How to Distinguish Among Migrants in a Migration Chain: Those Who are Links and Those Who Build links

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.