Transnational Migration E-Book

Thomas Faist

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: PIMS - Polity Immigration and Society series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 342

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Increasing interconnections between nation-states across borders have rendered the transnational a key tool for understanding our world. It has made particularly strong contributions to immigration studies and holds great promise for deepening insights into international migration.

This is the first book to provide an accessible yet rigorous overview of transnational migration, as experienced by family and kinship groups, networks of entrepreneurs, diasporas and immigrant associations. As well as defining the core concept, it explores the implications of transnational migration for immigrant integration and its relationship to assimilation. By examining its political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions, the authors capture the distinctive features of the new immigrant communities that have reshaped the ethno-cultural mix of receiving nations, including the US and Western Europe. Importantly, the book also examines the effects of transnationality on sending communities, viewing migrants as agents of political and economic development.

This systematic and critical overview of transnational migration perfectly balances theoretical discussion with relevant examples and cases, making it an ideal book for upper-level students covering immigration and transnational relations on sociology, political science, and globalization courses.

Leseprobe

Transnational Migration

Immigration and Society series

Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser and Eveline Reisenauer, Transnational Migration

Grace Kao, Elizabeth Vaquera and Kimberly Goyette, Education and Immigration

Christian Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration

Ronald L. Mize and Grace Peña Delgado, Latino Immigrants in the United States

Philip Q. Yang, Asian Immigration to the United States

Transnational Migration

Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser andEveline Reisenauer

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Copyright © Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser and Eveline Reisenauer 2013

The right of Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser and Eveline Reisenauer to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6454-5

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

1  Three Transnationals: Transnationalization, Transnational Social Spaces and Transnationality

Cross-border migration and the need for a transnational perspective

Unpacking the transnational

Aim and structure of the book

2  Transnationality and Social Practices

Familial transnational practices

Socio-cultural transnational practices

Economic transnational practices

Political transnational practices

The significance of transnational practices

3  Conceptualizing Transnationalization and Transnational Social Spaces

Transnationalization in historical perspective

The concept of transnational social spaces

The durability of transnationalization

4  Transnationalization and Development

Three phases of the debate

Remittances and their role for family and kin

Transnational investment and business

Hometown associations and their contributions to community development

Transnational circulation of knowledge

Social remittances and their effects

5  Transnationality and the Models of Migrant Integration

Transnationalism as a model of integration

The relationship between transnationality and integration

Second-generation transnationality

Migrant associations as a means of integration and transnationalization

6  States and Citizens – Transnational Political Practices and Institutions

Citizenship: a conceptual sketch

The policies of citizenship: the case of dual citizenship

The politics of citizenship: citizens, diasporas and states

Transnational citizenship?

7  Transnational Methodology

Three methodological challenges for transnational analysis

Methods to address the three challenges

Capturing simultaneity

8  Transnationalizing Civil Society

Civil society and transnational social spaces

The relevance of development, social integration and citizenship for civil society

Civil society and the state

Civil society and the market

Civil society and the family

The role and function of migrant transnational social spaces for civil society

The significance of a transnational approach for the social sciences

Notes

References

Index

Preface and Acknowledgements

Increasing interconnections between nation-states across borders have made the transnational perspective a key tool for understanding our world. It has made particularly strong contributions to immigration studies and holds great promise for deepening insights into international migration. This book provides an accessible yet rigorous overview of cross-border migration from a transnational perspective – as experienced by family and kinship groups, networks of entrepreneurs, diasporas and immigrant associations, and as regulated by states. As well as defining the core concepts of transnationalization, transnational social spaces and transnationality, we describe everyday transnational life, explore the implications for immigrant integration, and take a fresh look at issues of membership and citizenship. By examining the political, economic, social and cultural dimensions of transnational migration, we seek to capture the distinctive features of the new immigrant communities that have reshaped the ethno-cultural mix of receiving nations, including the US and Western Europe. Importantly, we also examine the effects of transnationality on regions of migrants’ origin, viewing migrants as agents of political and economic development. In doing so, we aim to balance theoretical discussion with relevant examples and cases, making this an ideal book for upper-level students covering immigration and transnational relations, in sociology, political science and globalization courses.

