Transnational Migrant Communities Research Articles

The role of the digital diaspora in overcoming the vulnerabilities of migrants under the covid-19 pandemic (the case of Moldovan migrants)

Contemporary information-communication technologies contribute to the development of the quasi-institution ‘transnational migrant community’ in the form of digital diaspora. It has several functions: maintaining ties with the country of origin, ensuring transnational interaction, constructing the identity of migrants, consolidating their ethnic community and social adaptation, expressing the subjectivity of the diaspora in the public sphere, psycho-emotional support. The relevance of the study of the digital diaspora’s role in overcoming vulnerabilities of migrants under the pandemic is determined by the need to consider the adaptation of migrants in the context of the transformation of migrations and the use of contemporary information-communication technologies by migrants. The object of the study is the online groups of Moldovan migrants, which are characterized by the rapid institutionalization of diaspora organizations. The authors focus on the mechanisms of social adaptation of Moldovan migrants, which serve to overcome their vulnerabilities and risks under the pandemic with information-communication technologies. The study is based on the concept “digital diaspora” and the secondary analysis of the data from the Representative Office of the International Organization for Migration in Moldova on the Internet practices of Moldovan migrants (2017) and on the situation of migrants under the pandemic (2020). The main research method is the analysis of the content of the largest Internet groups of Moldovan migrants in the social network with the techniques “problem tree” and “decision tree”. The study showed that during the pandemic, the Internet groups of Moldovan migrants became a platform for their self-organization and overcoming vulnerabilities, and also performed informational, organizational, representative, mobilization and recreational functions. The authors believe that the experience of the Internet groups of Moldovan migrants can be extrapolated to other migrant communities and other contexts supporting the political, economic and social-cultural subjectivity of migrants.

“I Can't Do Anything but Wait”: The Lived Experiences of Children of Transnational Migrants in Lombok, Indonesia

Abstract This article contributes to debates about the temporal and affective implications of migration in Southeast Asia by presenting child-focused research concerned with children in rural Lombok, Indonesia, who have been “left behind” by their transnational migrating parents. The article explores the unpredictability of the temporality of migration and how parental absence can be indefinite or permanent, especially for parents who follow undocumented channels of migration. The article explores children’s lived experiences of waiting for their parents to return, often with no contact, and how multiple modes of waiting have become a distinctive part of children’s lives within transnational migrant communities.

Dame Edna and ‘the help’

‘Dame Edna Everage’, a persona originally created by the Australian comedian Barry Humphries in 1955, is a character designed to simultaneously shock and amuse. Dame Edna voices (and satirizes) the discourse of ‘average’, older, politically conservative Anglo-Australians who feel compelled to ‘tell it like it is’ – no matter how offensive their opinions might be. In the Anglosphere, Edna’s humour is well understood and sustained international success has followed Edna for more than 60 years in Britain, Canada, the US and Australia. However, Edna occasionally misfires. In 2003, for instance, Edna’s satire outraged Latinos across the USA, in fulfillment of Poe’s Law (Aikin, 2009). Simply put, Latinos assumed that Edna’s comments satirising negative mainstream attitudes towards them were expressive of Edna’s authentic racism. This paper investigates the Edna joke in the overall context of failed humour and then specifically for the offensiveness it generated amongst the Latino minority in the United States. It then tests whether this reaction was the result of a discursive frame specific to the US context, by conducting an exploratory study amongst a small sample of highly educated Australian bilingual Latin American immigrants and their adult children, to see whether they thought Edna’s joke was funny. These Australian individuals of Latin American heritage responded via an online questionnaire, and an analysis of their responses is presented here. The study’s main finding is that while these individuals generally demonstrated a high comedic literacy across both English and Spanish, including a prior awareness of Edna’s and Australian humour, they overall rejected the intention and humour of Edna’s joke. This paper asserts that, when it comes to humour, some transnational migrant speech community loyalties transcend other notions of identity and language competence.

