Hybrid transnational social protection: The role of religious institutions and networks

In June 2020, the New York Times reported that Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago had conducted ‘the first known lung transplant in the United States for Covid-19’ (Grady, 2020). Dr Ankit Bharat, the Director of the lung transplant programme, performed the surgery. Born in India, Dr Bharat attended medical school before emigrating to the United States following a path well-worn by many of his colleagues – one out of seven doctors in the United States is of Indian origin. India sends more doctors to America than any other country. In fact, the COVID-19 crisis has thrown America’s dependence on immigrant health care workers into sharp relief: 16% of registered nurses, 29% of physicians, and 38% of home health aides in the United States are foreign born (Gelatt, 2020).

While there are many stories of foreign-trained medical staff who emigrate to work in US hospitals, a less familiar story is how these same hospitals establish outposts and partnerships overseas. Johns Hopkins University, for example, works in collaboration with multiple overseas partners, including two in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Again, Indian workers are central to the success of these endeavours: 3.5 million Indian citizens live and work in the UAE, making it the top destination for Indian emigrants (Connor, 2017). In this case, though, Indians are less likely to be working in hospitals and more likely to be building them. They come as labourers rather than highly skilled physicians. And unlike the life of a surgeon in Chicago, these workers face deplorable conditions: pay is meagre and, living and working conditions are difficult. Any attempt to remediate them meets with severe reprisals including mass deportations (Mauk, 2014). Yet every year, thousands of labourers from across the Indian subcontinent, along with workers from a host of other less developed countries, sign up to work abroad because their families back home depend upon the money they send to pay for food, school fees, and medical care.

Moving abroad to support family back home is a common but risky strategy. Chittam Malaya was one of the 10,000 residents of the southeastern Indian state of Telangana who go to work in the Gulf every year. Unfortunately, he was also one of the nearly 450 migrant workers who have died on the job in Dubai since 2014 (Reuters, 2017). But although rural Telangana suffers from water shortages that make it difficult for farmers to earn a decent livelihood, Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana, is a thriving hub for global tech companies and hospital centres. Apollo Hospitals, a national chain with an international reputation, established Asia’s first ‘health city’ there over 30 years ago, offering centres of excellence across a number of clinical departments (Apollo Hospitals, 2019). Many private hospitals in India have become international health care providers: they become magnets for Indian doctors who want to return home (Mathai, 2015) and wealthy patients from other parts of the world who seek less expensive, readily available, high-quality care (Block, 2018). Given that medical expenses are now the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States, it is not surprising that an increasing number of Americans seek care outside the country’s borders.

These experiences bring to light how an array of actors – states, corporations, non-profit organisations, and households – mitigates risk. They challenge traditional narratives about social protection as something provided by states to their citizens in a single place. ¹ They also make clear that the level of risk that different actors assume to access – or extend – social protection varies significantly. To emigrate as a doctor does not carry the same level of risk as emigrating as a day labourer. Working in a liberal democracy like the United States or the United Kingdom brings with it different opportunities and challenges than working in an authoritarian state like the UAE (Parreñas et al., 2020; Paul, 2017). Moving capital abroad to invest in health care partnerships is a lot easier than moving people across international borders: states tend to greet foreign investment more enthusiastically than foreign workers. Gender, age, education, socio-economic status, and nationality all serve to mediate risks and rewards, and to shape access to social protection giving rise to an extraordinarily stratified process (Constable, 2014; Fitzgerald, 2019; Serra Mingot and Mazzucato, 2018).

And to not connect what happens in the places that migrants travel to with the places they leave behind is to miss a key piece of this picture. Dr Bharat is clearly an asset to his patients, but he is no longer an asset to India. What does it mean for the Indian public health system when so many of its skilled physicians work abroad? And what does it say about the American health care system when it employs some of the world’s most skilled physicians but millions of citizens cannot afford their care? Hospitals in the United States and the UAE are both built and staffed by immigrants, largely from South and Southeast Asia. But half a world away, who is taking care of these workers’ children and parents? Private urban hospital centres with global patient flows in India, Thailand, and the Gulf states may help to keep domestic medical staff from emigrating abroad and may even entice expats home (Cohen, 2015; Johnston et al., 2010). But what are the implications for public health, especially in rural areas? What these stories suggest – and what the book upon which my talk that is co-authored with my colleagues Erica Dobbs, Ken Sun, and Ruxandra Paul and will be published by Oxford University Press in early 2023 makes clear – is that social protection for some increases precarity for others.