Various persons have contributed to the successful completion of this project. We are especially grateful for the helpful comments of anonymous reviewers. We also wish to thank those whose efforts have helped to finish the book and whose work usually does not get to be seen. We wish to thank the students from a graduate-level course at the Department of Sociology at Bielefeld University for reading and critically discussing draft chapters. Their suggestions and questions greatly improved the readability. Edith Klein and Caroline Richmond have carefully edited the manuscript for publication. Eva Drebenstedt helped us in preparing the manuscript. The Polity Press team – Jonathan Skerrett, India Darsley and Sarah Dobson – has also been very supportive. We are grateful to all of them.

We are especially grateful to the Collaborative Research Centre 882 ‘From Heterogeneities to Social Inequalities’ at Bielefeld University for supporting the preparation of this book.

Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser and Eveline Reisenauer

 1 

Three Transnationals: Transnationalization, Transnational Social Spaces and Transnationality

To say ‘international migration’ is to say ‘cross-border connections’ or the ties and practices of migrants and non-migrants linking countries of emigration and immigration – that is, the connections between those who leave, those who stay behind and those who do not move are a salient aspect of the migration experience. The connections between the places of origin and destination, and of onward and return movements, are an integral component of migration. A transnational perspective means that migration is not an irrevocable process but may entail repeated movements and, above all, continued transactions – bounded communication between actors – between migrants and non-migrants across the borders of states. Cross-border migration inherently generates cross-border ties and practices: letters, phone calls, visits, family remittances and economic investments in migrants’ communities of origin yield feedback spurring additional departures and manifold changes in the regions where they and their significant others live.

This book takes a decidedly cross-border perspective on international migration. A transnational perspective goes beyond the usual preoccupation of immigration researchers, who, in focusing mainly on countries of immigration, assume that state and (civil) society normally converge. But simply adding on the emigration country experience, or connections of immigrants to their places of origin, is not enough. Instead, our perspective suggests adopting a third way, one that takes the multi-sitedness of migrants seriously. The transnational perspective shows that people, social groups, networks, communities and organizations frequently operate beyond the borders of nominally sovereign states. A transnational perspective on migration – and this is what we mean by transnational migration – focuses on how the cross-border practices of migrants and non-migrants, individuals as well as groups and organizations, link up in social spaces criss-crossing national states, mould economic, political and cultural conditions, and are in turn shaped by already existing structures. The ‘transnational’ has three components. First, migrants’ ties are embedded in broader processes of transnationalization – that is, the processes involving transnational ties and practices in various fields, including the cross-border transactions of goods, services, capital and ideas and the movement of people. Second, the transactions of migrants and other agents across borders result in social formations we call transnational social spaces. These social spaces take various forms, including kinship groups, circuits and communities. Third, individuals and groups engage in a continuum of cross-border transactions ranging from activities such as travelling, exchanging goods and services, and sending and receiving remittances to communicating ideas back and forth. It is thus transnationality, the degree of connectivity between migrants and non-migrants across national borders, which becomes important. While nation-states shape both the movements of people across borders and their transnationality, they determine neither all movement back and forth nor the form taken by the life worlds of migrants.

The film by the German-Turkish director Fatih Akın entitled The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite) offers an instructive entry into transnational life worlds (Ezli 2010). It tells of people who cross the national borders of Germany and Turkey but also cross boundaries between families, ethnically self- and other-defined majority and minority groups and generations. It is not a matter simply of one-way movement from one country to another but of various movements intersecting borders in both directions. Aytin, who lives in Turkey, and whose mother, Yeter, is based in the city of Bremen in Germany, gets into trouble because of her engagement with Kurdish nationalism. She travels to Germany in search of her mother. In the port city of Hamburg, she befriends Lotte, a university student. When Aytin is denied asylum by the German authorities and is sent back to Turkey, Lotte sets out to Istanbul to support her friend. Nejat, the son of a former ‘guest worker’, Ali Aksu from Bremen, is a successful ‘second-generation’ child who succeeded in becoming a university professor of German literature. Nonetheless, he leaves his position in Hamburg and takes over a bookshop in Istanbul. This shop, interestingly enough, is not a Turkish one, but one offering German-language books. He moves the geographical locus of his life from Germany to Turkey: in his case it is not simply a return to the country of origin, as would be denoted by the term ‘second-generation return’. The movements of these and other protagonists in the film are not tales of return in the classical sense. Even coffins cross borders in transit in both directions. Yeter, who dies in Bremen, is returned by Turkish Airlines to Istanbul, and Lotte, who is accidentally shot by street children, is returned by Lufthansa from Istanbul to Hamburg. They inhabit what might be called transnational social spaces. They live and die transnationally.

