare workers described in Chap. 8, have the ability to offset their potential loss of state-funded social protection caused by their emigration and, thus, choose a more mobile career.
In practice, however, it is often difficult to isolate the contributions made by different welfare-provision actors to individual migration decision-making. Hence, many chapters in this book engage with more than just one element of the welfare resource environment, encouraging the reader to reflect on the ways in which they are interwoven. For instance, illustrating how particular family circumstances can make public social protection crucial for the welfare of specifically vulnerable groups of migrants, Chap. 6 argues that the access to state-and city-provided socialwelfare programmes becomes decisive for the integration and settlement of single Filipina mothers in Japan. Looking at the other direction of state-family interaction, Chap. 13 discusses how the lack of public old-age social protection in Sudan, reinforced by the strong familialistic discourses over children's responsibility for their parents' future welfare, influences the decisions of Sudanese migrants about their initial emigration to Europe and, later, their secondary movements within Europe.

Key Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives
By zooming in on migrants' own experiences, the contributions in this volume abandon the state-centred perspective of welfare and migration that dominates this research field and, instead, bring to light complex social protection strategies embedded not only in institutional but also in social and cultural settings. The transnational and translocal space approach used by the authors follows in the footsteps of other pioneering work on transnational social protection (e.g., Levitt et al. 2017;Righard 2008). Whereas Righard (2008) focuses on the shortcomings of restrictive national social-protection policies vis-à-vis the needs of mobile populations, Levitt et al. (2017) advocate for the need for a transnational social-protection framework for studying international migration and social protection. While our book draws on the key concepts developed by these studies, namely the 'welfare resource environment' (Levitt et al. 2017) and the 'welfare repertoire' (Righard 2008), it puts the emphasis on the actual and desired mobility of migrants shaped by their -quite diverse -welfare considerations (rather than on institutional settings). Thus, a common thread which goes through the different chapters in this book are the migrants' reflections on and experiences of geographical mobility seen in the light of their social-welfare protection. With the level of analysis being on individuals and households, and not nation states, the chapters explore how migrants' welfare-resource environments or welfare repertoires encourage or restrict their geographical mobility. By employing the transnational and translocal space perspective, the book brings together different accounts of the nexus between welfare provisions and mobility into the conversation and, as such, contributes to an integrated account of the global social protection of migrant populations.
Furthermore, this book abandons the traditional and, arguably, outdated understanding of migration as a one-time movement from one country to another with the ultimate goal of settling permanently there. To this end, the book intends to mainstream a much broader understanding of migration, which it does by employing the concept of mobility. Thus, it aims to illustrate the complexities not only of migrants' actual itineraries -often involving previous experiences of mobility to other placesbut also the rationalities of such choices as well as reflections about the prospects of further mobility in the near or the more-distant future. Hence, several chapters included in this volume address the different forms of geographical mobility -such as immigration to and emigration from welfare states, re-migration, circular and return migration, rural to urban migration -and asks whether and how welfare concerns were part of migrants' decisions about mobility.

Study Contexts
The contributors to this book are anchored in the traditions of Social Anthropology, Sociology and Human Geography, with a keen interest in enabling the reader to partake in the world described in the chapters through grounded and rich empirical material. In order to challenge the Eurocentric understating of the welfare-migration nexus, the editors deliberately sought submissions based on original ethnographic fieldwork and conducted in different parts of the world -not just in the Western contexts which are more common in this field of research. Thus, the chapters tell the stories of migrants who either originate in or have migrated to places in Europe (Austria, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom) and outside the continent (Australia, Brazil, China, Ecuador, Japan, the Philippines, Sudan and Timor-Leste). Together, they provide a myriad of reflections on and experiences of the various state, family, market and third-sector welfare provisions which shape migrants' modes and patterns of mobility (and vice versa). The main reason behind this diversity of study contexts, often featuring states with lower levels of institutionalised social welfare, is to challenge the Western monopoly on the concept of welfare. In so doing, we emphasise the need for a more inclusive and comprehensive operationalisation of the welfare-migration nexus, which would reflect better its complexities in terms of the domains, sources and experiences of migrants or their families.

