Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood: the role of ICTs in Filipino transnational families

This article is concerned with the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on Filipina transnational mothers' experience of motherhood, their practices of mothering and, ultimately, their identities as mothers. Drawing on ethnographic research with Filipina migrants in the UK as part of a wider study of Filipino transnational families, this article observes that, despite the digital divide and other structural inequalities, new communication technologies, such as the internet and mobile phones, allow for an empowered experience of distant mothering. Apart from a change in the practice and intensity of mothering at a distance, ICTs also have consequences for women's maternal identities and the ways in which they negotiate their ambivalence towards work and family life. In this sense, ICTs can also be seen as solutions (even though difficult ones) to the cultural contradictions of migration and motherhood and the ‘accentuated ambivalence’ they engender. This, in turn, has consequences for the whole experience of migration, sometimes even affecting decisions about settlement and return.     

Situating transnational families' care‐giving arrangements: the role of institutional contexts

Scholars sometimes conceptualize migrants and their kin as ‘transnational families' in acknowledgement that migration does not end with settlement and that migrants maintain regular contacts and exchange care across borders. Recent studies reveal that state policies and international regulations influence the maintenance of transnational family solidarity. We aim to contribute to our understanding of how families' care‐giving arrangements are situated within institutional contexts. We specify an analytical framework comprising a typology of care‐giving arrangements within transnational families, a typology of resources they require for care giving, and a specification of institutions through which those resources are in part derived. We illustrate the framework through a comparative analysis of two groups of migrants – Salvadorans in Belgium and Poles in the UK. We conclude by arguing that while institutions matter they are not the sole factor, and identify how future research might develop a more fully comprehensive situated transnationalism.     

Leveraging symbolic capital: the use of blat networks across transnational spaces

In this article, we contribute to debates on how social networks sustain migrants' entrepreneurial activities. By reporting on 31 interviews with Eastern European migrants in the UK, we provide a critical lens on the tendency to assume that migrants have ready‐made social networks in the host country embedded in co‐ethnic communities. We extend this limited perspective by demonstrating how Eastern European migrants working in the UK transform blat social networks, formulated in the cultural and political contours of Soviet society, in their everyday lived experiences. Our findings highlight not only the monetarization of such networks but also the continuing embedded nature of trust existing within these networks, which cut across transnational spaces. We show how forms of social capital based on Russian language use and legacies of a shared Soviet past, are just as important as the role of ‘co‐ethnics’ and ‘co‐migrants’ in facilitating business development. In doing so, we present a more nuanced understanding of the role that symbolic capital plays in migrant entrepreneurial journeys and its multifaceted nature.     

Post‐return experiences and transnational belonging of return migrants: a Dutch—Moroccan case study

In this article we explore the links between return migration, belonging and transnationalism among migrants who returned from the Netherlands to northeast Morocco. While transnationalism is commonly discussed from the perspective of a receiving country, this study shows that transnationalism also plays a vital role in reconstructing post‐return belonging. Return migration is not simply a matter of ‘going home’, as feelings of belonging need to be renegotiated upon return. While returnees generally feel a strong need to maintain various transnational practices, the meanings they attach to these practices depend on motivations for return, gender and age. For former (male) labour migrants, transnational practices are essential for establishing post‐return belonging, whereas such practices are less important for their spouses. Those who returned as children generally feel uprooted, notwithstanding the transnational practices they maintain. The amount of agency migrants are able to exert in the return decision‐making process is a key factor in determining the extent to which returnees can create a post‐return transnational sense of home.     

In between leaving and being left behind: mediating the mobilities and immobilities of Indonesian non‐migrants

In this article, I consider how and why some non‐migrants partially inhabit migrant subjectivities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Central Java, Indonesia, I describe the experiences of those who embarked on pre‐departure migration processes, but failed to leave the country. Men were often victims of fraud; women typically ran away from the confines of training centres. When redirected away from the border spaces of airports and recruitment centres, they typically identify themselves and are perceived by kin and neighbours as ‘former’ transnational migrants. I analyse how migration infrastructure – intersecting institutions, agents and technologies – produces such subjectivities in‐between conventional migrant and non‐migrant categories. These positions in between leaving and staying illuminate the infrastructural conditions that enable, constrain and mediate transnational mobilities. These cases of non‐departure show the expansive social and spatial effects of migration infrastructure beyond the facilitation of transnational movement. Such less considered (im)mobilities of non‐migrants point to the diverse ways in which migration institutions and agents mediate the circulation of persons between and within national borders.     