The film depicts not only ties across the borders of countries or nations but also mobility across generations. Nejat, representing the second generation of Turkish immigrants in Germany, is a successful university professor who does not follow a standard integration path predicted by sociological integration theories. Common wisdom has it that, with rising educational credentials and success, an individual’s orientation to their parents’ country of origin declines. Yet Nejat’s story defies this prediction. Also, Lotte, the daughter of Susanne, is engaged in helping her friend Aytin, a political refugee. In order to do so she has to break with her mother, who clearly belongs to the ‘generation of 1968’. Lotte ventures to Istanbul against the wishes of her mother. Yet, with her political engagement, Lotte continues in her mother’s political path. In short, there is no linear logic connecting the first generation to the second or the country of emigration to that of immigration.

The crossing of borders and boundaries is also not coterminous with intercultural communication or dialogue, or with a celebration of cultural diversity as enrichment. When Susanne searches for her daughter, she eventually meets up with Nejat in his Istanbul apartment. Looking out of the window, the two of them watch people going to the mosque to observe Kurban Bayramı (the festival of sacrifice). Susanne asks Nejat why this holiday is observed. Nejat then tells her the story of Abraham’s sacrifice according to the Qur’an. Susanne responds that the same story could be found in the Bible. One might now expect that an intercultural dialogue would ensue on the different interpretations of this episode in the Muslim and Christian traditions. Yet this is not the case. The two figures stand not for different cultures but for persons with similar life stories who happen to meet, suggesting that it is not a fixed or even a hyphenated identity which occupies the foreground. Rather, what is at stake are the connectivities and ties between people and across generations, families, religions and states.

Throughout, the film traces the trajectories of the characters and their ties – which cross national borders and generational boundaries – without losing sight of the importance of national states to their lives. The film’s approach does not correspond to known metaphors describing the migration experience as the uprooting and transplanting of people into a new environment. It is no classical tale of loss of home, estrangement, foreignness, rootlessness and marginalization, or a film in which migrants celebrate the culture(s) they brought with them to their new homeland. Instead, it deals with continuous delocalization and relocalization in a transnational world which cannot be reduced to contexts of emigration and immigration. The Edge of Heaven depicts cross-border connections, as well as biographical and family connections, which reach across generations. The life world of the protagonists is neither German nor Turkish, nor even simply an overlap between the two – it is a third social world. This is the perspective we as researchers take in this book.

We offer a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding cross-border migration and its consequences from a transnational point of view. It is a building block towards a coherent theory of transnationalization, here focusing on migration. This introductory chapter contains three parts. First, we sketch the phenomenon with which transnational ties and structures are connected and discussed in this book – that is, cross-border migration – and explain why a transnational perspective helps to account for processes so far poorly understood. Second, we define the key terms used, disaggregating the broad and sweeping term ‘transnational’ into three analytically useful concepts – namely, transnationalization, transnational social spaces and transnationality. And, third, we discuss the rationale and aims of the book and introduce the questions discussed in the individual chapters.

