Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter One
Introduction: Trans-Pacific Mobility
and the New Immigration Paradigm
The Commission concludes that the old paradigm of permanent migrant
settlement is giving way to temporary and circular migration
Global Commission on International Migration 2005: 31
Following two years of consultation and analysis, the Global Commission
on International Migration reported back to the Secretary-General of the
United Nations in October 2005 (Martin and Martin 2006). Its report
sought to organize and, through its own influence, disseminate to a govern-
ance and policy audience a new understanding of international migration
that departed from an established paradigm. Conventional understanding,
familiar to the administrators and theorists of new world settler societies,
has spun a linear narrative of immigrant departure from the homeland, fol-
lowed by the serial processes of arrival, settlement, citizenship and assimila-
tion within the enveloping arms of a single nation state. But it has become
apparent that this tidy arrangement has decreasing purchase in an era of
unprecedented global mobility, labour flexibility and household dispersal.
Transnationalism has become an umbrella term to describe the contempo-
rary hyper-mobility of migrants across national borders, both those who are
poor, sometimes undocumented, and merely tolerated or worse, and also
those who are skilled or wealthy and eagerly solicited by nation states.
Transnational migrants maintain connections in both their nations of origin
and destination by e-mail, internet and telephone, through travel, economic
ties and remittances, and in continuing social and cultural relationships.
For a minority, political activity sustains contacts and commitments, espe-
cially when facilitated by the enfranchisement of dual citizenship.
Alternating periods of residence in origin and destination countries are
variable, in some instances seasonal or short-term, while others again are part
of a careful life plan of repeated movement that coincides with significant