Traditional answers to questions about managing risk and precarity revolve around or focus on the state, particularly within the context of relatively wealthy and developed societies. In the absence of the state, the family must step in, especially when it comes to the care of children or the elderly. Some families may also have the financial means to purchase services via the market, or access free or subsidised alternatives through non-profit community organisations. Whatever way individuals piece together social protection, though, there is an underlying assumption that access is limited by proximity: membership in the nation-state via citizenship, geographic proximity to the distribution of services within a given territory, and embeddedness in specific local kinship networks all place natural limits on the availability of social protection. Our book on hybrid transnational social protection reconsiders these assumptions and, by doing so, urges us to rethink social welfare as we know it.

The proliferation of lives that cross borders challenges long-standing assumptions about how and where people earn their livelihoods, the communities with which they identify, and where the rights and responsibilities of citizenship get fulfilled (Ho, 2019; Levitt, 2007; Smith, 2006). They produce societies that are increasingly diverse – racially, ethnically, and religiously and also in terms of membership and rights. There are increasing numbers of long-term residents without membership who live for extended periods in a country of settlement without full rights or representation. There are also more and more long-term members without residence who live outside the countries where they are citizens but continue to participate in their economic and political life. There are professional-class migrants who carry two passports and know how to make claims and exercise their voices in multiple settings, but there are many more poor labour-class migrants who cannot gain a secure foothold anywhere. And changes in social welfare brought about by migration and mobility also affect social protection for people who stay in one place.

Therefore, what we are witnessing is that the structure and dimensions of social protection have fundamentally changed. Systems of social protection that were state-driven, territorially limited, and nationally bounded are giving way to a new regime that is, at its core, transnational, involving multiple sectors and actors across international borders. This new transnational social protection regime has in some cases replaced, and in others, operates in tandem with, earlier models. One of the understudied pieces of this puzzle is the role played by religious institutions and networks.

We define transnational social protection as the policies, programmes, people, organisations, and institutions that provide for and protect individual migrants, whether they are voluntary ‘permanent’, short-term, or circular in a transnational manner. We include grounded actors that provide for and protect people who move transnationally; transnational actors which provide for and protect grounded individuals; and transnational actors that provide for and protect transnational individuals (Levitt et al., 2017).

While transnationalism is relatively commonplace terminology in the migration literature, this is a radically different way to think about social protection. Much of our understanding of social protection centres on the state: the state creates welfare programmes as part of a nation-building agenda, the ability to benefit from these programmes is largely determined by an individual’s citizenship status (which is determined by the state), and as such, the welfare programmes it creates in turn more closely binds its citizens to it. Yet, we can see how state-led systems of social protection are becoming more transnational. In the past, states were largely free of their social obligations to citizens once citizens moved outside of the national territory. This is decidedly not the case today: citizens who emigrate are, to paraphrase A.O. Hirschman (1970), not choosing between exit and voice – rather, they are exiting with voice (Duquette-Rury, 2019). Conversely, states with significant levels of immigration are increasingly facing calls to extend social protections to non-citizens. All of this is not to say that the state is unimportant – indeed, it still plays a central role even in a world on the move, in no small part due to its unequivocal control over immigration policy. Rather, we argue that to understand social protection today, we have to move beyond our assumptions both about state–society relations and ‘national’ social welfare policy.

Second, while the state is still central, it is not necessarily the most important source of social protection. Just as this transnational regime involves multiple countries, it also involves multiple possible sources of social protection, namely, the state, the market, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as religious institutions, and individual social networks. Collectively, these constitute an individual’s resource environment (Levitt et al., 2017). This resource environment is not constrained by international borders; it, too, is transnational. However, the ability to tap into this array of resources may be highly constrained, whether by citizenship, socio-economic status, age, occupation, or gender. Therefore, while a system of transnational social protection can create opportunities for some, it can also create or even exacerbate precarity for others.