Cross-border migration and the need for a transnational perspective

International or, more precisely, cross-border migration is here understood to mean a change of residence from one country to another over a meaningful period of time. And we hasten to add, from a transnational perspective, that even a change of residence may not be simply unidirectional but may involve movement back and forth, and that settlement does not necessarily imply a severing of ties to the place of origin. This book concerns international rather than domestic or internal migrants, although the latter are much more numerous, and the focus is on South–North migration and not South–South migration, which probably involves even more people. Thus the book deals explicitly with a particular aspect of the migration experience. The overwhelming majority of people who move do so within the borders of their own country (UNDP 2009: 21). According to the International Organization for Migration, there were about 214 million international migrants in the early twenty-first century – a number that marks a rapid increase over the last few decades (IOM 2009: 1). By contrast, the 2001 census in India showed that there were 309 million internal migrants in the country (Bhagat 2009: 4), while the 2000 Chinese census counted 144 million domestic migrants in China (Ha et al. 2009: 7). Among the poorest populations, migration takes place primarily within and between developing countries. For example, many countries in South-East Asia rely heavily on cheap migrant labour from neighbouring countries – for example, Malaysia has a large number of Indonesian workers. As for refugees, four-fifths live in developing countries and more than a third dwell in the least developed countries.1 Nonetheless, over the past decades, the proportion of international migrants relative to domestic migrants has increased. Of the former, about half – circa 74 million – of all international migrants move between so-called developing countries. This estimate is likely to be too low, as the official data tend to undercount irregular migrants. Irregular migration is probably even more common in between countries in the South than from South to North (World Bank 2008: 3; Bakewell 2009: 17).2 If we disaggregate these figures among world regions and look at them from a chronological perspective, we realize that cross-border migration is unevenly distributed across the globe. We can also see that there has been a slow but steady rise in the proportion of the world’s population who are migrants – from about 2 per cent in 1960 to between 3 and 4 per cent in 2010.

A transnational approach is needed to make sense of tendencies in international migration which have not hitherto been at the centre of analysis. It takes seriously the observation that migrants do not usually break off their contacts with their countries and communities of origin upon settlement in new countries; rather, we see that they often maintain ties to significant others and even forge new ones. For example, a survey of selected migrant groups from Latin America in three cities in the US carried out in the 1990s found that a significant minority maintain strong transnational political, cultural and economic ties (Portes 2003). They are engaged in such cross-border practices as following political affairs in their country of origin and sending remittances on a regular basis. Similar conclusions can be drawn from data from the German Socio-Economic Panel on cross-border (financial) transactions among migrants in Germany, which suggest that a tenth to a third of all migrants can be defined as transnational, depending on the benchmarks set for the regularity and intensity of such transactions (Holst et al. 2012). Such ties may extend back to the regions of origin but also to other countries in which significant others have settled. A particularly good example is migrants from Turkey who have settled in substantial numbers in such European countries as Germany, France and the Netherlands while retaining significant ties across the regions of immigration (Abadan-Unat 2011). A transnational perspective also takes heed of the fact that people are spatially mobile and may not settle in the countries in which they work – for example, those engaged in seasonal work or in posted workers’ arrangements (Faist 1997). In a nutshell, a transnational approach recognizes the multi-stranded and cross-border ties of individuals, groups and organizations and their sometimes simultaneous engagement across the borders of national states. Such transactions may refer to intra-family financial support, on one side of the spectrum, and the activities of nationalist diasporas, on the other. What makes cross-border migration such a suitable site for exploring transnational processes is the fact that we can observe how individuals, groups and organizations actually engage in transactions across borders of national states not only with respect to their life worlds but also in fields such as education, the labour market and politics.

Unpacking the transnational

The transnational approach was born out of the observation that migrants do not simply cross borders to live elsewhere but may turn this into a strategy of survival and betterment – indeed, into a lifestyle of its own. That we observe such developments more intensively today – although it is not a totally new phenomenon (chapter 3) – is perhaps not all that surprising considering that present-day migration takes place in a world characterized by the compression of time and space (Harvey 1990). Air travel has become cheaper than ever before and staying in touch, because of technological developments such as the Internet, has never been so easy. Notwithstanding the presence of international borders and all the laws and regulations imposed by national states on those wishing to cross them, transnational relationships have intensified.

Two uses of the term ‘transnational’ need to be distinguished. The first is very loose, denoting any kind of cross-border transaction, even fleeting ones such as a tourist trip abroad. When we use the term in a narrower and more specific sense – which is the one used in this book – we refer to a process by which migrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. Many migrants today build social spaces which span political, geographical, and cultural borders (Basch et al. 1994).

Note that cross-border migration is not the only context in which sustained transnational ties may emerge. Such ties may be found among national minorities and those in their original kin state – for example, the large numbers of ‘ethnic’ Hungarians who have been living outside Hungary for centuries in what today are Slovakia and Romania. It makes a difference whether the relationship with an external homeland has come about through the movement of people across borders, as in migration, or of changes in borders as a result of war settlements, as is the case with the Hungarians. And it also makes a difference whether the situation in the host country is that immigrants have arrived recently and become territorially dispersed or that a settled minority has lived continuously in a particular territory over many generations and may even enjoy cultural minority rights. Additional sites of research are cross-border social movements (della Porta and Tarrow 2005), advocacy networks in the fields of human rights or the environment (Keck and Sikkink 1998), networks of criminal gangs and organizations (Shelley 1995), civil society organizations in the area of social and labour standards (Faist 2009) and religious communities (Levitt 2007). In all of these cases it is not primarily migrants who forge and entertain transnational ties and practices but relatively immobile persons and organizations who communicate and exchange ideas and goods across borders.

