How to Distinguish Among Migrants in a
Migration Chain:
Those Who are Links and Those Who Build Links
Vilna Bashi
Abstract
This paper reviews, reevaluates, and extends the social
network as an analytical concept in international migration. Researchers
give much weight to the importance of the immigrant social network
in explaining migration flows, but they have neither specified what
the network is, showed how it works, nor accounted for how it is
structured and maintained. Here, I present an ideal typic model
of the immigrant social network that I call The Hub and Spoke Network.
My research, based on the West Indian immigrant case, shows that
all network members are not equal, i.e., that there are certain
immigrants (whom I label "hubs") who are much more likely to send
for other immigrants. Other immigrants may use the assistance of
the network as they themselves migrate, but these immigrants (labeled
"spokes") are much less likely to send for others. The paper concludes
by discussing two important implications of this new understanding
of network migration for immigration research and policy. One challenges
our understanding of social capital. Migration research to date
has led us to assume that potential immigrants still in the home
country are able to marshal social capital to their own ends when
they are ready to move. However, this research suggests instead
that hubs, or veteran immigrants, are the keepers and controllers
of the social capital in the immigrant social network. This finding
leads to a second implication: if we are aware that the probabilities
of sending for others are unequal across types of immigrants, perhaps
we should develop new ways of studying the processes of and estimating
the probabilities for subsequent chain migration.
Vilna Bashi, Department
of Sociology, Northwestern University
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