These transformations in how, where, and by whom social welfare is provided involve benefits for some and also clear costs. Xenophobia is on the rise across the world. Natives accuse migrants of overburdening the national social welfare system or taking jobs that they never wanted to begin with (Dreby, 2015; Fujiwara, 2008). As more health care professionals leave to take up better opportunities elsewhere, care deficits increase. When doctors and nurses who are trained at Indian universities leave to study or work in the United States or Europe, it means that Indians forego the fruits of the education their taxes paid for. While sending governments and private health care and educational institutions try to counteract brain drain by offering incentives designed to get migrants to return, counteracting this massive outflow of human capital is generally a losing battle.

Political debates and scholarly work on Transnational Social Protection (TSP) tend to be framed by a ‘political secularism’ that keeps religion out of all aspects of politics and public life (Fox, 2019). But, while secularism (differentiation of spheres and decline in religious beliefs and practice) challenges the position of religion in the public sphere in the global North at least, it has not brought about its demise. Indeed, Fox (2019) argues that ‘competition between religious and secular political actors not only exists, but . . . is also ubiquitous throughout the world’ (532). Yet, the scholarly focus on secular state actors means that the significance of religiously-based social protection across borders has been overlooked. In my talk today, I am also drawing on work I have done with my colleague Breda Gray, which brings to light aspects of how the TSP regime actually operates by addressing this blind spot.

We use the Catholic Church as an illustrative case because it established a transnational infrastructure of social protection long before similar cross-border arrangements became so popular among many origin states (Gray, 2016; Turina, 2015). We adopt an ‘entangled history’ approach that examines the constitutive, relational, and historical dimensions of Catholic Church institutional status, discourses and practices as these intersect with those of the state in shaping TSP (Agensky, 2017). In other words, we show how the church and state have historically worked together to protect emigrants and, at the same time, create a responsible and connected national population that includes citizens living outside its borders. Our work explores these entanglements in the case of Italy, Mexico, and the Philippines.

Let me say a little about each of these cases in turn. I will begin with Italy. Although it initially opposed emigration, by the turn of the twentieth century, the new Italian state came to see it as a way to alleviate pressures in Italy and potentially useful to the state-building project (Choate, 2007; Tintori and Colucci, 2015). As ‘demographic capital’ in the new state’s consolidation and colonial expansion, emigrants were to be protected through minimal social assistance (Tintori, 2015: 113). Mutual aid, religious, and migrant associations, partially supported by an emigration fund, would provide this assistance (Tintori and Colucci, 2015: 39). Especially in Argentina and Brazil, mutual aid societies and trade unions were central (Baily, 1983: 292), but the networks, resources and agencies created by the church also played a major role in social provision (Choate, 2007). For example, the introduction of the ‘Italian Schools Abroad Scheme’ in 1862 relied on Catholic missionaries who taught Italian language and culture and, in the United States, national parishes paired with parochial schools to simultaneously foster religious and Italian identity (Alba and Orsi, 2009; Choate, 2007).

Bishop Scalabrini, founder of the Scalabrinian Order in 1887 as an apostolate for Italian emigrants, ‘envisioned Italian “colonies”’ around the world held together by religion and national sentiment in which . . . missionaries and government agents would cooperate for the good of Italians abroad’ (D’Agostino, 1997: 126). By 1918, in the United States alone, Scalabrinian efforts were complemented by 26 other Italian orders, which administered parishes, schools, charitable institutions, and social services, often in collaboration with state efforts (D’Agostino, 1997; Vecoli, 1969). The Scalabrinian Order spread to France and Germany in the 1930s where it served Italian migrant workers during World War II and expanded after the war, to Australia, Venezuela, and Canada (D’Agostino, 1997).

Although post-war emigration relieved pressure on the Italian labour market, it remained a topic of heated public debate (Tintori and Colucci, 2015). Again, the state relied strongly on church organisations to provide welfare services (Choate, 2007: 736; Smith, 2003). For example, the government actively supported the expansion of post-war Catholic missions in Argentina and Brazil on the basis that Italian diplomatic networks there were working with large Italian communities (Ferrara and Petito, 2016: 35). Thus, an established transnational infrastructure of NGO and church service providers was already in place during the second major outflow of emigrants between 1946 and 1974.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the Italian state began to develop concerted diaspora engagement initiatives by promoting transnational business opportunities and introducing ‘welfare and pension schemes provided directly abroad, training and educational programmes, [and] Italian language schools abroad’ (Tintori and Romei, 2017: 57). The extension of the franchise in 2001 and subsequent institutionalisation of diaspora engagement led to the expansion of state assistance programmes for Italians abroad. For example, a member of the Italian senate, elected in the South American constituency, leveraged €14 million per annum in state TSP between 2007 and 2009 (Tintori, 2011: 178).