Another remark on terminology is in order. When the word ‘transnational’ was first used specifically in migration studies, in the early 1990s, the term ‘transnationalism’ was very prominent (Basch et al. 1994). Yet this latter term conflates the ideas of ‘state’ and ‘nation’, the first referring to territorial units, the second to social collectives. By definition, cross-border migration connects the territorial units of the global. However, ‘state’ and ‘nation’ may not necessarily be coterminous. There are quite a few stateless nations around the globe. Therefore, in earlier work, Thomas Faist used the term ‘trans-state’ to refer to the territorial fact of cross-border migration, and ‘trans-national’ to refer to collectives (Faist 2000b). Few scholars have attended to the matter (see, however, Fox 2005: 172). In this book, we will not differentiate semantically between these two terms and will continue to use, as do virtually all authors, ‘transnational’ for cross-border – that is, ‘trans-state’. Yet we will indicate at which level of aggregation the ties and practices refer to collectives, such as family or household, network, organization, local community (hence the term trans-local) or state. Therefore ‘transnational’ is a catch-all term which must be disaggregated in various ways to be of use. The subsequent analysis will refer to these terms and not ‘transnationalism’, which suggests an ideology. However, it is not clear whose ideology it would connote: that of researchers, migrants, other observers – or all of these?

Transnational approaches certainly do not (yet) form a coherent theory or set of theories. They can more adequately be described as a perspective which has found entry into the study of manifold cross-border phenomena. We can delineate three key concepts of transnational scholarship relevant for migration research: transnationalization, transnational social spaces and transnationality. Interestingly, they correspond to three succeeding generations of research: transnationalization for theories of ‘transnational relations’ in the political science field of international relations in the 1960s and 1970s, transnational social spaces in sociology and anthropology from the latter part of the 1990s onwards and, finally, transnationality as a new concept which we seek to put forward. Nonetheless, these concepts have not replaced each other. All three are vital for a transnational research programme.

Transnationalization as cross-border processes

A transnational approach is not a coherent theory but a lens. It looks at cross-border transactions as a process, namely trans-nationalization, which refers to sustained ties, events and activities across the borders of several nation-states. It focuses above all on non-state agents. Nonetheless, states also participate in seeking to regulate borders, places of residence, economic activity and access to rights. The Oxford Dictionary of English dates the emergence of the term ‘transnational’ to around 1920, documented with a quotation from an economic text that characterized Europe after the First World War by its ‘international or more correctly transnational economy’. The term re-emerged only in the late 1960s in what was called transnational relations in the field of international relations to denote increasing economic and political interdependence between industrialized countries, referring to processes which involve powerful non-state actors such as multinational companies and, to a lesser extent, political parties such as the Socialist International. Transnational relations in political science pointed beyond state-centrism and the billiard-ball models of international relations and asked about the emergence, role and impact on states and international organizations of large-scale, cross-border, non-state organizations (Keohane and Nye 1977). Curiously, the interest in this approach disappeared with the onset of debates on globalization from the late 1970s onwards. Perhaps its demise was related to the fact that globalization studies, taking a ‘top-down’ view, recentred interest on how national state political economies were reshaped by ever growing capital flows across borders. Nonetheless, there have continually been scholars who are interested in how transnational practices, such as networks of capitalists, shape the current world (Sklair 2001).

