Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc, From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration

Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc, “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration,” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Jan., 1995), pp. 48-63.

The article deals with a scholarly debate on transmigrants, who “are immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state.” It further links the debate on transmigrants with the current US political debate on immigration policy which they regard as “a nation-state building project that delimits and constrains the allegiances and loyalties of transmigrants.”

Juxtaposition of current realities brought about by a large proportion of transmigrants in the US, on the one hand, and traditional narratives of nation-states, on the other, allows the authors for a critical reassessment of current legislative, political and cultural regulations of immigration. In history, narratives of assimilation determined strategies of forgetting about immigrant ties with home communities. In the modern globalized world, new means of communication challenge this traditional role of national narratives, as immigrants can maintain tight ties with their home communities: they remain loyal to both original and host societies, their loyalties are, in this respect, divided.

“Fundamental to these multiple networks of interconnection are networks of kin who are based in one or more households.” Business opportunities which are often exploited by transmigrants are to a great degree dependant on these personal connections. Moreover, transnational connections even make it possible to bring political change to home societies, as in the case of Haitian and Filipino immigrant communities in the US. “While the dominant political ethic of the U.S. continues to demand that citizens, both native born and naturalized, swear allegiance only to the U.S. and define their political identity within its borders, the transnationalism of increasing numbers of its citizens promotes new political constructions in labor-sending states.”

As for the US political response to this situation: “This particular emphasis on categories of legality has a dual thrust. The debate is as much about confining immigrant loyalties to the U.S. as it is about reducing the flow of immigration.”