This provision was rolled back following the 2008 economic crisis (Tintori, 2011: 178). Although politically fragile, origin state TSP had become institutionalised and non-resident citizens had gained a legitimate voice in questions of provisioning. By the turn of the twenty-first century, when ‘Italians abroad’ began to be targeted by state diaspora engagement initiatives, the more integrated multi-generational diaspora had less need of church assistance (O’Ressa Venditto, 2014). Scalabrinians continue to work closely with ethnic leaders in the United States to preserve Italian culture and festivals (D’Agostino, 1997), but by the 1990s, most Italian missionary groups were providing pastoral and charitable assistance to all migrants, rather than just Italians (O’Ressa Venditto, 2014). Moreover, the Italian church was becoming more embedded in state provisioning for immigrants in Italy as well as actively protesting the inadequacies of Italian state provision for these migrants (Giorgi and Itçaina, 2016).

The Italian example contributes to our overall understanding of TSP in three key ways: first, it is clear that the entwined efforts of the church and state in shaping non-resident citizen engagement and protection, until the 1970s at least, challenges the adequacy of a political secularist lens in addressing these processes; second, it highlights the significance of church and state entanglement in creating a foundational infrastructure of TSP which the state built upon when it took a stronger role in social provisioning from the early twenty-first century onward; third, as the post-Vatican II Italian church became more open to state welfare intervention, the Italian church adopted a more critical stance vis-à-vis state provisioning, especially in relation to immigrants to Italy today.

Now let me say a little about Mexico:

The Mexico–United States migration corridor is now the largest in the world with the U.S. accounting for more than 98 percent of Mexican migration (Fitzgerald, 2008; Garip, 2017). However, the first large outflow of people was in the 1910s and 1920s, during and after the Mexican revolution (Fitzgerald, 2008). Although church–state conflict characterised Mexican church–state relations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at this critical point in nation building, both institutions were anti-emigration (Fitzgerald, 2008; Sherman, 1999). The state responded initially by increasing consular social supports, but encouraged return (Sherman, 1999: 842, 854). The church too kept emigrant support to a minimum because it feared religious conversions, secularisation, the break-up of families, and potential agrarian radicalism among returnees (Fitzgerald, 2008, 2009) Church efforts to expand its outreach during the Bracero programme (seasonal worker scheme between 1942 and 1964) were ambivalent. For example, just as the Archbishop of Guadalajara warned of the ‘spiritual and material dangers’ to migrants in 1951 (Fitzgerald, 2009), parishes in the archdiocese were establishing pro-emigrant sections that fostered mutual aid among migrants and hometown associations (Fitzgerald, 2005: 9). Indeed, hometown associations (HTAs) were the central vehicle by which the church encouraged ongoing ties to the homeland (Goldring, 2001). Despite these efforts, however, emigrants and returning migrants tended to be treated as second-class citizens or traitors until the latter decades of the twentieth century (Smith, 2003).

The rise in regular and irregular emigration following the Bracero programme led to more concerted church efforts including pastoral tours of origin regions for US priests (Fitzgerald, 2009). These efforts got a boost when, in 1980, the Scalabrinians established a seminary in Guadalajara to prepare priests for migrant ministry and ‘persuade the Mexican Church to develop a more consistent policy towards emigrants’ (Fitzgerald, 2005: 10). In addition to developing services across the United States, the Scalabrinians established a network of migrant shelters, called Casas del Migrante, providing humanitarian, educational, and legal support to migrants along the border (Hagan, 2006). Thus, the church led social provisioning for migrants from the 1950s until the state began to develop its diaspora engagement policies in the 1990s (Fitzgerald, 2008; Norget, 1997). Non-resident citizens became potential diplomatic and economic intermediaries in the Mexican state project of regional economic integration when the status of 2.3 million Mexicans was regularised in 1986 (Sherman, 1999: 860). In 1990, the state adopted an explicit ‘remittance-led development model’ by establishing the Programme for Mexican Communities Abroad (Délano, 2010: 244; Smith, 2008). A Presidential Office for Mexicans Abroad followed this in 2000 and the Institute for Mexicans Abroad (IME) in 2003.

