Transnational networks and transcultural belonging: a study of the Spanish second generation in Switzerland

Migration scholars often assume a close association between transnational social practices and transcultural forms of belonging. Nonetheless, we argue that the distinction of both concepts is analytically important and helpful in understanding the transnational lives of second‐generation migrants. To analyse the biographical accounts and network maps of second‐generation Spaniards living in Switzerland, we draw a theoretical distinction between social practice (transnational networks) and forms of belonging (transcultural belonging). Our analysis shows second‐generation migrants maintaining social networks over time, interrupting them, or reconnecting with them. Their sense of belonging may either endure or fade. Although the interconnection between social networks and the sense of belonging is neither straightforward nor causal, we can nevertheless identify five types of network/belonging combinations. These types describe the various ways in which second‐generation migrants are likely to articulate transnational networks and transcultural belonging in their lives.     

A home far away? Religious identity and transnational relations in the Iranian diaspora

Abstract In this article, I address the influence of religious identity on the discourses of national belonging that traditionally dominate transnational discussions. Many of the children of the Iranian diaspora live in a state of exile from contemporary theocratic Iran. Living at a temporal and physical distance from the homeland has resulted in differential long‐distance imaginings mediated by the diasporic context. Through the reflections of the children of Iranian migrants on the desire to ‘return’, a picture is painted of differing transnational trajectories divided along religious lines within the Iranian diaspora. For many of the second generation from a Muslim background their centrality in the discourses of national belonging, typified through the conflated ‘Muslim Iranian’ of media representations, feeds a desire for return. In contrast, for many second‐generation Baha ‘is their positionality as a minority, in both the homeland and the diaspora, combines with an eschatological problematizing of national belonging, to lead them away from Iran. In this article I draw on discussions about email communication in the diaspora(s) carried out as a part of research with the Iranian communities of London, Sydney and Vancouver.     

Grandparents,kinship ties,and belonging after migration: the perspective of second‐generation grandchildren

In this article, I investigate the roles of grandparents for second‐generation immigrants who live with their parents in a different country from their grandparents. I draw on in‐depth interviews with second‐generation Vietnamese immigrants living in the Czech Republic, where they are very often raised by Czech caregivers. The carers and the children are joined through the process of caregiving and become grandmothers and grandchildren to each other. The analysis focuses on how the interviewees make sense of, interpret, and understand their roles as grandchildren vis‐à‐vis their Czech and Vietnamese grandmothers. It shows how, after migration, the kinship ties are performed, negotiated, and reproduced on a micro level of everyday life, with tasks of caring, homeland visits, and a transnational/face‐to‐face maintenance of intimacy. The article concludes that grandparents play an important role in the grandchildren's sense of belonging both to their family kin and to the homeland.     

Homeland (Dis)Integrations: Educational Experience,Children and Return Migration to Albania

Based on empirical research conducted in Albania, this article reports that educational experience and performance, and hence, integration of the children of (returned) migrants in their parents' homeland is obstructed by structural factors linked to the educational system. A finding such as this challenges the centrality of an essentialized notion of ethnicity in models of “second generation” integration and evidences the centrality of the nation‐state, and the education system as one of its pillars, in the integration of migrants and their children. Comparative integration context theory appears to apply to the integration of children of returned migrants; yet it needs to take into account the mobile lives of migrants and their children, the transnational disjuncture between different educational systems, and the role of locality within the nation‐state. Moreover, including children in analyses of integration, in the context of education, calls for the inclusion of life‐course and scale in integration theories.     

Rooted in relative privilege: US ‘expats’ in Granada,Nicaragua

This article investigates how US citizens living in Granada, Nicaragua, negotiate transnational belonging. Best known for a revolution and covert US intervention, Nicaragua, and in particular, the colonial town of Granada, has become a popular site for settlers from the Global North. Similar to other cases of ‘lifestyle migration’, these migrants enjoy spacious homes, maids, and upscale restaurants in a country ranked second poorest in Latin America, and governed by none other than El Comandante Ortega himself. They do not sever ties with their homeland, and form strong attachments in their new land. Fieldwork conducted in 2016 reveals that despite their international mobility, cosmopolitanism does not characterize how these migrants belong in the world. Instead, they practice privileged transnationalism in which their economic, political, and cultural power relative to that of their hosts facilitates both their mobility and their comfortable sense of rootedness in their sites of origin and settlement.     

“Transnational” Socio‐Cultural Systems and Ethnographic Research: Views from an Extended Field Site

This article discusses a widespread pattern of migratory moves that is often overlooked in contemporary research on transnational migration. Transnational theory has successfully highlighted the significance of migrants' attachments to people and places transcending the confines of nation‐states. By emphasizing, a priori, the national, this theory tends to overlook the full complexity and meaning of migrants' extra‐local socio‐cultural relations. Through an ethnographic study of dispersed family networks of Caribbean origin, I explore the wide range of migration practices in which differing actors engage and the nature of the sociocultural systems that emerge as migrants move between places.     

