For decades, many transnational migration scholars have studied the interconnectedness between immigrant well-being and that of relatives from whom they are physically separated. With concepts such as transnational care and care chains, in particular, they have shown how the mobility of migrants driven by labor shortages in the care sectors of industrialized countries itself triggers new needs for care in the societies of origin. These works expanded the meaning of care to embrace various forms of cross-border material and moral support that circulate across transnational family networks and are governed by family and kinship ties that are not gender-neutral. In using the narrower concept of immigrants’ transnational health strategies, which are the rights, schemes, and practices available to immigrants to provide both themselves and relatives in the host, and home societies with access to medical treatment from qualified health professionals.
Immigrants and family members in the home and host societies experience inequalities in access to social protection. Focusing on healthcare, for instance, the immigrant families today respond to healthcare needs of family members here and there through cross-border strategies. It shows that immigrants select and articulate these different strategies to assemble transnational health care arrangements. Using an intersectional approach, the heterogeneity markers such as gender, race, class, and levels of transnational engagement determine the choice between different types of arrangements.
Combining the intersectional approach to social phenomena with the transnational approach to migration is a compelling conceptual tool to study immigrants’ inequalities in access to social protection. Indeed, various existing studies have focused for too long on differentiated access to social protection within the boundary of a single nation-state basing themselves separately on heterogeneity markers that are gender, class or ethnic.
Resource:
Baldassar L, Merla L. Locating transnational care circulation in migration and family studies. Transnational families migration and the circulation of care: Understanding mobility and absence in family life. New York UK: Routledge; 2014. pp. 25–58.
Pseudonym: Alexis
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