TSP is now delivered via 55 Mexican consulates in the United States and Canada aided by the advisory CC-IME (consisting of Mexican diaspora community leaders). Social protection initiatives include distance learning sites (Plazas Comunitarias e-México), consular identification cards (the matricula consular) which allow people to open bank accounts and get drivers licences without a social security number, transnational border health programmes and consulate-based Health Windows (Ventanillas de Salud), including free mobile medical clinics (Bayes and Gonzalez, 2011).

These state efforts rely strongly on hometown associations (HTAs) originally inspired by the church (Fitzgerald, 2008, 2009) Despite their links to church initiatives, Fitzgerald (2008) argues that HTAs now act as vehicles by which ‘migrants’ economic resources and political support’ are tapped by the state (34,124). State officials cooperate with local priests to organise the festivities but also attempt to secularise them (Fitzgerald, 2009). Homeland ties and a soft cultural nationalism are also fostered through devotions to the Virgin of Guadalupe and local patron saints, and by encouraging return for religious festivals (Fitzgerald, 2009; Napolitano, 2016).

As Mexico became a more important transit country and the border a site of even greater migrant vulnerability, ‘the Tex-Mex Bishops – as they refer to themselves’ – support a range of local and international NGOs, including Catholic Charities, Catholic Legal Immigration Network, and Catholic Relief Services, which together provide humanitarian, hospitality, social, and legal services for migrants (Hagan, 2006: 1560). These were augmented in 2009 via the establishment of the Kino Border Initiative (KBI) by a coalition of six US and Mexican church groups to provide shelter and food services, education, research, and advocacy for migrants (KBI Website, 2019).

The Mexican church also adopts a critical role vis-à-vis state provisioning and exposes the state’s failure to promote jobs in emigrant regions and its unjust treatment of Central Americans in transit through Mexico (Fitzgerald, 2009). This critical role is augmented by a bilateral alliance between the Mexican and US bishops to challenge inadequate origin and receiving state responses to migration (Fitzgerald, 2009). In their first joint pastoral letter, Strangers No Longer (2013), they declared: ‘We speak as two episcopal conferences but as one Church, united in the view that migration between our two nations is necessary and beneficial’. This letter called for systematic reforms to US immigration policy, a path to citizenship, family reunification rights, and protections for migrant workers (Scribner, 2013).

In April 2018, the Bishops of Mexico’s northern border and the Mexican Bishops’ Conference addressed the citizens and presidents of Mexico and the United States for the first time denouncing the deployment of the US National Guard on the border and human rights violations. They pointed out the serious responsibility of successive Mexican governments ‘for not having created sufficient development opportunities for our poor and marginalised people’ (Fides, 2018). This was followed in 2019 by a joint statement from the US and Mexican bishops, again invoking the international human rights regime to denounce ‘the lack of a truly humanitarian reception for our brother migrants, which reflects our conviction regarding the protection of the rights of all human beings equally’ (USCCB, 2019). Unlike the state, the church is not constrained by norms of territorially bound sovereignty. It can speak simultaneously as a universal, trans(national) church concerned with the preservation of human dignity, and as a national church concerned with local families and communities. In contrast, Mexican state efforts to support TSP remain more implicit for fear of US public opposition to this extension of a protective arm into US sovereign territory (Délano, 2009; Levitt et al., 2017).

In sum, despite church–state conflicts dating back to the 1858–1861 War of Reform and Cristero rebellions of 1926 and 1929, Catholicism and Mexican nationalism have been tightly bound (Fitzgerald, 2005: 3). It is precisely because the Mexican clergy view emigration as potentially undermining the tight connection between Catholicism and Mexicanidad that they make fostering nationally identified diasporic subjects central to their programme of pastoral and welfare provision (Fitzgerald, 2008: 80; Napolitano, 2016).

