Transnationalism

Transnationalism denotes processes and practices through which contemporary international migrants forge and maintain ties across national borders to their countries and places of origin. The acceleration of economic globalization has enabled these migrants to create new transnational social and cultural spaces that span multiple polities and societies. Migrants create these new social spaces by, among others, sending money home to family members in the form of remittances; they influence the political lives and well-being of their home places through hometown associations, contribute to economic development projects in their countries of origin, or participate in religious and cultural organizations that span national borders. While these new social spaces are similarly facilitated by innovations in transportation and communication technologies, migrants’ “transnationalism from below” differs from globalization from above in that it is individual migrants’ and groups’ social practices rather than the economic power of transnational corporations that create new ties between places.

The terms transnational migrant or migrant transnationalism were made popular by Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Christina Blanc-Szanton, whose observation of migrants’ continued engagement across borders through multiple practices led them to suggest that contemporary migrants differ from previous waves of immigrants in that they no longer need to give up ties to their home places and face less pressure to assimilate to the host nation. Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton initially suggested abandoning the term immigrant in favor of transmigrant to reflect that migrants live their lives across borders and in multiple nation-states. Emphasizing migrants’ resistance to changing political and economic conditions in a globalized economy, they proposed rethinking conceptions of ethnicity, race, and nation. Such assumptions were echoed in postcolonial and cultural studies that suggested that transnationalism, aided by new mass media such as satellite television, was fostering new cultural identities that stretched beyond national and local contexts and undermined nation-state and nationalist projects.

This initial enthusiasm seemed to overshoot the conceptual and explanatory power of transnationalism and prompted criticism from scholarship in the social sciences that has since sought to refine several aspects of the initial conception proposed by Glick Schiller and colleagues. Some of these extensions and refinements constitute attempts at creating types and taxonomies of transnationalism aimed at better defining what does and does not constitute transnational processes and practices. These taxonomies distinguish economic, sociocultural, and political practices with low and high levels of institutionalization. In a taxonomy proposed by Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt, hometown associations are considered political transnational practices with a low level of institutionalization, whereas cultural events organized by foreign embassies are considered highly institutionalized sociocultural practices. The frequency and regularity of transnational practices in question receive additional consideration in such typologies. There is debate about the usefulness of such typologies, and more recent work has instead sought to examine migrant transnationalism in relation to multiple axes of difference.

The extent and intensity of transnational practices vary according to the socioeconomic positionality of migrants and the conditions in sending and receiving societies that limit or enable transnational mobility. Among the factors facilitating and constraining transnational mobility are gender, [Page 2871]class, and migration status. So-called hypermobile migrants, or “astronauts,” travel with ease across borders, for example, the Hong Kong Chinese business executives who bought property on the Pacific Coast of Canada. These “transnational elites” are able to take advantage of the globalizing economy by maintaining investments and economic interests in Hong Kong while raising their families in Vancouver. In contrast, poorer migrants’ transnational practices often remain limited to sending remittances to family members or making phone calls, especially if these migrants’ mobility is constrained due to their insecure status as refugees and asylum seekers. Undocumented migrants face even more restrictions because they lack the proper papers that would allow them to travel across borders with ease.

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