Abstract
How does emigration affect sending states’ welfare policies? Existing migration literature has identified numerous political, economic, and institutional variables that influence sending states’ approaches towards emigrants’ welfare. However, this literature has neglected broader processes of social transformation in sending states. Using the concept of welfare regime transnationalization, we show more precisely how emigration transforms welfare regimes in their functional, distributive, normative, and politico‐institutional dimensions. This process is nonetheless strongly constrained by domestic politics. To illustrate our analytical framework, we discuss the transnationalization of health policies in Turkey and Mexico.
Highlights
How does emigration affect sending states’ welfare regimes? In spite of the numerous controversies around issues of welfare and migration that take place across the world, existing scholarship has not yet proposed an answer to this particular question
Adjusting this concept with the input of migration scholarship, we propose the analytical concept of welfare regime transnationalization, which we define as processes of change in discourses, social policies, and institutional responsibilities implemented by welfare states to respond to the new social risks that mobile populations and their immobile relatives face due to emigration
We propose to look at welfare regime transnation‐ alization, which we define as processes of change in discourses, social policies and institutional responsibili‐ ties implemented by welfare states to respond to the new social risks mobile and immobile populations face due to emigration
Summary
How does emigration affect sending states’ welfare regimes? In spite of the numerous controversies around issues of welfare and migration that take place across the world, existing scholarship has not yet proposed an answer to this particular question. While the link is rarely explicitly made, scholar‐ ship on welfare state reforms is much more related to existing migration theories than one could expect at first sight To illustrate this point one can look at the new eco‐ nomics of labour migration (Stark & Bloom, 1985) accord‐ ing to which migration occurs when households seek to minimize risks of social exclusion by diversifying the type of economic activities in which their members engage. As the literature on immigrant transnationalism has evolved in recent years, a number of scholars have exam‐ ined policies adopted by sending country governments by which they seek to engage with citizens abroad, their descendants and/or specific ethnic groups that these states acknowledge as being members of the polity inde‐ pendently of their nationality (Collyer, 2013; Delano, 2009; Gamlen, 2019) Such state engagement is often presented as a natural consequence of the growing instrumental use of emigrants for economic or politi‐ cal purposes (Lafleur, 2013). In the remaining parts of this article, we, develop an analyt‐ ical framework that builds on these two bodies of lit‐ erature and proceed to examine two case stud‐ ies on the impact of emigrants on Turkey and Mexico’s health policies
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