Clearly, transnationalization is different from internationalization, the latter dealing with ties, events and processes involving exclusively states and their agents. An example of internationalization would be international regimes – for example, the order protecting refugees, based on the 1951 Geneva Convention and its subsequent protocols. Also, globalization differs from both transnationalization and internationalization in that it takes a bird’s-eye view. This involves at least two aspects: first, the intensification of interdependence and interconnectedness around the globe (Giddens 1990) and, second, the emergence of a single global system, such as a new global state (Albrow 1996: 178). While the first aspect overlaps with transnationalization, the second is specific to globalization and world theories. These theories take world-spanning structures as a point of departure and ask how such structures and associated processes impact and shape lower-level structures and processes – for example, at the level of the nation-state and below. In a way, they move from the ‘outside’ towards the ‘inside’ and from the ‘top’ to the ‘bottom’. In certain regional contexts globalization is reflected in more delimited developments, such as the rise of the European Union (EU). Often, the term is used to denote rapid and deregulated flows of capital that are restructuring patterns of investment, production, labour deployment and consumption. Ideas, technology and goods and services of all sorts are moving rapidly across the globe. Theorists of globalization, such as Ulrich Beck (1999), conceptualize the contemporary world by seeing the modernity of European societies upscaled to the world level. It is a perspective which assumes that European and North American modernity is globalized or generalized from a national state to a global level, as if these models of modernity – of political, cultural and economic development – could be generalized across the world. In short, they basically upscale nation-state theories.

A transnational approach, by contrast, suggests another take. Cross-border agency and structures can be understood only by examining the actual links between the parts of the world. This view holds that cross-border formations – or, indeed, even a world society – are constructed by cross-border practices, and that this implies a research agenda tracing such practices. A transnational approach starts with the very processes which constitute cross- border agency and structures, which are exemplified by the practices of migrants and non-migrants who forge ties across borders (Faist 2000a: 211). The focus on cross-border processes helps to open up a conceptual space which can be filled by the terms ‘transnational social spaces’ and ‘transnationality’, with concern about migrant networks, traders and ethnic business constellations, politics of place among migrants and returnees, diasporas and development, and migrant integration – but also social movements and advocacy networks.

Transnational social spaces as cross-border social structures

The pioneers of the transnational approach in migration research, Nina Glick Schiller and her associates, contended that there is something qualitatively different about immigrants today compared with their late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century counterparts. They viewed this earlier era’s immigrants as having broken off all homeland social relations and cultural ties, thereby locating themselves solely within the socio-cultural, economic and political orbit of the receiving society. By contrast, according to Glick Schiller and her colleagues, today’s immigrants are composed of those whose networks, activities and patterns of life encompass both societies, and they coined two new terms to capture this novelty: ‘transnationalism’ and ‘transmigrants’. While the former refers to the process by which immigrants build social fields that link their country of origin and their country of settlement, the latter refers to the immigrants who build such social fields by maintaining a wide range of affective and instrumental social practices spanning borders. Instead of focusing on ‘transnationalism from above’ by looking at powerful agents such as multinational companies, as the transnational relations approach in international relations had done, their emphasis on ‘transnationalism from below’ tried to restore agency to what would appear from a macro-political view to be minor players – in this case, migrants: ‘Transnational political, economic, social, and cultural processes (1) extend beyond borders of a particular state but are shaped by the policies and institutional practices of a particular and limited set of states; and (2) include actors that are not states’ (Glick Schiller and Fouron 1999: 343–4). The transactions involved take the form of material one- or two-way transfers such as financial remittances or ideas but also concern the exchange of information.

In this perspective, the multiple identities of contemporary migrants are fluid; these identities reveal a resistance on the part of migrants to the global political and economic situations that engulf them. This insight necessitates rethinking received ideas regarding class, nationalism, ethnicity and race. An important implication of the discussion is that assimilation and cultural pluralism are in adequate to account for the distinctive character of contemporary migration. Whereas assimilation implies the loss of past identity, cultural pluralism advances an essentialist perspective that treats ethnic identities as immutable.

