Transnational Social Protection: A View from Argentina
摘要
The idea that social rights are something we are eligible for based on where we live or where we are citizens is out of date. What happens to family policies when more and more people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship where they would normally have the right to health, education, and elder care? In this chapter, we look at how migration affects social welfare policies in Latin America through the case of Argentina. We propose (Levitt et al. 2023) a framework for understanding present-day social protection regimes to analyze how individuals and families protect and provide for themselves, formally and informally, across borders. We find that migrants in Argentina piece together packages of protections from multiple sources in multiple settings, including the state, the market and NGOs, and from international conventions and agreements. The result is that some families are well protected while, for others, the social safety net is threadbare. The transnational social protection strategies we encountered complement, supplement, and, in some cases, substitute for national family policies. They redistribute inequalities rather than eliminating them.