Migration and Community Formation under Conditions of Globalization

This article sets out to rethink the dynamics of the migratory process under conditions of globalization. Two main models of migration and incorporation dominated academic and policy approaches in the late twentieth century: first, the settler model, according to which immigrants gradually integrated into economic and social relations, re‐united or formed families and eventually became assimilated into the host society (sometimes over two or three generations); second, the temporary migration model, according to which migrant workers stayed in the host country for a limited period, and maintained their affiliation with their country of origin. Globalization, defined as a proliferation of cross‐border flows and transnational networks, has changed the context for migration. New technologies of communication and transport allow frequent and multi‐directional flows of people, ideas and cultural symbols. The erosion of nation‐state sovereignty and autonomy weakens systems of border‐control and migrant assimilation. The result is the transformation of the material and cultural practices associated with migration and community formation, and the blurring of boundaries between different categories of migrants. These trends will be illustrated through case‐studies of a number of Asian and European immigration countries. It is important to re‐think our understanding of the migratory process, to understand new forms of mobility and incorporation, particularly the emergence of transnational communities, multiple identities and multi‐layered citizenship.     

Realities of life and future prospects within two cultures: unaccompanied minor refugees from South East Asia in the Federal Republic of Germany

From August 1979 on, more than 30,000 refugees from South East Asia were accepted in the Federal Republic of Germany as quota refugees in a special program; among them were 1600 unaccompanied minor refugees. About 1500 were accompanied Vietnamese children and youths who had fled their home country as 'boat people' across the South China Sea. Unaccompanied minor refugees have, like all other recognized refugees, a legal claim to family reunion in the Federal Republic. Today, only parents can join their children and vice versa, and spouses their spouses. The 1st phase of socialization in the lives of the unaccompanied minor refugees evolved in the cultural traditions of their South East Asian country of origin up to the age of 10 to 15 years. In the 2nd phase of socialization--the enculturation--the child establishes its culturally specific emotionality, language, mentality, and patterns of behavior through interaction and verbal communication with the people nearest him. The 3rd phase of socialization begins at school age and reaches full significance at the age of starting to work, with the accompanying expectations of society. Most of the minor unaccompanied refugees from South Asia had already completed their enculturation--the establishment of their cultural identity. The realities of life the young single refugees as foreigners in German society are determined by 4 special factors: 1) the great cultural differences between their country of originin South East Asia and the resettlement country, 2) the young people left their homes as refugees and their resettlement in the Federal Repulic was determined by chance events, 3) they have to live there alone and without the emotional support of their families in a situation of cultural change, and 4) because of their Asian physiognomy they will always appear as foreigners even if they have integrated well. The future prospects of the young South East Asian refugees in German society will be determined primarily by to what extent they will be able to find a satisfactory place within both cultures.     

‘Give me my pathway!‘: multinational migration,transnational skills regimes and migrant subjectification

In this article, I address the interplay between migration regimes and migrant subjectivities in stepwise multinational migration through a comparative analysis of biographical interviews with migrants in the healthcare and dairy farm work sectors in New Zealand. In both sectors, migrants' trajectories involve movements from Asia to locations in the Middle East, North Africa or Japan before arrival in New Zealand, and in some cases plans for onward migration. The analysis of these migration patterns and the narratives of migrants, reveal an emergent transnational skills regime that involves connected but uncoordinated systems of skills recognition; negotiating this regime occurs through increased attunement to migration on the part of multinational migrants, as well as adaptation to the expectations of authorities and employers. I conclude the article by suggesting that while multinational migration involves new opportunities for people on the move it also entails greater entanglement in the unequal conditioning of transnational migration.     

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.     