‘Equally at home on Beacon Hill and Hill 16’? Transnational identities among Irish‐born return migrants from the United States

In this article, I examine the transnational identities that return migrants create upon resettlement in their country of origin. Specifically, I draw on interviews with Republic of Ireland‐born return migrants from the United States between the years 1996 and 2006. The analysis shows that return migrants – like other migrant groups – maintain and establish translocal identities and practices that straddle ‘here’ (Ireland) and ‘there’ (United States) upon return. However, the article goes further, asking why returnees develop such border‐spanning social fields. Some recent scholarship suggests that some migrants develop transnational identities as an adaptive response to a hostile receiving society. The analysis here shows a similar process at play for certain return migrants in the post‐return environment. Doubtless, for some returnees, a transnational identity is a natural outgrowth of having spent several years in the United States. Yet for others, one can better explain this transnational identity as a coping strategy to buffer resettlement anxieties and disappointments.     

Between two families: the social meaning of remittances for Vietnamese marriage migrants in Singapore

Scholars who have applied transnational perspectives to studies of migration and remittances have called for a move beyond the developmentalist approach to accommodate an expanded understanding of the social meanings of remittances. Researchers working in Asia have begun to view the remittances of money, gifts and services that labour migrants send to their families as transnational ‘acts of recognition’, as an enactment of gendered roles and identities, and as a component of the social practices that create the ties that bind migrants to their ‘home’ countries. In this article, we depart from the more common focus on remittance behaviour among labour migrants and turn instead to examine how, as marriage migrants, Vietnamese women generate and confer meaning on the remittances they send. First, from the women's viewpoint, we discuss the extent to which expectations vested in being able to generate remittances for the natal family by marrying a Singaporean man not only translate into motivation for marriage migration but also shape the parameters of the marriage. Second, we show how sending remittances are significant to the women as ‘acts of recognition’ in the construction of gendered identities as filial daughters, and, through the ‘connecting’ and ‘disconnecting’ power of remittances, in the reimagining of the transnational family. Third, we discuss the strategies that women devise in negotiating between the conflicting demands and expectations of their natal and marital families and in securing their ‘place’ between two families. We base our findings on an analysis of interviews and ethnographic work with Vietnamese women and their Singaporean husbands through commercial matchmaking agencies.     

Reconceptualizing Motherhood,Reconceptualizing Resistance

Female labour migrants face contradictory expectations. On the one hand, they are expected to be their families' and communities' economic saviours. On the other hand, they are expected to meet their maternal responsibilities even while they are abroad; otherwise, they face charges of maternal neglect. My goal in this article is to highlight how female migrant workers handle these conflicting demands. I discuss how migrant women simultaneously adapt to and challenge imposed family separation through the case study of Filipina live-in caregivers in Canada. They do this in two ways. First, they exhibit transnational hyper-maternalism which allows them to overcome accusations of neglect. They ‘mother across borders’ by providing for their families and by using technology to supervise, monitor and communicate with their children. In doing so, they reify and contest established gender roles. Second, they are active in civil society. In doing so, they highlight the negative consequences migrant women and their families face. Reconceptualized notions of motherhood characterize migrant women's transnational parenting, while the desire to ameliorate the negative consequences of family separation and reunification explain their activism.     

Philippine Women on the Move: Marriage across Borders

This paper discusses how Philippine transnational marriage migration is intertwined in complex and paradoxical ways with global, local and personal matters. My argument will blur the artificial and still dominant analytical division between marriage migrants (wives or "mail order" brides) and labour migrants (workers – mainly domestic workers). Focusing on the life histories of different Filipina women, the paper illustrates the intersections and multiplicity of their roles as wives, mistresses, workers, mothers, daughters and citizens in a transnational migratory space.
Furthermore, I go along with those scholars who argue that women do not only marry in order to migrate, but that they also migrate in order to marry, as marriage is seen as an important aspect of social fulfilment. By carefully investigating these emerging transnational or even global marriage-scapes, I analyze the different motives, logics and desires that come into play. While women from the Philippines may look for "modern husbands" and "modern marriages" because of local constraints on their marriage opportunities, many western men turn to Asia and the Philippines for "traditional" wives whom they imagine to be more "conservative" and "less demanding." Both often discover that their gender stereotypes are more imagined than real.
The stories illustrate how Filipina migrants use different socio-cultural and socio-economic situations across transnational space – and at times against local gender constructions – in order to renegotiate and reclaim a respectable and desired marital status. On the one hand, these women are subject to manifold localised, legal and religious-moral definitions as women and wives. On the other hand, they creatively and actively utilise structural differences and new opportunities across transnational space to redefine themselves. The stories thus show both the women's agency and the importance of structural factors.     

