Migrating in the Digital Age: Social Networks as Tools for Analyzing Integration and Precarity

To facilitate their integration in a destination country, migrant people mobilize their family relative, friends, and members of their ethnic and/or national community. These social interactions form networks, which, thanks to the massification of the Internet, are now being deployed online. Through them, migrant people can meet an ever-increasing number and diversity of migration actors. What we call digital social networks bring people together through a digital platform, such as Facebook or Whatsapp. These technologies facilitate people's access to certain resources in the destination space such as housing or employment, influencing their migration experiences. The analysis of digital social networks allows us to explore the interactions between migrants and their living conditions at destination. This project analysed the messages exchanged between 2016 and 2017 on two groups of migrant people of Latin American origin in London, the majority having emigrated from Spain and benefiting from their European citizenship to settle there before the implementation of Brexit.

Type of project

NARRAU research and development