Project C3

The goal of this project is to determine the influence of transnationality, as a characteristic of heterogeneity, on the ways that migrants and their families in emigration and immigration countries access and utilize "informal" social security. The study extends across transnational spaces between Germany and Turkey, Germany and Poland, and Germany and Kazakhstan.

The question guiding the research is how transnationality influences the distribution of informal social security and resulting inequalities. Particular emphasis is given to the impact of transnationality on the use of informal services such as childcare, care of sick relatives, money transfers, assistance with integration, and job placement.

The project's focus is on three areas. First, it asks how and under what conditions transnational support strategies take shape. Second, it analyzes the reciprocal influence of migrants' informal support strategies and formal national welfare regimes. Third, it describes mechanisms that produce inequality-related effects in connection with categories such as "gender," "ethnicity," "class," "nationality," and "religion" in the field of migrants' social welfare.

To achieve these goals, the study applies a mixture of methods: interviews with selected migrants and their relatives, participant observation, expert interviews with representatives of institutions and associations, and document analyses. In line with the principle of multi-sited ethnography, data is collected in collaboration with local partners in both the immigration country and the emigration countries.