Migration and Social Protection in Europe and Beyond: Comparing Consular Services and Diaspora Policies

This second open access book in a series of three volumes examines the repertoire of policies and programmes led by EU Member States to engage with their nationals residing abroad. Focusing on sending states’ engagement in the area of social protection, this book shows how a series of emigration-related policies that go beyond the realm of social security address the needs of nationals abroad in the area of health care, unemployment, family benefits, pensions and economic hardship. In addition, this volume highlights the variety of sending states’ institutions that are involved in these policies (consulates, diaspora institutions, ministries, agencies…) and their engagement with citizens abroad in other policy areas such as electoral rights, citizenship, language, culture, education, business or religion. As such this book is a valuable read to researchers, policy makers, government employees and NGO’s.

Dr Jean-Michel Lafleur is the Associate Director of the Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies (CEDEM) and a Research Associate at the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS). He also teaches different courses on Migration at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Liège. He holds a joint PhD in Political Science and International Relations from Sciences Po in Paris and the University of Liège (2008). Jean-Michel’s areas of expertise are the transnational dimension of contemporary migration, EU mobility, social protection and the political participation of immigrants. He currently holds a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to work on a project entitled “Migration and Transnational Social Protection in Post-crisis Europe”. During his career, Jean-Michel received different grants and scholarships to teach and conduct research in foreign institutions such as the Mora Institute in Mexico City, the European University Institute in Florence, the City University of New York (as a Fulbright scholar) and the City University of London. Since 2014, Jean-Michel is also Associate Researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg (Germany).

Dr Daniela Vintila is a postdoctoral researcher in the European Research Council (ERC)-funded project MiTSoPro at the Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies (CEDEM) of the University of Liège. Prior to that, she was a member of the British team of the project “Pathways to power: the political representation of citizens of immigrant origin in eight European democracies” at the University of Leicester. She holds a PhD in Law and Political Science from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, a MA degree in “Democracy and Government” from the same institution, and a BA degree in International Relations and European Studies from the National School of Political and Administrative Studies of Romania. She was visiting researcher at the European University Institute and the University of Edinburgh. Her interests lie in the areas of comparative politics, citizenship, international migration, EU studies, political participation and representation, and social protection policies. Her PhD dissertation (“The European citizenship and the electoral rights of non-national EU citizens in the EU Member States”) was the first large-N comparative analysis of the patterns of political participation of mobile EU citizens at EP and local elections held from 1999 onward in ten EU countries. Daniela Vintila is co-convenor of the ECPR Standing Group on Migration and Ethnicity, co-director of the IMISCOE Standing Committee on Migration, Citizenship and Political Participation, vice-chair of the IPSA Research Committee on European Unification, and member of the Executive Board of the Belgian Political Science Association. She is founder and co-editor of Migration News. She has been teaching at different institutions in Belgium, Spain, the UK, and China.