Caring for Ecuadorians on the move (original) (raw)
Related papers
Mondi Migranti, 2019
With a transnational perspective, this ethnography of Ecuadorian migrants in Vienna and their families in Ecuador focuses on how access to health care, old age, and social security are arranged for across borders, both through formal and informal channels. The "resource environment" is used as a tool to identify services and channels for transnational social protection. Applying the tool to empirical data exposes a series of practices and actors which challenge neatly cut categories. While it allows mapping dissimilar services and actors, it has limits in differentiating between service provision with the financing. This distinction reveals the importance of individual citizen's private money. Thus, although the state may appear at the forefront of the protection of its citizens abroad, a tendency of self-responsibilisation in and outside Ecuador is evident.
International Journal of Social Welfare, 2011
This article explores social protection as a transnational welfare process for migrants from Ecuador in Italy. It focuses specifically on the social protection for the family members left behind which is provided by migrants' remittances as well as by their transnational caregiving practices. It examines the discourse of, and policies relating to, migration in Ecuador, and analyses migrants' personal practices in social protection terms, drawing on an ethnographic study of Ecuadorians in Italy. In so doing, it reviews the interactions between formal top-down and informal bottom-up initiatives to ensure social protection for migrant households and, to some degree, their local communities. As a ‘transnational welfare’ measure, Ecuadorian migrants' rights and opportunities have gained unprecedented salience in their home country because of governmental attempts to cultivate citizen loyalty and national identification at a distance. Still, working overseas remains the key means of social protection for migrant families despite the social and emotional costs for those who migrate and those left behind.
Access to Social Protection by Immigrants, Emigrants and Resident Nationals in Ecuador
2020
Formal labour and affiliation to Ecuador’s social security system is the main gateway for access to social protection benefits, especially in the case of migrants. However, a large informal labour market and low levels on inclusion in the social security system forces large sectors of society to rely on family and community arrangements for the management of risk and economic uncertainty. The state provides some non-contributory benefits through cash transfer programs but, with the exception of health care, these only cover people living in conditions of extreme poverty. Universal, non-means tested programs are limited to the public health and education systems. Overall, migrants face several obstacles to access social protection benefits. Gaining the right to work legally is mostly reserved for white-collar and highly educated immigrants, excluding impoverished immigrants. Paired to the inability to access labour-related benefits and government programs for the so-called poor, immi...
Comparative Migration Studies, 2019
Ecuadorian migration to Spain can be described as an emblematic case of feminization of international migration. As the scholarship showed, this migration flow has been shaped by transnational female social networks in which different types of capital circulate and which are reproduced across generations, providing social protection for people involved in them, both migrants and non-migrants. Starting from three ethnographic studies conducted with Ecuadorian adults and teenage migrants in Seville and in different Ecuadorian localities between 2004 and 2011, this paper has two aims. First, it investigates the crucial role played by migrant women of the first and second generation to create a safety net for the members of their transnational households, in terms of child and elderly care, combining tactically both informal and formal social protection along the different stages of their migratory projects. Second, adopting an intersectional lens, which looks particularly at the dialectic between gender and generation, it analyses the tensions and conflicts generated by the re-positioning of these women within their transnational households. The paper contributes to the literature through questioning the changing gender role and relations in transnational social protection.
Transnational social protection: setting the agenda
Social welfare has long been considered something which states provide to its citizens. Yet today 220 million people live in a country in which they do not hold citizenship. How are people on the move protected and provided for in the contemporary global context? Have institutional sources of social welfare begun to cross borders to meet the needs of individuals who live transnational lives? This introductory paper proposes a transnational social protection (TSP) research agenda designed to map the kinds of protections which exist for people on the move, determine how these protections travel across borders, and analyze variations in access to these protections. We define TSP; introduce the heuristic tool of a ‘resource environment’ to map and analyze variations in TSP over time, through space, and across individuals; and provide empirical examples demonstrating the centrality of TSP for scholars of states, social welfare, development, and migration.
