Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
north, creating what Steven Vertovec (2006) calls a condition of 'superdi-
versity' in the gateway cities of Europe, North America and Australasia. 6
The earliest research, by anthropologists, identified repeated international
movement and frequent communication by Mexican and Caribbean
migrants between their home countries and the United States (Rouse 1992;
Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Basch et al. 1994). Cross-border social networks
were also economic channels as significant flows of remittances from sav-
ings were sent home by migrants to their families, priming local economic
development; contacts might also become political networks as Caribbean
and Central American politicians carried their election campaigns to expa-
triate populations in American cities.
These social networks, projected onto space, shape the important concept
of a transnational social field, where 'migrants, through their life ways and
daily practices, reconfigure space so that their lives are lived simultaneously
within two or more nation-states' (Basch et al. 1994: 28). The porosity of
national borders and the repeated mobility of migrants passing through them,
documented and undocumented, give rise to a sense of a changing spatiality:
nations have become 'unbound', migrants 'deterritorialized' and 'ungrounded',
citizenship itself is conditional and flexibly incorporated into migrant biogra-
phies. The coherent profile of a world (and subjective identities) tightly
organized around nation states as containers of national citizens seems to be
unravelling. Some argue that this is nothing new; the great European migra-
tion to the 'new world' between 1880 and 1930 had also included much
coming and going, with a significant fraction of immigrants returning to their
homeland (Foner 2000). But this interpretation, while respected, has not
prevailed; the scale of cross-border transactions permitted by cheap travel
and electronic communications together with various innovations (including
the status of dual citizenship) define a substantially novel phenomenon.
Early ethnographic interpretations of transnationalism were challenged
in a damaging criticism for including a sampling bias (Portes et al. 2002).
By highlighting only observations of transnational behaviour from small
samples, and disregarding migrant cases where such linkages were not sus-
tained, researchers were 'sampling on the dependent variable', thereby
inflating the scale of transnational activity. In contrast, Portes suggested,
and implemented, standardized measurement across large samples, to dem-
onstrate the extent of transnationalism and permit comparative surveys
across world regions. With these stringent requirements, transnationalism
remained a significant feature, though the incidence of political and eco-
nomic activities was shown to be less extensive than social transactions. This
literature demonstrates the advantage of both extensive and intensive meth-
ods, adding the discipline of large samples that ease validity concerns to the
interpretive depth of ethnographic study, a model that I will attempt to
follow in my own mixed-methods approach.
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