The pioneers of transnational research in the field of migration also contended that social science must become ‘unbound’. The argument is that the problem with theories operating with closed systems in which the unit of analysis is ultimately the nation-state is that they fail to provide room for the wider field of action occupied by contemporary migrants. Glick Schiller and others stressed that transnationalization is the product of world capitalism, which has produced economic dislocations that make immigrants economically vulnerable. At the same time, migrants are not just passive objects but active shapers of their social world. Research then identified cross-border practices as sustained ties of individuals, networks and organizations, ranging from weak to strongly institutionalized forms. Transnational ties are not about fleeting contacts between migrants and relatively immobile people in the countries of origin and destination. On the contrary, this gaze at the ‘global’ in the ‘local’ dealt with dense and continuous ties across the borders of nation-states, which cluster into social formations called transnational social spaces. These spaces consist of combinations of ties and their contents, positions in networks and organizations, and networks of organizations that can be found in at least two nation-states. Most of these formations are located in between familial and personal practices, on the one hand, and the functional systems of differentiated spheres, such as the socio-cultural, economic and political, on the other. Transnational social spaces are dynamic social processes, definitely not static notions of ties and positions: ‘By transnational spaces we mean relatively stable, lasting and dense sets of ties reaching beyond and across the borders of sovereign states. They consist of combinations of ties and their contents, positions in networks and organizations, and networks or organizations that cut across the borders of at least two nation-states. Transnational spaces differ from clearly demarcated state territories’ (Faist 2000a: 197; see also Kivisto 2001). In other words, the term refers to sustained and continuous plurilocal transactions crossing state borders. The most basic element of transnational social formations is the transaction or tie – that is, a bounded communication between social agents such as individual persons. Regular practices concatenate into social structures. Agents in transnational social spaces may be individuals, groups or organizations and even states. It is an empirical question whether such cross-border transactions are global or only regional in scope.

There are three expressions of transnational spaces, which will be discussed in detail later in this book (chapter 3):

1 Transnational kinship groups, such as transnational families who conceive of themselves as both an economic unit and a unit of reciprocity and who keep, in addition to the primary home, a kind of shadow household in another country. Economic assets are mostly transferred from abroad to those who continue to run the household ‘back home’.

2 Transnational circuits are sets of ties between people and organizations in which information and services are exchanged for the purpose of achieving a common goal. Linkage patterns may concatenate in advocacy networks, business networks or scientists’ networks. These issue-specific circuits or networks engage in areas such as human rights and environmental protection.

3 Transnational communities comprise dense and continuous sets of social and symbolic ties, characterized by a high degree of intimacy, emotional depth, moral obligation and social cohesion. Geographical proximity is no longer a necessary criterion for the existence of a community – there are ‘communities without propinquity’. Transnational communities can evolve at different levels of aggregation. The simplest type consists of village communities in transnational social spaces, whose relations are marked by solidarity extended over long periods of time. The quintessential form of transnational communities consists of larger cross-border religious groups and churches. World religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism – existed long before modern states came into existence. Diasporas also belong to the category of transnational communities. Diasporas are groups that experienced the territorial dispersion of their members at some time in the past, as a result either of a traumatic experience or specialization in long-distance trade (Cohen 1997). Transnational communities do not necessarily involve individual persons living in two worlds simultaneously or between cultures in a ‘global village’ of de-territorialized space. What is required, however, is that communities without propinquity link through solidarity to achieve a high degree of social cohesion through a common repertoire of symbolic and collective representations.

Transnationality as a marker of heterogeneity

Going a step further, we introduce a third key concept for transnational scholarship which is concerned above all with methodological questions: transnationality. With this addition we aim to contribute to the further development of a transnational theoretical framework. Transnationalization, as we have seen, sets the frame for sustained cross-border transactions of agents. Transnational social spaces, as defined above, refer to sustained concatenation of such cross-border ties and practices. So far, we have discussed studies which juxtaposed what were called trans-migrants with classical international migrants – that is, emigrants, immigrants and return migrants. Depending on how migrants are defined, about a quarter of all Mexican migrants to the US may be classified as transnational – that is, having some sort of cross-border ties, such as sending remittances, travelling to the country of origin or keeping an interest in political affairs (Donato et al. 2010). But research in this vein has two problems. First, cross-border transactions are not either–or practices but often vary along a continuum from low to high (Faist et al. 2011). Second, such research has overemphasized the aspect of geographical mobility. The role of relatively immobile household or kinship members who enable cross-border migration in the first place, as well as the cross-border exchange of ideas and underlying symbolic ties, is not sufficiently considered. Not all individuals and groups who contribute to the formation of transnational ties in what we have called transnational social spaces regularly cross borders between two or more nation-states. It is not only recent migrants but also their sometimes immobile family members and also settled migrants who engage in transnational practices. Moreover, those who have not migrated and are not associated with migrants but are well connected to colleagues abroad through work-based conduits entertain cross-border transactions as well (Mau 2010).