Conference: 14 th IMISCOE Annual Conference “Migration, diversity and the city”, 2017
After at least 15 years of the latest significant emigration wave, Ecuadorian migrants living in Europe are planning their old age. Having already surpassed several crises in origin and destination countries, soon-to-retire migrants live between Europe and Ecuador. As they plan where they will retire, they design strategies drawn from their personal resource environments. A multi scalar perspective on ethnographic material reveals the intricacies of overlapping, complementary and contradictory formal frameworks at the national and sub-national level, the available resources at local level, and the agency of migrants to guarantee a decent old age. International agreements, Ecuadorian diaspora policies, and European welfare regimes shape migrants’ access to formal social protection in destination countries. Actual implementation of these takes place at the local level resulting in particular constellations of services, gaps, and opportunities in Madrid and in Vienna. For some, return becomes also an option. Transnational practices of social protection are put at play and pieced together to use local services offered by the cities where they live in (Madrid and Vienna) and the country where they hold citizenship (Ecuador). With an ageing global population, securing the well-being of migrants and coordinating the actors involved becomes a pressing issue.
2014
The legal status and living conditions of migrants in host countries reflect contemporary forms of inequality arising from the uneven distribution of wealth and power among states. Over the past decades, the transnational social impacts of global movements of people have raised concerns about the appropriateness of the premise of self-contained nation-states, which have led some authors and social actors to reevaluate the notion of nation-based citizenship and to consider alternative conceptions that fit better to the changing complexities of international migration. In 2008, a constitutional amendment in Ecuador introduced the concept of universal citizenship, granting citizens’ rights independently of national affiliation. This provides a valuable case study for the exploration of the real implications of a de-nationalized citizenship when adopted under the current international framework, and particularly for understanding the way normative orders and migration policies in transn...
The ambition of this exploratory article is to contribute to the analyses of transnational social protection, highlighting the relevance of migrants’ agency. Specifically, I argue that the strategies of transnational social protection are manifested in the interface between informal (interpersonal networks) and formal social protection (provided by national states and organisations), not only through their objective elements (multi-sited resources and services), but also by their subjective aspects (actors’ meanings and institutional normative concepts). The understanding of the actors’ subjective meanings has the potential to articulate the interpretation of transnational ways to access resources of social protection, with the comprehension of the meanings that motivate different modes of use of these resources, by mobile and non-mobile actors. In this paper, a survey and semi-structured interviews from the “Return from Transnationalism” project (RETTRANS, 2011-2013) and life story interviews from the ongoing doctoral project “Transnational social protection: Bolivian transnational families in Barcelona and São Paulo” are analysed.
2019
This thesis focuses on the dynamics of care in the transnational lives of Ecuadorian migrant women in Spain. It is concerned with the various forms of care that take shape and are sustained in the workplace, between friends, and among family members in Ecuador and Spain. Ultimately, it sheds light on how care is mobilised to sustain ideals of solidarity at work as well as togetherness in transnational life. The thesis is set against the background of the economic and political crisis in Ecuador of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which resulted not only in the dollarization of the economy and the removal of the country's president, but in a dramatic shift of traditional male migration from the southern highlands to the United States, to a new wave of largely middle class female migration to Western Europe, especially Spain. Women from across the country left their children, spouses and elderly parents behind to work in domestic and care jobs abroad. In Ecuador, this disturbed the dominant cultural imaginary of the co-habitating and united family, centred on the presence of the woman as mother and wife. In light of this, the thesis engages with women's dilemmas in giving and receiving care during years of absence, the role of family members, friends and domestic workers in this process, and the development of long-term goals focused on remittances, reunification, return, and the ultimate goal of creating a better future. Most generally, while challenging a series of dichotomies between love and money, home and work, gift and commodity-which have structured academic discussions concerning the feminization of international migration-the thesis describes the intimate relationship between women's participation in the gift economy and a global labour market through the lens of care relationships.