Migrant Membership as an Instituted Process: Transnationalization,the State and The Extra‐Territorial Conduct of Mexican Politics1

How should we conceptualize membership, citizenship and political community in a world where migrants and their home states increasingly maintain and cultivate their formal and informal ties? This study analyzes the extra‐territorial conduct of Mexican. politics and the emergence of new migrant membership practices and relations between migrants and home states. Standard globalist, transnationalist or citizenship theories cannot properly contextualize and analyze such practices. I propose that we rethink the concept of membership in a political community not only as a Marshallian status granted by states, but also as an instituted process embedded within four other institutions and processes: home state domestic politics; the home state's relationship to the world system; a semi‐autonomous transnational civil society created in part by migration; and the context of reception of migrants in the United States. A main conclusion is that the state itself plays a key role in creating transnational political action by migrants and new migrant membership practices. The article draws on printed sources and interviews and ethnography done since 1990.     

The Dynamics of Repeat Migration: A Markov Chain Analysis1

This article studies repeat or circular migration between the host and home countries using panel data for Germany, distinguishing between factors generating single moves, circular migration, and absorption. Migrants are more likely to leave early after their first arrival in Germany, and when they have social and familial bonds in the home country, but less likely when they have a job in Germany and speak the language well. Once out‐migrated, the return probability is mainly affected by remittances and family considerations. Circular migration is fostered by vocational training in the host country and older age. Whereas male migrants are 9 percent more likely to return to their home country than female migrants, gender is not significant for predicting the return to move back to Germany.     

Navigating return: the gendered geographies of skilled return migration to Ghana

In this article, I extend the literature on return migration by exploring the gendered mechanisms of return for highly skilled Ghanaian migrants. Drawing on interviews with Ghanaian women and men who returned in their prime productive years, I examine their decision‐making, the strategies they implement and the challenges they negotiate in the process. While the decision to return was straightforward, the actual processes circumscribing it contained tensions and compromises that involved renegotiations of gender identities, roles and norms, which themselves intersected with class differences. The empirical analyses emphasize how skilled migrants capitalize on their class status, social networks and transnational activities as means not only to return but also, for some, to mitigate the impacts of separation for themselves and their families as they seek to accomplish specific goals.     

Moving for a ‘better welfare’? The case of transnational Sudanese families

The burgeoning literature on welfare migration, or on the likelihood of migrants moving to countries with more generous welfare states, yields mixed results. In this article, we aim to disentangle what kinds of considerations underlie the decisions that migrants and their families make to address their social protection needs when they move to certain places. We explain how Sudanese extended families, with members scattered across multiple countries, draw on formal and informal institutions to meet their needs for social protection. Through a transnational approach, we analyse the mechanisms guiding the access, circulation and coordination of resources to cover different but related social protection domains. We contribute to current debates on transnational social protection by drawing on the life stories of members of a Sudanese transnational family and by expanding on the concept of ‘resource environment’. We based this article on 14 months of multi‐sited ethnographic fieldwork with Sudanese migrants and their families in the Netherlands, the UK and Sudan.     

First‐generation migrants become grandparents: how migration backgrounds affect intergenerational relationships

First‐generation migrants are not only reaching the age of retirement, but they are also becoming grandparents in the host society. Through the specific case of Portuguese migrants in Luxembourg, we look at what point their migration background becomes important to their intergenerational relationships. We have acquired the data for this article from biographical narrative interviews with ten older first‐generation grandparents and ten second‐generation parents. On the basis of these findings, we address three important aspects of intergenerational relations: (i) how first‐generation migrants socialize their grandchildren, (ii) grandparental mobility patterns and their embeddedness in practices of socialization and care, and (iii) the challenges produced by language in intergenerational relationships.     

Transnational youth transitions: becoming adults between Vancouver and Hong Kong

In the context of the academic interest shown in the enduring transnationalism of contemporary migrants and in the modes of transitions to adulthood in different global settings, in this article we examine the transnational lives of adolescents moving between Vancouver (Canada) and Hong Kong. While there is a lot of literature on the parents' political and economic calculations, there is very little on how adolescents in these situations articulate their geographical sensibilities. We draw on three periods of fieldwork undertaken in 2002, 2008 and 2010 during which we employed a transnational methodology to interview young people in Vancouver and Hong Kong. We argue that becoming an adult involves a process in which, in their discussions about the geographical and emotional distance between themselves and their families, young people articulate their own complex emotions towards specific places in their transnational social field. Their families sporadically interrupt the adolescents' otherwise independent lives with fragmented modes of supervision. By examining the complex intentions and emotions behind circular migration from the perspective of transnational youth in a community of split families, we advance the discussion on transnational geographies, particularly of the family in the context of a flexible global economy.     

