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Transnational Migration (transnational + migration)
Selected AbstractsTransnational Migration, the Lost Girls of Sudan and Global "Care work": A Photo EssayANTHROPOLOGY OF WORK REVIEW, Issue 1 2009Laura DeLuca Abstract This essay explores the work lives of a group of Sudanese refugees known popularly as the Lost Girls of Sudan. Like other women from the Global South, the Lost Girls often work in the care work sector as maids, babysitters, nannies, preschool attendants, food service workers, nurses, personal care attendants for elderly and disabled people. The article also explores the U.S. refugee policy of self-sufficiency. [source] Transnational migration: taking stock and future directionsGLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 3 2001Peggy Levitt Increasing numbers of sending states are systematically offering social and political membership to migrants residing outside their territories. The proliferation of these dual memberships contradicts conventional notions about immigrant incorporation, their impact on sending countries, and the relationship between migration and development in both contexts. But how do ordinary individuals actually live their lives across borders? Is assimilation incompatible with transnational membership? How does economic and social development change when it takes place across borders? This article takes stock of what is known about everyday transnational practices and the institutional actors that facilitate or impede them and outlines questions for future research. In it, I define what I mean by transnational practices and describe the institutions that create and are created by these activities. I discuss the ways in which they distribute migrants' resources and energies across borders, based primarily on studies of migration to the United States. [source] Consuming the transnational family: Indonesian migrant domestic workers to Saudi ArabiaGLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 1 2006RACHEL SILVEY In this article, which is based on field work in a migrant-sending community in West Java, I focus on migrant women's narratives of transnational migration and employment as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. I contribute to the literature on gender and transnational migration by exploring migrants' consumption desires and practices as reflective not only of commoditized exchange but also of affect and sentiment. In addition, I show in detail how religion and class inflect low-income women's narrations of morally appropriate mothering practices. In conclusion, I suggest that interpreting these debates from the ground up can contribute towards understanding the larger struggles animating the Indonesian state's contemporary relationships with women and Islam. [source] Rethinking Caribbean transnational connections: conceptual itinerariesGLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 1 2006D. ALISSA TROTZ At the same time, the intense focus on linkages between origin and destination groups frequently ends up privileging this binary - home/away - as the only way to map enduring cross-border linkages. Drawing on two examples of Caribbean practices connecting Toronto and New York, in this article I suggest the traversing of a different spatial terrain and consider the implications of expanding our conceptual itineraries to include these other journeys that so far have tended to fly under the radar in discussions of transnational migration. [source] Toward a Critical Phenomenology of "Illegality": State Power, Criminalization, and Abjectivity among Undocumented Migrant Workers in Tel Aviv, IsraelINTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 3 2007Sarah S. Willen ABSTRACT Given the vast scope and magnitude of the phenomenon of so-called "illegal" migration in the present historical moment, this article contends that phenomenologically engaged ethnography has a crucial role to play in sensitizing not only anthropologists, but also policymakers, politicians, and broader publics to the complicated, often anxiety-ridden and frightening realities associated with "the condition of migrant illegality," both of specific host society settings and comparatively across the globe. In theoretical terms, the article constitutes a preliminary attempt to link pressing questions in the fields of legal anthropology and anthropology of transnational migration, on one hand, with recent work by phenomenologically oriented scholars interested in the anthropology of experience, on the other. The article calls upon ethnographers of undocumented transnational migration to bridge these areas of scholarship by applying what can helpfully be characterized as a "critical phenomenological" approach to the study of migrant "illegality" (Willen, 2006; see also Desjarlais, 2003). This critical phenomenological approach involves a three-dimensional model of illegality: first, as a form of juridical status; second, as a sociopolitical condition; and third, as a mode of being-in-the-world. In developing this model, the article draws upon 26 non-consecutive months of ethnographic field research conducted within the communities of undocumented West African (Nigerian and Ghanaian) and Filipino migrants in Tel Aviv, Israel, between 2000 and 2004. During the first part of this period, "illegal" migrants in Israel were generally treated as benign, excluded "Others." Beginning in mid-2002, however, a resource-intensive, government-sponsored campaign of mass arrest and deportation reconfigured the condition of migrant "illegality" in