Expanding transnational care networks: comparing caring for families with caring for homes

Although many factors may motivate a migrant to own a house in their country of origin, significant practical labour is needed to maintain it, as both a material structure intended for shelter and as a symbolic object reflecting attachment to a place of origin. Most research in this area focuses on the significance accorded to transnational houses by their owners and families connoted by the ‘myth of return’, but little attention has been given to how the labour of ownership – constructing, maintaining, overseeing and improving the house – is accomplished. In the light of emerging studies on the care labour that remittance houses require, this article suggests a theoretical framework for studying networks of transnational house maintenance on three dimensions of care – trust, communication, and remittances – observed in networks for transnational family care provisions. A review of literature on transnational home ownership indicates that these dimensions are also present, with some differences in application.     

Space,time, and self: Rethinking aging in the contexts of immigration and transnationalism

Critical gerontology views aging as a social construction that reflects the intersections of micro-processes with the macro-level forces of individual aging experiences. In the contexts of immigration and transnationalism, however, the macro-structural conditions, dynamics and experiences of aging have become further diversified and complicated. The dearth of empirical and explanatory knowledge in this area has inhibited us from comprehending aging in a changing world. Drawing on data from a study of Chinese grandparents' experiences of transnational caregiving in Canada, this article examines the impacts of such experiences on three interconnected dimensions – spatial, temporal and cognitive – of aging. Although the practice of transnational caregiving allows skilled immigrant families to mobilize care resources outside Canada, it has not only ruptured the traditional trajectories of aging for their elderly parents, but also complicated the inequalities that they have to bear on individual, familial and transnational levels. I argue that the critical examination of aging in the context of transnational caregiving helps us take into consideration those dimensions (such as place, space, time, and knowledge) that are changed by immigration processes, and rethink aging from a broader perspective that links seniors' experiences with their relationship with their adult immigrant children's families and macro-structures outside national borders.     

“Whom should We Help First?” Transnational Helping Practices in Ecuadorian Migration

Collective remittances, in the framework of migrant transnationalism, have been recently dealt with in some empirical research, especially on the Mexican‐US migration system. Far less studied is their significance in different migration flows, including their real contribution – as desirable as this may be – to local development. The article is concerned with a bottom up analysis of a migration flow where collective remittances – as the only way for emigrants to keep helping their local communities, well beyond their own families – are still in their infancy. It explores, through a translocal ethnography of Ecuadorian migration to Italy, the underlying attitudes, personal meanings and expectations – as well as the structural opportunities and constraints – accounting for helping practices at a distance. Charitable transfers to communities of origin are reconstructed as to their motivations, their main aims and beneficiaries, their embeddedness in mutual networks among immigrant co‐nationals. How is it that some of them decide to help “people in need” in their own communities overseas, or in their home towns, or in both? Is this an expression of communal belonging, or a matter of social status maintenance, or something else? Further reflections on the dilemmas inherent in transnational helping practices are then developed. Concluding remarks emphasize the relatively poor scope for such initiatives, in a recent and first‐generation flow over a long distance. While co‐ethnic solidarity overseas is a precondition for transnational helping practices, the latter are also affected by the developments of public policies in the countries of origin and of destination. Overall, an effective integration overseas is necessary for collective remittances to have some currency and impact.     

Entrepreneurial gain,cultural similarity and transnational entrepreneurship

The aim of this article is to analyse the factors affecting the motivations of immigrant entrepreneurs to generate an entrepreneurial gain (positive impact on home and host countries). We consider that positive reasons for emigrating can increase transnational entrepreneurship and mutual benefits for both societies. To test this hypothesis we present a model using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). This model explains the relations between motivations, cultural similarities, institutions and transnational linkage potentials. We designed an ad hoc search of Argentinean entrepreneurs established in Spain, both as EU citizens and without legal EU status, using online social networks. We applied an online questionnaire to 214 such entrepreneurs. We conclude that institutional rules (formal and informal) greatly influence the location decisions of firms and immigrant entrepreneurs’ motivations for starting transnational business because they provide the frame for the development of profitable opportunities.     

Agency of internal transnationalism in social memory

The article examines the limitations of methodological nationalism in the studies of social memory through a case study of memory of Stalinist repression in Belarus. It analyses how various social agencies – national and local activists, religious organisations, and international foundations – use the memory of repression for constructing post‐Soviet Belarusian identity by embedding their national representations in larger transnational frameworks. Drawing on the concept of ‘internal globalisation’, this article develops the idea of ‘internal transnationalism’ that suggests the importance of wider transnational configurations for the definition of nation. Internalized transnationalism does not make a national memory concept less nation‐centred, but it affects the choice of its cultural, political and civilizational framing. In contrast to methodological cosmopolitanism that implies rediscovering of the national as an internalized global, methodological transnationalism emphasizes the multiplicity of co‐existing transnational networks that can be invoked by social actors in their national mnemonic agenda. Using the case of the Kurapaty memorial site the article analyses how multiple framings of memory representations – the Belarusian national memory, liberal anti‐communist memory, contesting memories, such as Polish, Baltic and Jewish – compete and juxtapose in the space of social memory of political repression.     

