Transnational Migration

Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, Eveline Reisenauer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745664545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politiche dell'immigrazione

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

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

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

1

Three Transnationals: Transnationalization, Transnational Social Spaces and Transnationality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-border migration and the need for a transnational perspective

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

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

Unpacking the transnational

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

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

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

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

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

Transnationalization as cross-border processes

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