The idea that social rights are something we are eligible for based on where we live or where we are citizens is out-of-date. In Transnational Social Protection, Peggy Levitt, Erica Dobbs, Ken Chih-Yan Sun, and Ruxandra Paul consider what happens to social welfare when more and more people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship where they receive health, education, and elder care. The authors use the concept of resource environment to show how migrants and their families piece together packages of protections from multiple sources in multiple settings and the ways that these vary by place and time. They further show how a new, hybrid transnational social protection regime has emerged in response to the changing environment that complements, supplements, or, in some cases, substitutes for national social welfare systems as we knew them. Examining how national social welfare is affected when migration and mobility become an integral part of everyday life, this book moves our understanding of social protection from the national to the transnational.

Peggy Levitt is the Mildred Lane Kemper Chair of Sociology at Wellesley College. She is also a co-founder of the Global (De)Centre. Levitt has received Honorary Doctoral Degrees from the University of Helsinki (2017) and from Maastricht University (2014). She was recently a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute (2017-2019) and a Distinguished Visitor at the Baptist University of Hong Kong (2019). Her earlier books include Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (2015), Religion on the Edge (Oxford, 2012), God Needs No Passport (2007), The Transnational Studies Reader (2007), The Changing Face of Home (2002), and The Transnational Villagers (2001).

Ken Chih-Yan Sun is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova University. His research interests include families, migration, life stage, inequalities, and globalization. He is the author of Time and Migration: How Long-term Taiwanese Immigrants Negotiate Later Life (2021). He also published his works in Social Problems; Journal of Marriage and Family; Global Networks; Sociological Forum; Qualitative Sociology; Ethnic and Racial Studies; Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies; Symbolic Interaction; Identities; Journal of Family Issues; Population, Space, and Place; and Current Sociology.

Achilles Kallergis is an Assistant Professor at the New School for Social Research and the Director of the Cities and Migration Project at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. His research focuses on urbanization, migration, and mobility in rapidly growing cities. In his research, he has collaborated with transnational community networks Slum/Shack Dwellers International and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights. Previously he was a Research Scholar at the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University. He has taught at New York University at the New School.