Constructing Transnational Identities without Leaving Home: Korean Immigrant Women's Cognitive Border-crossing

Literature on contemporary immigrants suggests that increasing volume of transnational practices foster identity construction across borders, thereby disjoining geographical space and social space in which identities are constructed and negotiated. While studies pay increasing attention to the linkage between transnational organizing of economic and political activities and that of identities, relatively less attention has been given to transnational identity construction of immigrant groups without high level of transnationalism. This essay documents the identity dynamics among less mobile immigrants, who, albeit their immobility, negotiate their identities transnationally by way of various identity practices to imagine themselves as members of multiple communities across national and cultural boundaries. Based on thirty in-depth interviews with first generation Korean immigrant women, the author examines mechanisms of identity organizing which simultaneously indicate a gradual adaptation to the U.S. society and resistance to assimilation.     

Sent home: mapping the absent child into migration through polymedia

Migrants and their transnational families document their children and child‐rearing practices on social networking sites (SNS) to enhance their social mobility. In this article, I identify a new group of migrant children, namely those sent home to their parents’ countries of origin for an imagined ‘good childhood‘. I demonstrate that polymedia – SNS and other platforms – sustain these children and create new norms of publicness and visibility in transnational parenting. Exploring how families document child‐raising across international boundaries, I show how the trajectories of parenting relationships remain open ended. I counter the predominant focus on transnational parenting as a kind of abandonment attached to left‐behind children. Instead, I refocus the research on the opportunities polymedia give families to create and sustain intimacies, thus making the trajectories of migrant families and children increasingly dynamic. Polymedia create important shifts in global migration – a transformation that requires changes in the way scholars approach transnational families and long‐distance parenting.     

Salvadoran economic transnationalism: embedded strategies for household maintenance,immigrant incorporation,and entrepreneurial expansion

This article presents a case study of the transnational economic practices linking two Salvadoran settlements in the United States and El Salvador. It considers the relationship between economic transnationalism, immigrant settlement and economic development in the country of origin. Four processes are examined including: (1) the creation of border‐spanning social networks by migrants and their home country counterparts; (2) the construction of transnational economic activities and institutions; (3) the broader transnational social formations in which these are embedded; and, (4) the cumulative and unintended consequences of economic transnationalism for migrant households, the immigrant community, and El Salvador. The article applies the concepts of social network, social capital, and embeddedness, to explain the sources and determinants of individual‐ and community‐level variation in types of transnational economic practices. The conclusions drawn are that economic transnationalism is both part of a transnational settlement strategy and holds potential for economic development in the country of origin.     

Virtualizing diaspora: new digital technologies in the emerging transnational space

Since new distributed ledger technologies hold out a promise to restructure cross‐border flows of people and material resources, they affect globalization and alter transnational spaces. Their capacity to facilitate secure and disintermediated value transfer through crypto‐code and smart contracts enables novel forms of remittance transfer, resource management and digital identity verification – and may also generate new vulnerabilities. In this article, we examine the use of emerging blockchain applications in various migration and diaspora related initiatives in the emerging economies of Africa, Asia and Europe. By building on existing social networks of mutual obligation and quasi‐ethnic affinities, blockchain technologies may facilitate the ability to enlarge the scope of diasporas and change the nature of belonging, sovereignty, migration and statehood. Through exploring the selective foregrounding of mutuality and materiality in such alternative value transfer systems, we seek to explain the dynamics of trust and agency that these networks generate to extend commitments and loyalties in the transnational space.     

