Titel

This project investigates the trajectories of social protection of African migrants in Mexico, a new but increasingly visible migrant group that has emerged in the past years as a result of a combination of global processes. Migration is a social-protection strategy for individuals and families throughout the globe. At the same time, however, increasingly restrictive migration policies are pushing many migrants to seek new and more risky migration routes. In the past decades, migration and social protection have taken new forms and consequently different relations between the State and society. Many studies have investigated aspects of social protection for migrants from the Global South in industrialized countries of the Global North, with powerful welfare-states. Yet, such focus on origin and destination countries has failed to understand the complexities during the migration process, where people often spend uncertain periods of time in transit countries, frequently affected by violence, socio-economic crises, and a volatile formal social-protection system. Through a mixed-methods approach (ethnographic methods and social network analysis), this project aims to advance our understanding on how mobile populations devise and shape their social protection strategies during their migration trajectories in a transnational manner, beyond sending and receiving states. To do so, this research draws on the case of African migrants in Mexico, a context characterized by inefficient state protection and where social protection practices are carried out informally by individuals and their social networks. By exploring alternative mechanisms of social protection, the findings of this project will aim to inform social policy and ameliorate social inequalities throughout migration processes. Besides being empirically innovative, this study will contribute to the theorisation of current approaches of transnational social protection, which to date have only focused on the circulation of resources across sending and receiving countries.

Duration: 1st December 2021 to 1st June 2023

Funding: DAAD

Principal Investigator: Dr Ester Serra Mingot, Bielefeld University

Host institution in Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (​CIESAS)