Do transnational brokers always win? A multilevel analysis of social support

Abstract

Migrants often maintain relationships with significant others located in their countries of origin, which results in having transnational interpersonal ties in addition to local ones. The majority of previous studies indicate that financial and social remittances flow from countries of immigration to the countries of emigration through migrants and their networks. However, less is known about who is involved in those exchanges, what kind of supportive resources flow within and across nation-state borders, and what level of individual cross-border engagement of migrants is related to those flows. We ask whether and how transnationality as an individual attribute, together with other personal, dyadic, and supradyadic characteristics, explain received social support. Drawing on data from 100 ego-centric networks collected from Turkish migrants in Germany, the results indicate that not only the dyadic level but also network structure, the position occupied by individuals in the network and their level of transnationality explain supportive resource flows within and across borders.