In Search of a Better Life: The Experiences of Working Poor Immigrants in Vancouver,Canada

We utilized data from 72 in‐depth interviews with immigrant hotel and hospital support workers employed in the service sector of Vancouver, Canada to analyse migration decisions and subsequent experiences after arrival. We found that migrant social networks were centrally important, both as a stimulus for migration and in shaping post‐arrival experiences. At the same time, the working conditions faced by immigrants after arrival, such as low pay and long work hours, resulted in serious challenges. While some struggled with multiple jobs to make ends meet, others felt their economic circumstances prevented them from even bringing their children to Canada. In some cases, children were returned to their country of origin. Features of low‐wage service sector jobs also limited the time available for participation in community life. The findings both support and advance recent theoretical contributions about the incorporation of immigrants in the United States and Canada. As immigrants frequently face occupational downgrading and are channelled into low‐wage service sector jobs, the conditions of work and social policies are important for their post‐arrival experiences and incorporation. Going beyond traditional conceptions of citizenship in the immigration literature, some respondents acted through their union and community organizations to attempt to change society and improve their fortunes. While some sought social justice through political activism, others used their limited family and community life time to reterritorialize values from their countries of origin. Part of their activism was transnational, such as sending remittances to help loved ones back home, but other involvement included participation in organizations with the aim of promoting social justice or improving life in their new country. The experiences of immigrant service sector workers in Vancouver suggest a need for greater emphasis on the role of both immigrant and non‐immigrant specific social and labour policies for understanding immigrant incorporation in North America.     

CROSSING TEHRAN AVENUE

The online city magazine TehranAvenue.com (TA) occupies the transnational crossroad of digital and urban space. It thus provides an important case study of how urban studies, postcolonial theory and critical cyber studies can be combined fruitfully to explain the potentialities and limits of digital and social networks in transnational Middle Eastern contexts. The article explores metaphors of the Internet as city, theories of transnational urban space and recent studies of the Internet and its politico-cultural uses in Iran to establish a theoretical method that can explain the simultaneity of local and transnational in digital and urban spaces. Qualitative data (email and telephone interviews with TA's founder, editor and contributors), combined with content analysis of the site, supports the claim that the city as metaphor and metonym can account for the intersection between contemporary North African and Middle Eastern digital spaces and national and diasporic urban spaces. The digital city – or blogabad – expands physical urban space into transnational networks. But there are important limits to the transnational reach of mediated social networking practices. In fact, the located identifications of web users are often much more important than the global reach of the technologies they use.     

Social Capital Investment and Immigrant Economic Trajectories: A Case Study of Punjabi American Taxi Drivers in New York City

Although the scholarship on social capital and immigrant economic incorporation has sufficiently documented how immigrants mobilize social capital in their search for employment which often leads to the formation of immigrant niches, how social capital is processed after immigrants acquire employment and its significance for the preservation of immigrant employment niches is less well explored. This paper addresses this gap in the literature with a case study of immigrant Punjabi taxi drivers in the New York metropolitan area. In particular, this study shows how a group of immigrant Punjabi taxi drivers mobilized social capital via embeddedness in co‐ethnic social networks and improved their working conditions – a process that must be considered in explanations of the Punjabi niche in the taxi industry for more than two decades. The study has implications for the relationship between social capital and the structure of the workplace or industry where immigrants are incorporated and its subsequent impact on immigrant economic trajectories. Further, this study contributes to the debate on the usefulness of ethnic communities for the adaptation of immigrant groups. Additionally, this research is relevant to the scholarship on the economic adaptation of South Asian (a subset of Asian Americans) immigrants, an understudied immigrant group in the United States.     

The determinants of transnational entrepreneurship and transnational ties’ dynamics among immigrant entrepreneurs in ICT sector in Italy

This article contributes to the rapidly growing literature on transnational immigrant entrepreneurship by analyzing the determinants of transnational entrepreneurial engagement among immigrants in the ICT sector in Italy. We investigate which factors influence the rise or decline of transnational entrepreneurial involvement with a home country. Our results indicate that longer residence in Italy is associated with smaller propensity to become a transnational entrepreneur. Moreover, we find that the type of transnational ties and the network size have a substantial impact on the dynamics of transnational entrepreneurial engagement.     

Transnational Twist: Pecuniary Remittances and the Socioeconomic Integration of Authorized and Unauthorized Mexican Immigrants in Los Angeles County1

Annual U.S.‐Mexico pecuniary remittances are estimated to have more than doubled recently to at least $10 billion ‐ augmenting interest among policymakers, financial institutions, and transnational migrant communities concerning how relatively poor expatriate Mexicans sustain such large transfers and the impact on immigrant integration in the United States. We employ the 2001 Los Angeles County Mexican Immigrant Residency Status Survey (LAC‐MIRSS) to investigate how individual characteristics and social capital traditionally associated with integration, neighborhood context, and various investments in the United States influenced remitting in 2000. Remitting is estimated to have been inversely related to conventional integration metrics and influenced by community context in both sending and receiving areas. Contrary to straight‐line assimilation theories and more consistent with a transnational or nonlinear perspective, however, remittances are also estimated to have been positively related to immigrant homeownership in Los Angeles County and negatively associated with having had public health insurance such as Medicaid.     

