Family Separation and Emotional Distress in a Transnational U.S.-Mexico Immigrant Community

Alexis Silver, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Sergio Chávez, Rice University

The emotional repercussions of migration are experienced not only by individuals who migrate, but also by their family members and friends that remain at home. In order to adapt to the loss of family members due to migration, families in origin communities and migrants in destination communities must rely on larger social networks for social and emotional support and to help fulfil the roles of the missing family members. Although transnational families rely heavily on social networks, their relationships within broader migrant networks are under-researched. Using the Network Survey of Immigration and Transnationalism (NSIT), an innovative new survey of 600 respondents in a binational multisite migration network, we directly gauge measures of social embeddedness and emotional well-being of both migrants and non-migrants.