Israel and, in effect, transformed these benign "Others" into wanted criminals. By analyzing this transformation the article highlights the profound significance of examining not only the judicial and sociopolitical dimensions of what it means to be "illegal" but also its impact on migrants' modes of being-in-the-world. [source] Gender Matters: Ethnographers Bring Gender from the Periphery toward the Core of Migration StudiesINTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW, Issue 1 2006Sarah J. Mahler Ethnographers from anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines have been at the forefront of efforts to bring gender into scholarship on international and transnational migration. This article traces the long and often arduous history of these scholars' efforts, arguing that though gender is now less rarely treated merely as a variable in social science writing on migration, it is still not viewed by most researchers in the field as a key constitutive element of migrations. The article highlights critical advances in the labor to engender migration studies, identifies under-researched topics, and argues that there have been opportunities when, had gender been construed as a critical force shaping migrations, the course of research likely would have shifted. The main example developed is the inattention paid to how gendered recruitment practices structure migrations , the fact that gender sways recruiters' conceptions of appropriate employment niches for men versus women. [source] Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology,INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW, Issue 3 2003Andreas Wimmer The article examines methodological nationalism, a conceptual tendency that was central to the development of the social sciences and undermined more than a century of migration studies. Methodological nationalism is the naturalization of the global regime of nation-states by the social sciences. Transnational studies, we argue, including the study of transnational migration, is linked to periods of intense globalization such as the turn of the twenty-first century. Yet transnational studies have their own contradictions that may reintroduce methodological nationalism in other guises. In studying migration, the challenge is to avoid both extreme fluidism and the bounds of nationalist thought. [source] Imagined lives and modernist chronotopes in Mexican nonmigrant discourseAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2010HILARY PARSONS DICK ABSTRACT The globalization literature spotlights the way that the experiences of transnational actors are refracted through lives inhabitable elsewhere. In this article, I examine this process in spoken discourse about U.S.-bound migration produced by nonmigrants in the Mexican city of Uriangato. This talk is organized around a "modernist chronotope" that pits "progress" against "tradition," producing images of space,time grafted onto images of persons, or social personae. I show that acts of position taking vis-à-vis these social personae are fundamentally expressed through the ways speakers deploy the modernist chronotope and, thus, become emplotted in its imaginative sociology,a practice that constructs speakers as certain gender and class types. [discourse, chronotope, transnational migration, modernity, social positioning, gender and socioeconomic class] [source] Direction Sweden: migration fields and cognitive distances of Finland SwedesPOPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE (PREVIOUSLY:-INT JOURNAL OF POPULATION GEOGRAPHY), Issue 6 2007Charlotta Hedberg Abstract This article analyses migration fields and perceptions of distance in the context of the migration process of the Finland-Swedish minority group from Finland to Sweden between 1976 and 1999. The focus of investigation concerns whether the conceptualisation of distance, in terms of socio-historical migration fields and cognitive maps, can contribute to our understanding of migration decision-making. A combination of methods has been employed. Firstly, a quantitative analysis took place of the migration fields of Finland Swedes originating in three case-study areas in Finland. The extension of their migration fields into Sweden is calculated relative to the internal migration pattern within Finland. Secondly, an interview study analysed perceptions of distance among migrants to Sweden. The article shows that a sizeable proportion of the Finland Swedes' migration fields were directed towards Sweden, but that their extension contained regional variations. Further, the decision to migrate to Sweden was strongly influenced by the migrants' perceptions of Sweden prior to migration. Thus, the migrants possessed cognitive maps, with particular sites in Sweden being regarded as distinct and ,close' locations, in contrast to alternative, ,remote' locations in Finland. The perceptions of distance were shaped by the migrants' social, cultural and economic links with Sweden, as well as by their ethnic identity, which included an ethnic affinity with Sweden. It is suggested that the Finland-Swedish migration process to Sweden should be seen as a case of transnational migration. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Religious transnationalism among Ghanaian immigrants in Toronto: a binary logistic regression analysisTHE CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER/LE GEOGRAPHE CANADIEN, Issue 3 2008JOSEPH MENSAH immigration; analyse logistique; transnationalisme religieux; Toronto Thanks to pioneering work within anthropology, students of international migration acknowledge that most immigrants do not sever their ties with the homeland, but rather maintain them through a variety of cross-border relationships. While scholarly work has proliferated, since the early 1990s, over the transnational economic and political activities of immigrants, to date, only few analysts have examined the religious practices with which immigrants sustain memberships in multiple locations. In addition, most available studies on transnational migration has dwelled on qualitative methods, such as participant observation, focus groups discussions and in-depth interviews with a handful of informants, with little or no inclination towards the quantitative measurement of key variables implicated in the process. The prevalence of ethnographic methods in this area of research has, quite understandably, engendered charges of exaggeration, given the tendency of such techniques ,to sample on the dependent variable', to borrow the phrase of Alejandro Portes. Using data collected from a survey among Ghanaian immigrant congregations in Toronto, this study seeks to statistically predict the propensity to engage in transnational religious practices by way of a binary logistic regression analysis. In addition, the study examines how the transnational religious activities of the sampled immigrants relate to, overlap with, and differ from other kinds of transnational practices they pursue. Le transnationalisme religieux chez les immigrants ghanéens de Toronto: une analyse de régression logistique binaire Grâce à des travaux pionniers en anthropologie, les étudiants qui s'intéressent à la migration internationale reconnaissent aujourd'hui que la plupart des immigrants ne vont pas rompre les liens avec leur terre d'origine mais, au contraire, les renforcer par un éventail de relations transfrontalières. Si les travaux universitaires portant sur les activités économiques et politiques transfrontalières des immigrants sont en plein essor depuis le début des années 1990, peu d'études ont abordé les pratiques religieuses par lesquelles les immigrants conservent leur adhésion à une multitude d'endroits. De plus, l'essentiel des études disponibles sur la migration transnationale insistent sur les méthodes qualitatives telles que l'observation participante, la tenue de groupes de discussion et les entrevues en profondeur auprès de quelques informateurs. Les variables principales comprises dans ce processus n'ont pas vraiment fait l'objet d'une évaluation quantitative. Les méthodes ethnographiques prédominent dans ce domaine de recherche, à qui on reproche d'être tombé dans l'exagération. Dans cette étude, les données recueillies à partir d'entrevues réalisées auprès d'immigrants ghanéens dans les congrégations de Toronto sont utilisées dans une analyse de régression logistiques binaire pour faire des prédictions statistiques sur la propension à s'engager dans des pratiques religieuses transnationales. De plus, cette étude examine comment les activités religieuses transnationales des immigrants compris dans l'échantillon s'apparentent, se superposent et se différencient par rapport aux autres types de pratiques transnationales auxquelles ils se livrent. [source] The Securitization of Transnational Labor Migration: The Case of Malaysia and IndonesiaASIAN POLITICS AND POLICY, Issue 4 2009Alexander R. Arifianto Existing studies on transnational migration in Southeast Asia tend to view it primarily from labor, human rights, or gender perspectives. Few of these studies have viewed labor migration as a security problem between the countries involved. This article attempts to close this gap in the literature by looking at the case study of labor migration from Indonesia and Malaysia from a security perspective and how it affects the relationship between migrants, citizens, and governments of these two countries. The article utilizes securitization theory introduced by the Copenhagen School to explain why, within the last two decades, Malaysian politicians have shifted their treatment of Indonesian migrants from a policy of toleration to one that considers them a security threat against Malaysian society. [source] Milk Teeth and Jet Planes: Kin Relations in Families of Sri Lanka's Transnational Domestic ServantsCITY & SOCIETY, Issue 1 2008MICHELE R. GAMBURD Abstract This essay examines the confluence of local and global dynamics, exploring how transnational migration affects and is affected by gender roles, kinship relations, intergenerational obligations, and ideologies of parenthood. Journeying to the Middle East repeated on two-year labor contracts, many of Sri Lanka's migrant housemaids leave behind their husbands and children. Women's long-term absences reorganize and disrupt widely accepted gendered attributions of parenting roles, with fathers and female relatives taking over household tasks. Migrants say that economic difficulties prompt migration, and assess commitment to kin in financial terms. The government also benefits from remittances. Nevertheless, stakeholders (villagers, politicians, and the national media) worry about the social costs born by children. Drawing on interviews with the adult children of migrant mothers in four extended families in the Sri Lankan coastal village of Naeaegama, I examine the long-term effects of transnational labor migration on local households. The case studies do not support media claims that children suffer abuse and neglect in their mothers' absence, but do in part support survey information on reduced education, shifting marriage patterns, and paternal alcohol consumption. [source] | ||||||||||