Caribbean diasporic spaces and mobilities, transnational incorporation overseas and transnational capacity-building on return

Abstract

Long-held traditions of international mobility, emigration, and temporary circulation, and of family-centered networks, together forge intra-regional and extra-regional systems of social exchanges, transfers and support structures that directly and indirectly influence the development of the Caribbean region. Today’s mobilized diasporas exhibit multi-local “moorings” or locales within the Caribbean region and beyond: in this hemisphere (North America) and trans-Atlantic (in Europe). Family (and “friendship”) networks, wider kin networks, ethnic networks, and inter-network exchanges and transfers, all facilitate people’s mobilities and cross-border exchanges of goods, information, technology, monetary and non-monetary remittances, and social capital. In this article the potential of the Caribbean’s diasporic spaces to be new socio-structural agencies in global development policy is assessed and found to be both promising and achievable. Within such “spaces” there are multi-layered processes of transnational immigrant incorporation overseas, and cross-border transnational mobilities, social experiences, exchanges, and practices. In particular, monetary and social remittances and returning nationals can be critical influences in forging, creating, and consolidating what is re-conceptualized in this article as “transnational capacity-building”. Following the establishment of our theoretical generalizations and conceptualizations of the migration-development nexus of the contemporary Caribbean, the detailed “coming together” of transnationalism, the migration-development nexus, transnational capacity-building and “diaspora spaces” is formulated. Then, an empirical section follows, in which we utilize “narratives” gathered by the authors in several Caribbean locales during the early-to-middle 2000 decade to support our theoretical arguments and behavioral findings. Based upon the conceptual arguments and their empirical substantiation drawn from the quotes of returning nationals, we conclude that both economic and social “change for the better” appear to be possible in the most promising developmental contexts that the Caribbean offers, due to Caribbean people’s enduring propensity for transnational mobility options as a “strategic flexibility that still works”.