Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
status passages. The prospect of movement is always latent, ready to be
triggered by a family decision or an external event. So migration as described
in the UN Commission's text becomes more temporary, more circular,
more flexible, than the conventional paradigm imagined. Mobility is not only
shaped by immediate economic gradients, but also by other household projects
that may well require the family itself to be globalized, dispersed among at
least two nations, with periodic departures and reunions of family members.
A fraught illustration of such transnationalism became evident during the war
in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. As nations speedily assembled an armada
to rescue their expatriates in Lebanon, transnational citizens of Canada and
Australia proved unexpectedly numerous. Canada discovered 40-50,000 citi-
zens living in Lebanon in July 2006, almost double the number of American
nationals, while Australia, with 25,000, enumerated more citizens in this for-
merly francophone nation than France (Saunders et al. 2006). Both states
had small missions in Lebanon and were surprised and administratively over-
whelmed by the scale of their populations. In appeals for a speedy registration
prior to evacuation, and in a context of difficult communications, close to
40,000 Lebanese residents contacted the Canadian embassy in Beirut claim-
ing citizenship. Some were on holiday with family members, but others were
living more continuously in Lebanon and many were employed there. The
Canadian state discovered an unanticipated transnational colony that it had
obligations to rescue in precarious war conditions.
1
Meanwhile in Hong Kong there are repeated estimates of more than
200,000 Canadian citizens among the former colony's population of some
seven million.
2
They have travelled to Canada, lived temporarily, and have
chosen to return, at least for now, but have not eliminated the prospect of a
further trans-Pacific move in the future.
3
Returnees are primarily middle-
class and upper middle-class; some are affluent business people, or less com-
monly, professionals. Their numbers include well-educated 1.5-generation
4
and second-generation young adults from Canada who have re-located to
Hong Kong to begin their working careers. Hong Kong returnees share their
transnational behaviour with similar if less numerous elites in Taiwan and
smaller groups from South Korea. This cohort, some of them wealthy mil-
lionaire migrants who live, for now, either in Canada or East Asia, are the
subject of this topic and exemplify to a tee the new paradigm of temporary
and circular migration.
Geographies of Transnational Migration
The literature on transnational migration is now large, interdisciplinary,
and becoming global,
5
as migration itself links ever more national origins in
the global south with primarily metropolitan destinations in the global