"I Feel Happy that I Can be Useful to Others": Preliminary Study of East African Women and Their Remittance Behavior

Individuals and their families often migrate for various reasons (e.g., economic wellbeing, civic unrest, medical reasons). Yet often times economic strain can cause families to migrate at different times. This separation within the family units has created the development of transnational family interactions where immigrant families remain emotionally and financially connected across international borders. Remittances, the back and forth exchange of goods and resources between people in the host nation and their counterparts in the country of origin, can often play a vital role in these interactions. Black African immigrants, Black people from the continent of Africa, are one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in the US and also one of the highest financial remitters. Women are consistent remitters, yet little is known about the financial contributions of women from this continent to their families in their countries of origin. The current study looked at a segment of this population by exploring the remittance experiences of seven immigrant women from the East African countries of Rwanda and Kenya. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted and our thematic analysis revealed five themes: (1) Women felt their families made financial sacrifices for them, (2) Women took on family financial responsibilities, (3) Women felt their families in the country of origin had skewed financial expectations of them, (4) Women felt guilty about their limited finances and inability to send more to their families, and lastly (5) Women invested or had plans to invest in their country of origin.     

Looking Down or Looking Up: Status and Subjective Well‐Being among Asian and Latino Immigrants in the United States

Foundational theories of international migration rest on the assumption that immigrants maintain reference groups in their country of origin even after settling in a new place, while the transnationalism perspective suggests that immigrants maintain a dual frame of reference. This article uses the nationally representative National Latino and Asian American Survey to test the location of immigrants’ reference groups. I find that the relationship between various measures of subjective social standing and subjective well‐being suggests that immigrants maintain simultaneous reference groups in both the United States and the country of origin, supporting transnational theories, and refuting earlier theories.     

A transnational lens into international student experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic

We analyse the experiences of international students living in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of transnationalism that understands mobility as broadly uninterrupted, continuing and taken-for-granted, and international student migration (ISM) literature. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, people had to contend with sudden border closures and stringent restrictions on all forms of travel. International students are regarded as the archetypal trans-migrants with frequent mobility and often multiple attachments to place. We interrogate these assumptions of mobility by drawing on interview data from 13 international students in Ontario from April to June of 2020. We found that international students experienced the pandemic transnationally and faced increased challenges, which heightened their reliance on support from transnational families, and generated anxieties about their future career and mobilities. We bring transnational theories into conversation with ISM literature to better understand international students’ lived experiences in Canada during a pandemic.     

The Panic to Leave: Economic Crisis and the "New Emigration" from Ecuador

Prior to the late 1990s, Ecuadorian international migration was directed primarily toward the United States. Of the estimated 400,000 Ecuadorians living in the United States, most are concentrated in metropolitan New York and many hail from the south–central highlands of Cañar and Azuay Provinces. In the mid– to late–1990s, Ecuador entered a political and economic crisis just as clandestine transportation to the United States became increasingly expensive and dangerous. Within two years Ecuadorian migration diversified radically and a "new emigration" formed. Many thousands of Ecuadorians from throughout the country migrated to Europe, mostly Spain, but also to France, Italy, and The Netherlands. Prior to 1998, few Ecuadorians lived in Europe, but now, Ecuadorians are the largest immigrant group in Madrid and one of the largest in Spain. The migrant stream was led by women and composed of people from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Ecuadorians find themselves working in a variety of services (especially women) and negotiating a volatile, even hostile, social, and political environment.
This "new emigration" has numerous implications for Ecuadorian families, the economy, and the nation–state. Understanding the implications requires a comparative approach that examines at least three aspects of the new emigration: the role of gender, the importance of transnational ties and connections, and the emerging roles of state and non–state actors in the formalization of migration.     

Transnational families and their children's education: China's ‘study mothers’ in Singapore

Abstract For many middle‐income Asian families from the region's less developed countries, the education of children in a more developed country has become a major ‘project’ requiring the transnational relocation of one or more members of the family. As an aspiring global education hub, Singapore has been a recipient of many international students. In our article we examine the case of ‘study mothers’ from the People's Republic of China who accompany their children to Singapore during the course of the latter's study, while leaving their spouses at home. In the analysis we demonstrate that the transnational ‘project of education’ for these young Asian children hinges crucially on the notion and realization of the ‘sacrificial mother’. Unlike the women in elite Chinese transnational families who enter western countries as potential citizens and are able to regain their relatively privileged lifestyles after a period of transition, the study mothers are admitted to, and remain in, Singapore as transient sojourners whose lives are characterized by continuing challenges and fluidity.     