During the first great wave of migration, the church and state adopted ‘parallel but generally uncoordinated efforts’ to dissuade emigration and encourage return (Fitzgerald, 2008, 2009) However, the work that the church did since the mid-twentieth century, by providing refuge and social supports to migrants, helped cultivate the constituency the state needed for its future diaspora engagement.

Now, finally to the Philippines.

In contrast to the Mexican case, where most migrants move to a single destination, the globally dispersed Filipino diaspora, is scattered among 197 countries working mainly in caregiving and seafaring (San Juan, 2011). Like Mexico, Catholicism in the Philippines also dates back to the Spanish colonial era and the political influence of the church has shifted over time (Yap, 2015). Even before the Filipino state’s overseas employment programme was introduced in the 1970s, church-based organisations provided limited pastoral and social care to migrants. This provisioning expanded significantly after a remittance-led migrant labour policy was put in place by the state in 1975. A battery of social protection legislation and regulations accompanied its implementation, including the establishment of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA; located in the Department of Labour and Employment – DOLE) and the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA). The former focuses on the needs of migrants before they leave the country and the latter supports migrants while they are abroad. Additional state protections include minimum wage proposals for domestic helpers, contract compliance regulations, the establishment of the advisory Consultative Council for Overseas Foreign Workers (CCOFWs) in 2002, and extension of voting rights and acceptance of dual citizenship in 2003. However, the ratio of state resources to the sheer numbers of migrants and extent of their dispersal is beyond the state’s capacity (Bagasao, 2008). Because of this, the Filipino government sees NGOs, many of which are church-initiated or run, as essential partners in providing for migrant welfare (Orbeta et al., 2009: 18).

At first, the church worked with the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) and Joint Committees of Councils of Churches to develop social provisioning (Yap, 2015). Later, formal church migrant care structures were put in place when the Scalabrinians arrived in Manila in the early 1980s to work with the Episcopal Commission for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People (ECMI) (Scalabrini Migration Website, 2018). While the latter established a worldwide network of chaplains to serve Filipino migrants, the Scalabrinians opened the Scalabrini Centre for People on the Move (SCPM) and provides pastoral, legal, and welfare support to migrants in 33 countries worldwide (Scalabrini Migration Website, 2018). As in the Italian and Mexican cases, the Scalabrinians have been significant in bridging state and church services. For example, they have explored ‘how Filipino migrants’ associations in Italy and Spain . . . and Philippine government institutions . . . can cooperate to support development processes in the Philippines’ (Asis, 2008: 98).

Churches in most destinations offer ‘programmes and services for migrants’ (Asis, 2008: 94). For example, in France, church support for overseas foreign workers (OFWs) builds upon religious, judicial, social, economic, housing, counselling, and cultural services developed for Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese immigrants between 1945 and 1975 (Fresnoza-Flot, 2010: 348– 9). Since 1986, when the Paris-based Philippines Chaplaincy was established, priests have worked with the embassy on a range of social, economic, and cultural projects (Fresnoza-Flot, 2010: 348–9). Fresnoza-Flot (2010) characterises this chaplaincy as ‘both a religious and economic space’ because much of its work involves promoting Filipino entrepreneurial activities and connecting migrants to French employers (353, 355). These interventions align with the Filipino state’s goals by fostering labour market-ready migrants who will optimise their economic potential to remit to families and communities of origin. Most of those NGOs providing ‘systematic assistance’ to Filipino migrants in Asia ‘are affiliated with Catholic churches’ and, like those in France, address labour market participation issues, including taxation, computer skills training, and rights violation issues (Calbay, 2012; Lan, 2003: 120). However, church practice varies significantly across the world. For example, Lindio-McGovern (2004) found that a church desk for migrants in Taiwan avoided any form of advocacy or collective organisation of workers around rights violations (230). Furthermore, authoritarian states can clip the church’s wings. For example, in Singapore in the 1980s, priests who strongly advocated for migrant worker rights were investigated by the state and accused of sympathising with communist elements (Yeoh and Huang, 1999: 1159). Since then, many church actors prefer to provide individualised support and ‘stress spiritual forbearance . . . rather than to arbitrate between employer and employee’ (Yeoh and Huang, 1999: 1159). One priest’s response was to turn responsibility back on the state by asserting that if problems persist, migrant workers should ‘go to the Embassy’ (Yeoh and Huang, 1999: 1160).