Gendered Transnational Ties and Multipolar Economies: Chinese Migrant Women's WeChat Commerce in Taiwan

After a first migration in internal China, Chinese migrant women re‐migrate to Taiwan through marriage. There, to cope with economic discrimination, by exploiting the social network WeChat, Chinese women produce physical and virtual transnational multipolar economies, connecting the society of departure, China, and of settlement, Taiwan. Engaging with the contemporary debate about migrants’ translocal practices and economic transnationalism, this research article aims at elucidating the link between migration and entrepreneurship, through the case of Chinese migrant women's physical and virtual entrepreneurial activities across the Taiwan Strait. It explores the development of a specific culture of migration and of affections during the two mobility experiences, and the creation of gendered transnational networks across the borders. Thus, it provides empirical data for an understanding of Chinese women's cross‐strait migration in terms of interconnection, circulation and simultaneity.     

Privileged Japanese transnational families in Hawaii as lifestyle migrants

This study of privileged Japanese families in Hawaii revisits the claim that East Asian transnational families relocate overseas either to improve their well‐being or to enhance their status through their children's international education. Existing scholarship has focused mainly on the second pattern of status‐seeking migration, conceptualized as ‘education migration’. By employing Benson and O'Reilly's concept of ‘lifestyle migration’, I consider the less widely studied case of migration strategies designed to increase well‐being. The central difference between the two types of migrants lies in the way that migrant women construct their gendered identity through their transnational split‐household arrangement – a freer self (lifestyle migrants) or a sacrificial self (education migrants). In conclusion, I call for further research on this neglected topic and propose an important dimension to facilitate lifestyle migration, gender.     

Migrant transnationalism and the choice of transfer channels for remittances: the case of Moldova

Migrant remittances, particularly when transferred through the banking system, may contribute to financial development in migrants' home countries. We analyse the determinants of the choice of transfer channel (formal services versus informal operators or personal transfers) by Moldovan migrants in 2006. We estimate a multinomial logit model from household survey data. Our explanatory variables include socio‐economic characteristics of the migrant and other household members, the pattern of migration (destination country, legal status, duration), and financial information (average amount and frequency of payments). Key reasons not to use a formal transfer channel are a migrant's emphasis on low transfer cost (rather than speed, convenience or security), irregular legal status in the host country, and short migration spells. Our findings demonstrate that migrants' transnational capacities and activities in their entirety bear upon the choice of transfer channel; any policy interventions to promote the use of formal channels should reflect this.     

The boundaries of transnationalism: the case of assisted voluntary return migrants

Few studies on transnationalism have focused on migrants who return to their country of origin with insufficient resources and limited mobility. This study sheds light on the transnational connections of those who went back to Georgia and Armenia from Belgium on a voluntary assisted return and reintegration programme. Using Boccagni's (2012) analytical framework, we reveal the returnees' interpersonal, institutional and symbolic transnational ties. Although these ties were often limited and had little effect on their daily lives, and although the migrants' desire to participate in the transnational field rarely matched their ability to do so, they nonetheless attached great value to them symbolically and emotionally. Our findings question current conceptualizations of transnationalism and the focus on the home country as the sole context in which transnational ties should have an impact. We believe that there is a need to pay greater attention to the subjective and symbolic dimensions of the return–transnationalism field, including the relationship between integration and return migration policies.     

Dual citizenship or dual identity? Does ‘transnationalism’ supplant ‘nationalism’ among returning Trinidadians?

In this article we focus on the dual identities of relatively young Trinidadians who have decided to return to the island of their birth, or of their parents, while still in their thirties and forties. Highly‐educated professional transnational migrants mostly make up our sample of 36; 26 possess dual citizenship. We focus on our informants’ narratives about their transnational experiences, self‐appraisals of their dual identities and how they value dual citizenship. More generally, we ask, does transnationalism supplant nationalism among our returning informants? Unsurprisingly, the diverse responses we document do not support the commonly held explanatory relationship between return adaptations, ‘national belonging’ and the expected dominance of ‘transnational belonging’. Family relations intervene significantly, both to encourage transnationalism and to strengthen nationalism. Feelings of national belonging often accompany transnationalism. Notably, we view dual citizenship strategically and pragmatically as advantageous to the continuation of transnational practices.