Don't call me ibu: challenges of belonging for childless transnational Indonesian women

New forms of transnational families are being created by the feminization of migration, particularly of mobile Southeast Asian female workers who take on the financial responsibility of supporting their nieces and nephews who remain in the home country. This understudied kin relationship provides important insights into the complexities of transnational belonging among childless women. Fieldwork conducted in 2015 with Indonesian professional migrant women in Melbourne, Australia, reveals a translocalized Javanese cultural practice of fostering nieces and nephews. Using a framework that extends the anthropology of belonging into a gendered transnational context, in this article I argue that children who are absent, whether living in another country or never born, are yet present in women's narratives and are key to a larger migrant project of recreating oneself as an ambiguously valued subject.     

Transnational parenting and the well‐being of Angolan migrant parents in Europe

Studies on the transnational family highlight the emotional difficulties of migrant parents separated from their children through international migration. This article consists of a large‐scale quantitative investigation into the insights of transnational family literature by examining the well‐being of transnational parents compared with that of parents who live with their children in the destination country. Furthermore, through a survey of Angolan migrant parents in both the Netherlands and Portugal, we compare the contexts of two receiving country. Our study shows transnational parents are worse off than their non‐transnational counterparts in terms of four measures of well‐being – health, life satisfaction, happiness, and emotional well‐being. Although studies on migrant well‐being tend to focus exclusively on the characteristics of the receiving countries, our findings suggest that, to understand migrant parents' well‐being, a transnational perspective should also consider the existence of children in the migrant sending country. Finally, comparing the same population in two countries revealed that the receiving country effects the way in which transnational parenting is associated with migrant well‐being.     

Gender and Transnational Gossip

Transnational social networks powerfully shape Mexican migration and enable families to stretch internationally. In an atmosphere of such high dependence on social networks, it would be rare for families not to be affected by the opinions of others. This article analyzes this often-overlooked aspect of social networks, gossip. I analyze gossip stories prevalent for one type of migrant family, those in which parents and children live apart. Drawing on over 150 ethnographic interviews and observation with members of Mexican transnational families and their neighbors in multiple sites, I describe both parents’ and children’s experiences with transnational gossip. I show that in a transnational context, gossip is a highly gendered activity with different consequences for men and women. Although targeting both women and men, transnational gossip reinforces the expectations that mothers be family caregivers and fathers be family providers even when physical separation makes these activities difficult to accomplish.

Not Always ‘Left-Behind’: Indonesian Adolescent Women Negotiating Transnational Mobility,Filial Piety and Care

In contrast to current research focusing on how migrant parents provide care for their ‘left-behind’ children, this article highlights how Indonesian adolescent women also migrate (or stay) in order to provide care for their families. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted mainly between 2014 and 2015 in Central Javanese migrant-origin villages, this article discusses how opportunities for transnational labour migration affect young unmarried women’s roles as ‘dutiful daughters’ in diverse ways. By analysing how the (im)mobilities of three young women are mutually shaped by diverse expectations to care for their families, I highlight that care is always relational, showing that the distinction between care-givers and care-receivers is less evident than currently assumed in migration studies. Closer examination of how young persons mutually negotiate mobility and parent–child care expectations brings into focus the new forms of agency, power and vulnerability that they encounter in migration and migrant-origin contexts.     