Content of the Book
The 12 other chapters collected in this book cover a wide variety of topics, perspectives and geographical contexts. They address different types of geographical mobility, among which immigration, emigration, circular migration, return migration and rural-to-urban migration. They engage with different domains of welfaresuch as unemployment and social protection, healthcare and education, child and elderly care and old-age pensions -and with different sources of it -the state with its formal institutions, the family, the market and the third-sector actors. Consequently, the task of arranging the chapters thematically or contextually would face a number of problems. Firstly, defining clusters or groups would inevitably result in blurred, stretched and questionable borderlines between topics, perspectives and the intersecting issues. Secondly, it would be counterproductive to this book's goal to offer readers an integrated reading of the welfare-migration nexus from a micro perspective. Finally, concerned with the imperatives of the topics, concepts and typologies, both the editors and the readers would run the risk of overlooking the perspectives of those who are at the centre of this welfare-migration nexus -individual migrants and members of their families. It is for these reasons that we have decided to restrain from dividing this book into thematic parts, letting its chapters stand on their own and leaving it up to the reader to choose a chapter at a time based on its topic or geographical context. At the same time, the common threads permeating them will help the reader to understand the ways in which these chapters are interconnected.
One such common thread which runs through several of the book's chapters is the role of the intergenerational contract in the mobility (or immobility) of the migrants and members of their families. It is often manifested in relation to childcare, gender roles and education. For example, Yan Zhao and Yu Huang (Chap. 2) discuss how the intergenerational contract and the family-based care regime in modern China shape the internal mobility of Chinese elderly parents. On the one hand, they find that being a supportive parent to the younger generation seems to be a more important factor than filial piety in influencing the elder generation's decision to migrate in order to help their adult children with childcare for the grandchildren. On the other hand, due to their double positionality of being both givers and recipients of care, the grandparents face a stay-or-return dilemma, for they fear that their stay may result in an economic burden for their children. Svitlana Odynets, in Chap. 3, demonstrates how Ukrainian female migration to Italy has challenged the hierarchical relationships of generations and gender in Ukraine, where the traditional family ideals intersect with gender contracts inherited from the Soviet period. She concludes that the persistence of the traditional image of Berehynia -the mother who takes care of her children and family -perpetuates the care mobility between Ukraine and Italy. It has recently become manifest in the emergence of a chain migration pattern wherein aged Ukrainian women in Italy begin taking longer holidays in Ukraine while their own daughters, other female family members or friends temporary replace them at work in Italy. In Chap. 4, Alexander Gamst Page explores how Chinese students in Norway reflect on their aspirations for greater social and geographical mobility on the one hand and the social-care expectations of their ageing parents and the overall more-traditional Chinese society on the other. He argues that moral obligations towards one's parents in China may partly explain the somewhat fluid migration trajectories of this one-child-policy generation of Chinese students, as embedding oneself too deeply in a new community may pose the dilemma of whether to uproot oneself at a later stage or to abandon one's parents. Magdalena Ślusarczyk and Agnieszka Małek show, in Chap. 5, how Polish migrants' view of Norwegian education as a currency, which will give their children access to further studies and better jobs in the future, gradually transform their temporary stay in Norway into a permanent one.
Some chapters in this book look more explicitly into the ways in which state-, family-and employment-related social protection mechanisms intervene with migrants' decisions about mobility. For example, Jocelyn O. Celero (Chap. 6) demonstrates how the availability of different social-protection schemes to single parents in Japan enables Filipina mothers of Japanese-born children to safeguard and improve their socio-economic situation when they, first, transit from marriage to divorce and single parenthood and, later, climb from part-to full-time employment and, in some cases, even home ownership. She argues that these mothers do not passively rely on social-welfare protection schemes but, on the contrary, actively seek, make use of and later abandon certain schemes to destigmatise their position and status in Japanese society. She concludes that their aspirations to settle in Japan or return to the Philippines in the future are contingent more on their children's age, their investments and their visions of desirable retirement than on the immediate social protection available to them. In Chap. 7, Mădălina Rogoz and Martina Sekulová use the case of Slovak and Romanian female care-workers in Austria and show how the geographical proximity between Austria and the migrants' home countries on the one hand and the persistence of conservative cultural expectations towards mothers and women in the home society on the other, result in these careworkers' frequent travels back and forth between their workplace in Austria and home in Slovakia or Romania. They argue that the inadequacy of state-provided care services for children and the elderly and the persistence of conservative gender norms in their home countries sustain these care circulation patterns which only occasionally become disrupted by major life-course or family events which the authors call 'tipping points.' Mojca Vah Jevšnik explores, in Chap. 8, Slovenian healthcare workers' welfare-related considerations underpinning their decision to emigrate from Slovenia. She argues that the generosity of social benefits in destination countries is not a decisive factor for healthcare workers emigrating from Slovenia. Instead, their globally demanded profession is their most valuable financial safety net. Given that healthcare workers are themselves providers of welfare, the chapter also discusses the workers' ethical considerations about leaving patients behind. In Chap. 9, Catrin Lundström examines how Swedish expatriate wives become systematically excluded from national social-welfare provision and how they relate to the national political ideals of gender equality and the dual-earner family model upon their return to Sweden.
