Communities, Transnational

Labor Migration

The first understanding of a transnational community—that associated with the effects of labor migration—is clearly tied closely to both ethnic belonging and binational identifications with the idea of “home” as being connected simultaneously with the country of origin and the present and/or past country or countries of residence. It could be argued that such transnationalism existed well before the application of the term transnational community to these groups, and indeed it goes back to the beginnings of transnational labor migration, whether within colonial, postcolonial, or noncolonial contexts. A closer look, however, reveals that prior to the 1990s, when the concept of transnational communities started to gain currency in academic circles, transnational migrant communities did not entirely fit the five criteria outlined. Some were perceived as only temporary by both country of origin and host country and, indeed, by the migrants themselves. This is the case, for example, of many so-called postcolonial migrants of the first generation: Algerian workers in France, Turkish workers in Germany, Mexican workers in the United States, or Filipino workers in North America, the Middle East and East and Southeast Asia. Or, if permanently resettled, migrants were not particularly mobile, either physically or culturally, as in the case of interwar British migrants who traveled to Australia on assisted passages, or postwar Greek or Italian migrants. It was generally assumed that postmigratory communities would assimilate into the host society and culture (even if they also inevitably became agents of hybridization or transculturation within the host country). Or the transnational interaction has not been sustained within a perceivable network of reciprocal transactions adding new dimensions to the communities in question that would not have otherwise occurred within national borders. Or the migration was largely forced, as in the case of refugee migration and slave migration (whether we are speaking of colonial slavery or more modern forms such as trafficking in women for prostitution or domestic service): In this case, the term diasporic communities, or simply diasporas, is usually more appropriate.

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