Supporting Asian Deaf Young People and their Families: the role of professionals and services

This paper discusses how Asian deaf young people and their families engage with welfare provision. Our findings, based on group and individual interviews with young deaf people and individual interviews with their parents, explore the assumptions underlying current provision and how they influence the options available to young people and their families. The paper suggests that the welfare state exerts a form of social control where professional help, although well intended, may disempowers Asian deaf people by privileging 'oralism' over sign language, and western norms over other cultural values. On the other hand, positive constructions of deafness privilege Deaf identity while failing to accommodate ethnic or religious diversity, resulting in Asian deaf young people and their families having an ambivalent relationship with the Deaf community. We argue that services need to recognise and address the reasons for this ambivalence if they are to adequately engage Asian deaf people and their families.     

The intersection of class origin and immigration background in structuring social capital: the role of transnational ties

The study investigates inequalities in access to social capital based on social class origin and immigration background and examines the role of transnational ties in explaining these differences. Social capital is measured with a position generator methodology that separates between national and transnational contacts in a sample of young adults in Sweden with three parental backgrounds: at least one parent born in Iran or Yugoslavia, or two Sweden‐born parents. The results show that having socioeconomically advantaged parents is associated with higher levels of social capital. Children of immigrants are found to have a greater access to social capital compared to individuals with native background, and the study shows that this is related to transnational contacts, parents’ education and social class in their country of origin. Children of immigrants tend to have more contacts abroad, while there is little difference in the amount of contacts living in Sweden across the three groups. It is concluded that knowledge about immigration group resources help us predict its member's social capital, but that the analysis also needs to consider how social class trajectories and migration jointly structure national and transnational contacts.     

Intergenerational Transnationalism: 1.5 Generation Asian Migrants in New Zealand1

This paper explores some of the issues associated with the nature of contemporary transnationalism and the particular experiences and strategies of a specific cohort of migrants, the 1.5 generation. Based on a study of East Asian migrant adolescents to New Zealand, we argue that the experiences and strategies of this generation differ from those of their parents, the original decision‐makers in the migration process, as well as from the historical experiences of earlier migrants. There is an ambivalence (in‐betweenness) about settlement and attachment that raises some key questions about the assumptions of the immigration literature and of policy/political communities. The paper suggests that the 1.5 generation represents a particular group that deserves more attention in the migration and transnationalism literature.     

‘Oh they drink here harder I think’: young people and alcohol consumption at three New Zealand secondary school formals

The New Zealand media sensationalises the issue of teenage drinking. It also frames school formals (balls or proms) and associated after parties as problematic sites, since young people may drink to excess at such events. This article explores the alcohol consumption patterns of a group of year 13 students on the night of their school formal. Adults' permissive attitudes towards their own and young people's alcohol consumption on the night are discussed to highlight how drinking is almost necessary for socialisation in a New Zealand context. The majority of student participants reported that they drank in moderation on the night and some were intolerant of intoxicated peers. This poses a challenge to New Zealand media depictions of the school formal and after party as ‘drunken affairs’. Some international students did drink to excess at unofficial after parties organised by students and/or parents in two of three participating schools. Rather than this reflecting negatively on the students concerned, such behaviour can be read as a reflection on New Zealand's binge drinking culture. This article concludes with suggestions for how schools can create safer after parties which may reduce the chances of young people engaging in ‘risky’ drinking behaviours at such events.     

Finding Meaningful Support: Young People's Experiences of “Risky” Environments

This paper reports on the qualitative phase of a New Zealand study of young people who had been exposed to “risky” environments from a young age. These young people had experienced traumatic events such as abuse, violence, addictions, mental health issues, and many had been excluded from school. The young people (aged between 13 and 17) were users of multiple services (statutory and nongovernmental services including: child welfare, juvenile justice, remedial education, and mental health services). Qualitative interviews (n?=?109) explored young people's experiences in their families, communities, education, and their perspectives on support provided by services and their own support networks. Three thematic clusters emerged as central motifs in young people's experiences and are the focus of this article: navigating “risky” environments; services and support; and, working to find different pathways.     

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.     

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.