Finally, the role of citizenship as a factor enabling or hindering mobility echoes strongly throughout the book's chapters. For example, Anna Wojtyńska and Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir discuss, in Chap. 10, how Polish migrants' entitlements to unemployment and other work-related benefits as holders of EU citizenship in postcrisis Iceland, combined with the imperfect EU regulations in the domain of social protection, discourage their return migration to Poland and lead to geographical and social immobility. On the contrary, Polina Palash and Virginie Baby-Collin (Chap. 11) illuminate the ways in which EU citizenship enables naturalised Spanish-Ecuadorian migrants to manage their social protection across multiple countries over their life span as they circulate between Spain and the UK. They argue that such mobility, however, does not necessarily guarantee them an accumulation of social rights and, instead, often leads to an accumulation of social risks. In Chap. 12, Claire C. Millar looks at the role of the emigration of Timorese migrants -holders of Portuguese citizenship -to England for their understanding of social welfare for the economic development of their home country. Arguing that Timorese migrants utilise the labour market's economic protections and state-based welfare in support of their own, family-based protection frames, she elucidates the culturally differentiated ways in which migrants and their families piece together unique welfare solutions. Finally, in Chap. 13, drawing on the life stories of transnational Sudanese families whose members reside in Sudan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, Ester Serra Mingot asks what role migrants' considerations for securing old-age pensions play in their decisions to move to and stay in certain places. Focusing on naturalised Dutch Sudanese migrants' secondary movements from the Netherlands to the UK, she argues that migrants' decisions to move are less motivated by the differences in the objective 'welfare generosity' between the two countries but, rather, more by their opportunities to secure their own and their families' social protection in a manner deemed more rewarding from the family's point of view which, in its turn, is rooted in the practices of intergenerational reciprocity.

Instead of a Conclusion
This book contributes to the exiting literature on transnational mobility and social protection by bringing in empirical evidence from across the globe which illustrates the multitude of mechanisms in which welfare concerns shape individual and family decisions about mobility (and, sometimes, immobility) and vice versa. By focusing on individuals, households and families rather than on nation states, the book's contributors distance themselves from the macro-and nation-state level of analysis in the field of migration and welfare research. Inspired by the recently emerging and rapidly ground-gaining theorisations of mobility and social protection, the authors of this book do not simply follow in the footsteps of the pioneers (Levitt et al. 2017;Righard 2008). They take a step further by developing their own theoretical lensessuch as, for example, a theorisation of major life events as 'tipping points' in migrants' trajectories (see Chap. 7).
Given the broad scope of topics, geographical contexts and theoretical perspectives covered in this book, issues such as gender, culture, intergenerational relations and citizenship become common threads that permeate and stitch together the 12 other chapters of this book. As a gendered process in which culture plays an important mediating role, migration is both a response to and a cause of household welfare insecurity in many countries around the world. At the same time, culture is not something static, predetermined or incapable of adaptation. On the contrary, when viewed in the context of social welfare, culture shapes and is simultaneously shaped by existing social protection structures. The intergenerational processes of care production and reproduction inevitably bind gender and culture together. Thus, the lifecourse and life-event perspectives prove to be essential analytical tools for applying the micro level of analysis to mobility and social protection. Hence, several of the book's chapters illustrate how geographical mobility is shaped by individual and family needs for social protection over the course of migrants' lives. Moreover, in some cases, families' welfare-mobility projects might stretch over several generations.
Despite the emphasis on migrants' subjective rationalities, the book's chapters often highlight the political nature of many dilemmas faced by migrants and members of their families and expose the national welfare systems' inherent sedentary bias. Thus, acknowledging the role of contextual factors (i.e. social welfare and migration regimes and bilateral/international social-protection agreements), a number of the chapters demonstrate that citizenship plays a crucial role in steering human mobility. Leaving aside its symbolic and emotional meanings, the formal possession of the citizenship of particular countries (or, in China's context, the right to city residence Hukou, see Chap. 2) becomes a key factor enabling or disabling onward, secondary and return mobility. The issue of citizenship as one element of migrants' welfare-resource environment brings the reader closer to the concept of agency and resourcefulness in the welfare-migration nexus. Individual agency can help to explain the variations in migrants' ability to piece together their own and their families' social-welfare security despite the seemingly uniform restrictions imposed by institutionalised welfare policies. The future theoretical endeavours could more explicitly incorporate the concept of agency in the studies of transnational mobility and social protection.
This book is designed for a broad range of audiences, from established scholars and policy-makers to graduate students of Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology and Human Geography who are familiar with academic texts and interested in transnational mobility and social protection. We hope that the readers will find the contributions to this book insightful and valuable for their understanding of migrants' experiences of social-welfare protection in a globalised world.
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