Tracing Transnational and intersectional inequalities in immigrants families’ access to social protection: The case of Andean families’ in Brussels

Immigrants and family members in the home and host urban spaces often experience inequalities in access to social protection (Faist, 2016, Amelina, 2017). Focusing on healthcare, we demonstrate that immigrant families today respond to healthcare needs of family members here and there through four cross-border strategies. We show that Andean transnational family networks based in Brussels select and articulate these different strategies to assemble transnational health care arrangements. The arrangements we follow are based in the urban area of Brussels but are connected to other urban spaces in southern Europe and Latin America in which migrants have developed networks of informal and formal support. Using an intersectional approach, we argue that heterogeneity markers such as gender, race, class and levels of transnational engagement determine the choice between different types of arrangements (Mahler et al. 2015). We support our argument with multi-sited (Marcus, 1995) ethnographic data collected with 48 members of 10 Andean transnational family members during fieldwork in Belgium, Colombia and Peru.