“Dear Mother,” wrote sisters Edith and Sara Pilap from their New York home to their native Polish village of Rypin in 1891,

Yet another migration chain was drawing people linked by kinship, ethnicity, and religion across the Atlantic to America. Polish villagers vigorously fashioned new social lives in teeming New York City.

Chain-linked, long-distance migration provides a privileged laboratory for study of transformations in trust networks. Long-distance migration poses serious risks. Those risks dispose potential migrants who do not have extensive professional connections to rely on members of their trust networks for information and advice. The same risks inhibit potential migrants who lack the mediation of trust networks from migrating at all. Instead of a broad distribution across destinations as a function of economic opportunities at those destinations, chain migration channels long-distance moves into a few origin-destination streams; large numbers of people from the same village end up in the same towns or urban neighborhoods thousands of miles away. Networks persist in the process, but change structure and geographic distribution.