Diasporic Memberships in Historical Perspective: Comparative Insights from the Mexican,Italian and Polish Cases1

This article compares the evolution of diaspora‐sending state relations for Mexico, Italy, and more briefly, Poland during their peak periods of out migration. I argue that sending‐state diaspora relations evolve through the state's changing relations with the global system, their domestic politics, and migrants' ability to act politically with respect to the homeland. This research shows the state helping to create diasporic or transnational space. It also contributes to the analytical work of fleshin out examples of transnational life in history, and examines a case (the Polish one) where the global system and other conditions combine to overwhelm transnational life.     

Family divided: the class formation of Honduran transnational families

Although there is a growing literature on transnational families, we know little about the class formation of such families and even less about how transnational migration and generation interact in this process. In this article I draw from ethnographic research with Honduran immigrant parents in the USA and transnational youths in Honduras to theorize the class formation of transnational families. Based on Bryceson and Vuorela's concepts of frontiering and relativizing, I show how economic remittances bolster the expectations and improve the lifestyles of transnational youths to the detriment of their parents' welfare in the USA. That parents often relativize their communication, choosing not to tell children about their struggles, can contribute to increased inequalities within families. Finally, my data suggest that it will be difficult for transnational youths to meet their newfound expectations and maintain their lifestyles without a permanent flow of remittances and thus the ongoing separation of family.     

Documenting and Explaining the Persistence of Homeland Politics Among Germany's Turks1

This article examines the development of Germany's Turkish organizations since 1961. These have failed to mobilize Germany's Turks around shared ethnocultural grievances against the host society. A transnational political opportunity structure, a contextual framework involving host and sending countries, entices distinct actors leading Germany's Turkish organizations to focus on homeland differences instead of common interests. In this transnational context, actors — whom I will label political migrants — influence immigrant community cohesion by using associations to pursue goals rooted in the homeland or host country. When a sending country generates contentious political migrants in an ethnoculturally dissimilar, homogeneous democracy and the hosts fail to incorporate the foreigners, infighting focused on the homeland is likely to preoccupy the immigrant community.     

Migrant family visits and the life course: interrelationships between age,capacity and desire

Migrant visits to the country of origin play a crucial role in transnational family cohesion and migrant well‐being; the research on them so far has focused primarily on the relationship between migrant integration and transnational engagement. In this article, I extend the discussion by adding a life course perspective to Carling and Hoelscher's (2013) framework for studying transnational activities, which incorporates capacity and desire. I explore whether age has an independent effect on migrants' family visits and how it relates to socio‐economic resources, migration status and transnational ties. Using data from a survey of Peruvian migrants around the globe (n=7,741), I show that migrants' stage in the life course has a partial effect on their propensity to travel through the interrelationship between age, capacity and desire. The findings show that the capacity and desire of migrants to visit their country of origin are particularly strong after reaching retirement age, suggesting a favourable combination of resources at later stages in life. However, whether this expresses a positive approach to ageing, or is a strategy to balance transnational family obligations and to postpone return decisions, remains open for future research.     

“You Know,Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant”: Religion and Transnational Migration

The purpose of this article is to summarize what we know about the role that religion plays in transnational migration and to outline a strategy for further research in this area. While migration scholars now generally acknowledge the salience of migrants' economic, social, and political transnational activities, we have largely overlooked the ways in which religious identities and practices also enable migrants to sustain memberships in multiple locations. My goals in this article are threefold. First, I provide a brief overview of related bodies of work on global, diasporic and immigrant religion and differentiate them from studies of migrants' transnational religious practices. Second, I selectively summarize what we have learned about the role of religion in transnational migration from prior research. Finally, I propose an approach to future research on these questions.¹     

Voting here and there: political integration and transnational political engagement among immigrants in Europe

In this article, I examine voting patterns in origin and receiving country national elections among immigrants in Europe. The existing scholarship on transnational political engagement offers two competing interpretations of the relationship between immigrant integration and transnational engagement, which I classify as the resocialization and complementarity perspectives. The resocialization perspective assumes that transnational political engagement gradually declines as immigrants become socialized into the new receiving society. Conversely, the complementarity perspective assumes that immigrant integration increases transnational political engagement. I test these competing perspectives with survey data collected between 2004 and 2008 for 12 different immigrant groups residing in seven European cities. The analysis examines how immigrant political and civic participation in receiving countries affect their proclivities to vote in homeland elections. I also analyse the effects of receiving and origin country contexts on immigrant voting behaviour in homeland elections. While my findings support both the resocialization and complementarity perspectives, they also highlight the ways in which a set of origin‐country contexts shape immigrant propensities to engage in transnational electoral politics. I observe a degree of complementarity among immigrants with resources who are motivated and eligible to participate in both receiving and origin‐country elections.     