Philippine church and state entanglement is most evident in their co-construction of migrants as making heroic sacrifices for the nation. For example, the 1995 church Pastoral Letter on Filipino Migrant Workers, which emphasised the virtue of migrant hardship was endorsed in the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of the same year (Bautista, 2015: 433). In 2018, the Filipino head of the ECMI stressed the importance of collaboration with government agencies and other groups in promoting the welfare of migrant workers. He highlighted the capacity of the global Catholic lay organisation ‘Couples for Christ’ ‘to empower migrants through moral values reorientation’ and help them become ‘modern day missionaries of Christ’ (Saludes, 2018). Catholic moral teaching regarding family and gender is often appealed to by state pre-deployment training, which promotes the ‘reputable image of Filipinas’ (Guevarra, 2006: 356). Indeed, one pre-departure workshop for married women migrants recommended ‘“prayer and faith” alongside goals of paying their debts and frequent communication with their husbands and children as means of self-protection’ (Guevarra, 2006: 356). These are just some examples of how the church locates ‘OFW labour within a global, exemplary Catholic imaginary, one characterised by an export oriented mode of production that publicly valorises OFWs as virtuously suffering, de facto missionaries’ (Bautista, 2015: 426). At such moments, it becomes difficult to separate out ‘what is “religious” and where “religious” influence begins and ends’ (Wilson, 2017: 1081).

The Catholicising of Filipino labour migration and church–state collaboration in service provision implicate the church in the government of migration. The church’s public criticism of state migration policy and provisioning is another mode of church migration government. As in the Mexican case, church actors, such as the Catholic Bishop Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), the Scalabrinians, and ECMI repeatedly call out the state for coming up short. The ECMI produces reports from its bi-annual gatherings of worldwide Filipino missionaries, which document problems and demand solutions (Wilson, 2017). Moreover, the Scalabrini Migration Centre produces numerous studies of migration which are often critical of state migration policy and social provisioning (Abella, 2008). In Hong Kong as well, the church demonstrates its capacity to simultaneously work with and critique the Filipino state via active partnering with international migrant’s rights networks and close collaboration with the United Filipinos group (UNIFIL-HK – established in 1984) to protest enforced remittances (Nakonz and Yan Shik, 2009).

The Filipino state’s assertive labour migration policy renders migrants vulnerable via their dispersal in a precarious global labour market. Yet, the state’s simultaneous social provisioning measures project an image of protecting against non-resident citizen vulnerability and risk (Fresnoza-Flot, 2012). The church is complicit in this contradictory project by playing its role in nurturing work-ready non-resident citizens and filling gaps in state provisioning. The church and state also work together to manage the lives of migrants by Catholicising ‘ideal migrant workers’ and making them into national heroes while optimising their capacities. Finally, the church maintains a critical position vis-à-vis the state by calling it to account for its policies while legitimating migration as a form of national duty.

Our account shows just how contradictory state church entanglements can sometimes be. In each of our cases, the church and state were clearly mutually implicated in constructing a transnational nation and in creating the citizens necessary to maintain it. At the same time, we cited multiple instances of the church taking a critical stance towards state efforts. So while reciprocally implicated in the development and delivery of TSP, the church and state also maintain autonomy with respect to each other when it comes to migrant welfare. When critical of state provisioning, the church claims its specific institutional and religious authority in an effort to shape state TSP policy. In this capacity, it acts as a kind of TSP ‘value guardian’ (Petterson, 2011: 33). However, this is less the church against the state, than a positioning of the church as an actor in the government of migration. The multiple positioning of the church as sometimes entangled with state agendas, sometimes a state substitute, sometimes complementary, and sometimes critical, is formative of the project of migration government through TSP. Through its moral confrontation of the state, it endeavours to invigorate public discourse on the ‘ethics of citizenship’ (Rees and Rawson, 2018: 180). Questions of appropriate and inappropriate migration government are deliberated and revised through the entanglements of church and state and in their deliberations as autonomous institutions. The position of the church itself is also contradictory insofar as it works with state TSP to prepare non-resident citizens for inclusion in systematised transnational migrant labour mechanisms, which are, at the same time, the subject of church criticism.