This is why the concept ‘transnationality’ is helpful. Trans-nationality connotes the social practices of agents – individuals, groups, communities and organizations – across the borders of nation-states. The term denotes a spectrum of cross-border ties in various spheres of social life – familial, socio-cultural, economic and political – ranging from travel, through sending financial remittances, to exchanging ideas. Seen in this way, agents’ transnational ties constitute a marker of heterogeneity, akin to other heterogeneities, such as age, gender, citizenship, sexual orientation, cultural preferences or language use. In short, transnational ties can be understood as occupying a continuum from low to high – that is, from very few and short-lived ties to those that are multiple and dense and continuous over time. For example, migrants may remit varying sums of money or none at all. This is also to say that, for our purposes, migrants and non-migrants should not be considered simply as transnational or not, but as being transnational to different degrees. Transnationality is characterized by transactions of varying degrees of intensity and at various stages of the life course; it is not restricted to geographical mobility. For example, non-mobile family members of migrants may engage in transnational practices.

To research transnationality has profound methodological implications. Since transnationalization can be observed to varying degrees in all spheres of social life, the ‘container’ of the nation-state cannot be taken as the sole and unquestioned unit of analysis or reference. Therefore, a focus on transnational social spaces and transnationality fits with scholarship which has addressed the questions of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003). Methodological nationalism needs to be unbundled into territorialism and essentialism.

First, transnational approaches aim to overcome territorialism – that is, conflating society, state and territory. Such territorialism is evident in many analyses which prioritize the state in the Weberian trilogy of the congruence of territory, authority and people. Many studies of migrant political participation take the container space of the nation-state as the singular frame of reference. Particularly pertinent is the fact that empirical data are collected and analysed largely on a nation-state basis and compared internationally. National state comparative work abounds in fields such as migration and immigration studies (for examples on both national state and transnational perspectives, see Martiniello and Rath 2010). If cross-border transactions are more important than this work leads us to believe, we need to open up the container. Second, transnational approaches also strive to overcome essentialism – that is, the conflation of society, state and nation. The problem to be addressed is the reification of important categories of national state thinking, such as nations and ethnicity. Even nowadays, transnational studies abound which look at particular national groups around the world and their relations to home countries instead of inquiring into how such groups are socially constituted and sustained in the first place. After all, it is worth noting that migrant networks or organizations can be built around various categorical distinctions, such as ethnicity, race, gender, schooling, professional training, political affiliation and sexual preference. It is far from clear that specific categories such as migrants always congeal around ethnic or national communities.

Aim and structure of the book

Cross-border or transnational migration is an ideal site to study how processes of transnationalization matter for the life courses of individuals and for the activities of groups and organizations. At the same time, the transnational perspective enables us to see how agents, migrants and non-migrants alike, are shaped and, in turn, actively shape their own destinies in a world in which cross-border transactions matter for life chances. Thus, we hold that not only do cross-border transformations impact upon agents, but also agents engage in transformative practices, and these importantly include cross-border transactions. It is this duality that underlies the analyses presented in this book. The chapters that follow deal with the main questions and challenges deriving from the realization of migrants’ transnationality embedded in larger processes of transnationalization in all spheres of life, intertwined with the formation of transnational social spaces and their significance for crucial issues in the public sphere, such as economic development, social integration and citizenship.

Against this background, the objectives of the book are threefold. First, we seek to give an overview of transnationality by looking at cross-border ties and practices (chapter 2) and introduce the concept of transnational social spaces (chapter 3). Second, we show the significance of such a perspective for understanding migration and its consequences. Towards that end we discuss in more detail three substantive fields – development (chapter 4), migrant integration (chapter 5) and political practices (chapter 6) – which are crucial for understanding the life chances of migrants and non-migrants more generally. In the field of migration and development a transnational lens allows us to recognize the importance of, for example, diaspora and other communities for social change and economic transformation in regions of origin. It is thus migrants as cross-border development actors which is central. With respect to the integration of migrants, a transnational approach extends the view of the state as national container to ask the question: integration into what and where? And regarding political practices, the transnational perspective contributes to understanding how national institutions such as citizenship jump scale and partly incorporate cross-border views, such as in dual citizenship. Third, the book develops a transnational research methodology (chapter 7) and