Puzzling Social Protection across Several Countries: Opportunistic Strategy or Risky Compensation?

International audienceIn a context of increasing mobility, the management of social protection issues from below may encompass several countries. The limited studies on this topic mainly frame migrants’ use of an extended transnational social-protection space as an opportunistic strategy aimed at increasing resources. This chapter analyses the cross-border arrangements of dual Ecuadorian-Spanish citizens coping with the recurrent crisis, adopting a socio-spatial perspective of circulation over the life course. Our findings show that families flexibly adapt to such destabilisations through a mechanism of diffuse circulation of support as compensation practices implying a risky accumulation of constraints and vulnerability. This contrasts with the framings on migrants’ opportunistic and strategic use of social-protection resources and with ‘the welfare magnet’ or ‘welfare tourism’ assumptions. The study draws on fieldwork among 36 transnational families investigated through a multi-sited ethnography in Spain, England and Ecuador in 2015–2016, with a partially matched sample