Introduction

Scholars have long been interested in social networks in enabling and supporting chain migration (Tilly and Brown, 1967; Hugo, 1982; Massey and España, 1987; Boyd, 1989). A migrant network has been defined as ‘a web of social ties that links potential migrants in sending communities to people and institutions in receiving areas’ and in so doing ‘dramatically lower costs of international movement’, giving ‘powerful momentum’ to the migration process (Massey and España, 1987: 733).

By the late 1980s, a ‘growing body of research existed regarding the role of social networks in the etiology, composition, direction and persistence of migration flows, and in the settlement and integration of migrant populations in receiving societies’ (Boyd, 1989: 639). In the following decades, this body of work continued to grow, with particular attention on networks as sources of migrants’ capital, facilitating migration and settlement but also in the maintenance of transnational lives (Gurak and Caces, 1992; Portes, 1998; Castles and Miller, 2003; Jordan and Duvell 2003; Faist and Ozveren, 2004).

Nonetheless, as noted in the opening quote of this chapter, there were also increasing criticisms about the loose ways in which the concept of ‘network’ was applied within migration research (Wierzbicki, 2004; Ryan, 2007a), often resulting in a metaphorical use of networks (for a discussion see Bilecen et al, 2018; Ryan and Dahinden, 2021). Moreover, there was growing concern that the relationship between networks and capital was being assumed rather than properly examined and analysed (Portes, 2000; Anthias, 2007; Erel, 2010; Ryan, Erel and D’Angelo, 2015; Keskiner, Eve and Ryan, 2022). Furthermore, the tendency within migration studies to simply take for granted ethnic networks has been increasingly challenged (Wimmer, 2004; Schiller, Çağlar and Guldbrandsen, 2006; Eve, 2010; Dahinden, 2016). As Eve argued, ethnic ties cannot be simply assumed as natural, but should stimulate enquiry into their roots so that we can develop a ‘sociological explanation of particularities and an account of how they emerge from preceding ties’ (Eve, 2010: 1245).