A Global-Middle-Class House?1 Cultural Capital,Taste, and Kitsch

Abstract

In this article, I show how the category of the migrant house, as has been recently discussed in much scholarship, can be expanded to include another subcategory—the global-middle-class house. Recently, the migrant house has generated much research in migration studies and in disciplines of the built environment. Consequently, it has been examined through various perspectives, including home and belonging, materiality in the home, and the transnational home. It has not been examined, however, through the concepts of cultural capital, taste and kitsch, as developed by Bourdieu and others. This article applies these concepts in the exploration of the migrant house through a case study of one house and its transformation from old to new in suburban Melbourne. The article shows how the concepts of cultural capital, taste and kitsch can be utilized to expand the category of the migrant house to include the global-middle-class house. Following a theoretical discussion, the article analyses the old family house, the decision to demolish, the construction process and the redevelopment of a new house, together with an analysis of material objects in the new house and around it. The article argues that this is a specific kind of a migrant house, a global-middle-class house, because it combines popular global taste with objects taken from the ancestral past of its migrant residents.     

Taiwanese Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Canada and Transnational Social Space

This article explores the migration of Taiwanese immigrant entrepreneurs to Canada and their transnationalism. Their presence in Canada is documented and described with statistical data on their demographic characteristics, human capital, and economic capital. An assessment of their transnationalism is provided by primary qualitative data gathered through in‐depth interviews. Overall, the review of the literature on Taiwanese migration to various countries, and their transnationalism, indicates that research has primarily been conducted in Australia and the United States, while it remained understudied in Canada. The article makes a case for contextualizing Taiwanese entrepreneurial migration in terms of a global immigration marketplace and the specific business migration programmes in Australia, United States, and Canada. Further, the article argues for the appropriateness of conceptualizing these Taiwanese entrepreneurs as operating within the theoretical framework of transnational social space. The findings on transnational social space include the importance of transnational familial networks, transnational business circuits, and transmigration. Transnational familial networks constitute a form of “capital” as the dispersal is a “resource”. The transnational business circuits include three types: (1) Asian production‐North American distribution; (2) retail chains; and (3) import‐export, all spatially distributed with their multiple national sites. In selected areas of the presentation and discussion of the data the policy implications of the findings are explored. These include discussion of the implications of this transnationalism on Canadian policies such as immigration, multiculturalism, business development, international trade, economic development, and citizenship. There is clearly a lack of harmonization among migration policy and other social and economic policies in Canada. While Canadian multiculturalism policy facilitates transnationalism, Canadian citizenship policy is shown to conflict with and discourage transnational practices.     

Invisibility and Temporary Residence Status of Filipino Workers in South Korea

This study concerns a group of Filipino immigrant workers–mostly trainees or undocumented workers–in Korea. It deals with the influence of immigration on family members and their relations. The stories of sending babies to the Philippines and talking on the phone show how the concept of transnational motherhood can be applied to immigrant workers in Korea. This study also discusses the meaning of invisibility and temporary residency as a two‐control mechanism of immigrant workers in Korea. Korean society keeps immigrant workers invisible and prevents their becoming members of society in many ways. Therefore, Filipino migrant workers do not belong to either their home country or Korea.     

Transnational political practices and the receiving state: Turks and Kurds in Germany and the Netherlands

This article examines how the social and political contexts in receiving countries affect the transnational political practices of migrants and refugees, such as their mobilization around political events in their homeland. The case study explores the political participation of Turks and Kurds in Germany and the Netherlands in its full complexity, that is in both the immigration country and in homeland politics. The findings suggest that transnational political practices should not be reduced to a function of the political opportunity structures of particular receiving countries for two main reasons: (a) more inclusive political structures, which provide for more participation and co‐operation on immigrant political issues, may at the same time, and for that very reason, serve to exclude dialogue on homeland politics; (b) homeland political movements may draw on a different range of resources than their immigrant political counterparts, including those outside the local political institutional context.     

Mapping the role of ‘transnational family habitus’ in the lives of young people and children

In this article, we develop the concept of ‘transnational family habitus’ as a theoretical tool for making sense of the ways in which children and young people from a migrant background are ‘doing families’ transnationally. Drawing on over a decade of cumulative research on Caribbean and Italian families in the UK, as well as on a new joint research project, we first investigate the opportunities and consequences of a transnational family habitus on family arrangements, kinship relationships and identity within a transnational context. Second, we analyse the role of these young people's structural location in Britain in shaping the boundaries of their transnational family habitus. We argue that one should see a transnational family habitus as an asset that can potentially disrupt conventional understandings of belonging and processes of inclusion and exclusion. However, we also detail how social divisions of class, race, and increasingly migration status, shape such a habitus.