Today, the church sustains a key role in service provisioning and strong public voice on migration despite evidence of secularisation in all three contexts. Catholicism and the church continue to be institutionally, culturally, and ideologically embedded within many states, as well as transnationally, and retain a powerful influence in defining the parameters of TSP.

So let me go back to where I began about the implications of these changes for how we understand social protection today: who is responsible for giving it where and what the consequences are. I hope that by now it has become clear that TSP is by no means a panacea. It redistributes inequality rather than eliminating it.

Writing our TSP book has been a sobering experience. The emergence of the global coronavirus pandemic as we did so convinced us even more of the importance of updating our understanding of the ways in which contemporary social protection actually works. Because disease knows no borders, nor should health care. Because livelihoods cross borders, so must pensions. Even in moments of heightened xenophobia and nationalism, the social welfare of citizens everywhere is deeply interconnected.

Transnational social protection and migration are strategies deployed to reduce risk and uncertainty but they generate new risks and redistribute precariousness. This gives rise to several uncomfortable truths. At best, we believe, rethinking the relationship between citizens and states, a process for which we advocate, will promote new policies and inform new institutions. These, we hope, will enhance access to social protection among excluded groups. But, as these pages reveal, inequality is re-shuffled not eliminated. Enhanced protections for some result in greater vulnerability for others.

We are particularly concerned that migrants’ political voices be heard and their demands for rights be respected as social welfare systems in both sending and receiving countries rely increasingly on migration. This interdependence seriously affects the politics of migration. Governments in receiving countries, for example, cannot afford to shut out the nannies and nurses who care for their young and elderly even when populism is on the rise. Governments in sending countries can no longer think of emigration as a ‘safety valve’ allowing, to paraphrase Hirschman (1970), disgruntled citizens to choose exit (abroad) over voice (at home). Instead, migrants are exiting but retaining voice. Given the economic importance of remittances and the rising importance of the expatriate vote, governments of sending countries are recognising that emigrant citizens will no longer be satisfied with platitudes. They demand that their voices be heard.

We are also concerned that states are less and less accountable for the welfare of their citizens. Whereas professional, well-educated migrants have many places to turn for social protection, the state remains the provider of last resort for most of the world’s poor. How, then, should the contract between state and citizen be redefined? What is an appropriate role for sending states in providing for their emigrants? Which institutions, located where, should be responsible for upholding the rights and protections of the many long-term residents without membership? These individuals – so integral to the care of the young and elderly and to the construction, gardening, and restaurant sectors – often live without access to basic services in the countries where they settle. Governments may have to answer to the native born who fear that immigrants will unravel the social fabric but are they not also morally responsible for them? Without immigrant labour, many societies would fall apart.

Another uncomfortable truth involves tough questions of distributive justice. What constitutes a fair transnational allocation of resources? The decision to seek social protection transnationally affects not only migrants and their families but the non-migrants who stay behind. Doctors from less developed societies like India or the Philippines may now be the backbone of health care systems in Europe or the United States but their departure has left health care systems in their native countries seriously weakened. International clinics designed to attract medical tourists may benefit cash-strapped migrants wishing to bypass long waiting lists or expensive co-payments for elective procedures in their homelands, but these institutions also contribute to local disparities in access to care (Holdaway et al., 2015). Remittances can enable family members back home to purchase goods and services, but the rising cost of living and more limited access to care deeply hurts families who do not receive them. Senior citizens who move abroad for care fare well, but they displace locals who cannot afford the facilities opened to serve these new, more monied population (Sun and Kibria, 2021).

Our work, then, is not just about migrants and their families. It is a response to widespread social injustice and inequality in today’s global world. Indeed, the emergence of the hybrid transnational social protection regime we describe, in part, results from that profound injustice and inequality. I hope that these pages provide tools for policymakers, researchers, and concerned citizens alike who are committed to ensuring that people everywhere get the basic rights and protections to which every dignified human being should be entitled to. I also hope that they bring religious institutions and networks, with all their contradictory entanglements, more centrally into our conversations.