Grandparents on the move: a multilevel framework analysis to understand diversity in zero‐generation care arrangements in Switzerland

Among the various forms of transnational grandparenting is the engagement of the so‐called zero generation – the transnationally mobile parents of adult migrants – in caring for their grandchildren abroad. It constitutes a distinct kind of intergenerational solidarity within transnational families. By taking migrant families in Switzerland as a case in point, in this article we attempt to broaden the existing research by adopting a comparative, qualitative approach towards understanding the commonalities and differences of childcare organization involving grandparental support in European and non‐European transnational families. By taking into account the main objective and the temporality of grandparents' visits in Switzerland, we identify six different types of childcare arrangements. While these arrangements are shaped by the discriminatory Swiss migration regime, several other institutional, familial, and individual factors help to promote or impede them, or to change their dynamics. Thus, we introduce an innovative, multi‐level, analytical approach towards studying the various ways in which the parents of adult migrants of different nationalities take part in the transnational circulation of care.     

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.     

‘Knowing one's place’: gender,mobility and shifting subjectivity in Eastern Indonesia

Abstract In this article I analyse the gendered space of transnational mobility by problematizing migrant subjectivity in everyday practices. In line with feminist perspectives I highlight the significance of the micro‐scale experience of female migrants from Eastern Indonesia in acquiring mobility as a struggle for new subjectivity. I frame this migration as a production of the subjective space of power. Based on in‐depth interviews with returned migrants, I present reflexive accounts of two migrants on contract domestic work abroad to illuminate the changing contours of the relationships between gender, mobility and shifting subjectivity. Households take into account the cultural meanings of space in everyday life including local relations in the decisions on mobility. Strategies of ‘knowing one's place’ reflect women's agency in negotiating alternative roles and positions within the intra‐household dynamics and in the workplace. Women's personal accounts have the potential to illuminate spatial processes of migration as a contested space for the repositioning of self in networks of family, kin, local and global relations.     

Contesting transnationalism? Lessons from the study of Albanian migration networks from former Yugoslavia

Abstract Recent studies have questioned the concept of transnationalism, showing that transnational ties do not always have the weight attributed to them in the first studies conducted on the topic. Using a case study of social networks of Albanian migrants from former Yugoslavia, in this article I discuss the significance of transnational ties in the context of: the decision to migrate; social support networks of Albanians in Switzerland; and reintegration on return. The results raise questions about the factors that determine the existence and form of transnational social spaces as well as the social relevance of transnational ties. While the transnational perspective brings interesting insights to the study of migration processes, it is argued that transnational ties and social relations must not be presumed but rather carefully analysed, and that structural as well as cultural aspects must be introduced in this analysis.     

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.     

Mothers and Daughters in Historical Perspective: Home,Identity and Double Consciousness in British Pakistanis' Migration and Return

Scholarly interest has increasingly focused on the predicament of second-generation counter-diasporic return migration to an ancestral homeland. The present paper portrays two generations of Pakistani middle class women migrants: two mothers, who arrived in Manchester in the 1970s, and their daughters, who both returned to live in Pakistan, one at the age of 11 and the other in her twenties, to marry. The latter in particular experienced Pakistan as culturally alien and unhomely. In Britain one mother has become extremely pious after 9/11. The paper looks at the moral careers of mothers and daughters, starting from the fact that migration initiates an irreversible process in which everyday, taken-for-granted intimacies and socialities of home and identity are subverted. Refuting simplistic theories of a continuous “transnational field”, it argues that migrants experience “double consciousness”, an awareness of competing rules, expectations and a doubling up of a subject's sense of belonging and alienation, which no return home can reverse.     

Migrant Mobilization for Homeland Politics: A Social Movement Approach

From the campaign of Chilean exiles all over the world to overthrow the regime of Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s to the contemporary mobilization of the Kurdish diaspora in Western Europe, various cases demonstrate the persistence of homeland ties among migrants, especially those who experienced repression and displacement by the government in their countries of origin. Diverse frameworks and concepts in both the humanities and the social sciences have been deployed to explain the involvement of migrants in politics in their home countries, from “long‐distance nationalism” to “transnational activism.” Each points to different dynamic processes and causal mechanisms. In recent years, scholars have advocated the use of a social movement framework in the analysis of migrant mobilization, despite the marginalization of such studies in theory development. In this article, I examine the concepts put forward by the political process model (PPM) as they apply to the analysis of migrants' involvement in politics in their native land. I propose ways for PPM to be useful in the explanation of the dynamics and processes of homeland‐oriented migrant mobilization.