Institutionalization of transnationalizing political parties: the case of the Conservative People\u2019s Party of Estonia

While party institutionalization research has advanced notably in the recent years, the institutionalization of political parties that extend their organizations abroad (i.e. transnationalizing parties) has remained an academically uncharted territory. This article draws on party institutionalization literature and analyses the particularities of institutionalization in transnationalizing parties. The findings suggest that transnational institutionalization takes place simultaneously on multiple levels (local, national and transnational) and is distinctly interactive, placing crucial importance on the activities and responsiveness of both the central party organization as well as the extraterritorial branches. The internal dimensions of institutionalization can be notably affected by the territorially and temporally scattered nature of emigrant communities and by the sense of inclusion provided to the activists. The external dimensions of transnational institutionalization involve a wider variety of actors than institutionalization on the national level and can also be more challenging due to the more contingent socialization patterns and interest in politics of transnational migrants. Transnational institutionalization of political parties is relevant to the parties and their continuous electoral success, but also for transnational migrant communities and impact of their political participation.

The “Ideal” Female Migrant as Grateful and Uncomplaining: Gendered Colonial Ideologies, Pre-Departure Orientation Sessions, and the #ungrateful Filipina

Filipinos have internalized colonial mindsets that equate the maintenance of “Filipino values” with adhering to gendered colonial ideologies. By using the examples of mandatory pre-departure orientation sessions (PDOS) and posts within transnational diasporic Filipino social networking sites, I show how discourses emerging from both the Philippine state and the diasporic Filipino community extol the virtues of the “grateful” and “uncomplaining” Filipina labour migrant. Ultimately, I argue that before the Filipino transnational migrant community can begin the process of decolonization, it is important to recognize how colonial ideologies themselves are deeply gendered.

Reflection of Cultural Crisis in Bhutanese Nepali Diasporic Poetry

This article has discussed how Bhutanese Nepali diasporic poetry has depicted cultural crises of the community settled in Europe, America and Oceania. Twenty one poems composed by Bhutanese Nepali diasporic poets from 2009 to 2019 have been selected through purposive sampling and their content analysis has been conducted with the focus on their themes. The study has found that the Bhutanese Nepali culture has been in crisis in the diaspora. The community is working to preserve it; but many socio-economic conditions do not favour them. They find problems in celebrating their festivals, eating their food, observing the rituals, using language, wearing traditional Nepali dress, and following their work pattern. With these difficulties and being in the minority marginal position in the host land, they find their identity in crisis resulting into emotional insecurity. It is believed that this article will contribute to the study of diasporic culture and the problems of the transnational migrant communities.

A megastructure in Singapore

AbstractThe People's Park Complex is one of two megastructures built in the early 1970s as prototypes for a new “Asian city of tomorrow” designed to humanize the urban expansion of Singapore through the creation of affective ensembles and connections, and would serve as an alternative to the state's forcible relocation of the population to alienating, cookie-cutter high-rise new towns. While the envisioned model of an expansive, affective urbanism failed to materialize in these megastructures, I examine how the transnational migrant and working-class communities that use the complex engage in other forms of affective placemaking that disrupt the narratives and temporalities in the state's recuperation of the surrounding old city by the state as a heritage and tourist district. I illuminate how affect can serve as an analytic to reorient a unilinear notion of architectural failure toward new temporalities, imaginations, and futurities.

Kin-state politics stirred by a geopolitical conflict: Hungary's growing activity in post-Euromaidan Transcarpathia, Ukraine

In the last decades, as a result of intensified migratory movements, scholars have globally witnessed the proliferation of transnational migrant and diaspora communities in many cases challenging the traditionally conceived sovereignty of nation states and inducing policy answers in the field of migration and citizenship politics. In Central and Eastern European countries, citizenship issues have been embedded in kin-state politics due to the existence of great number of ethnic-kin communities living in the territory of a neighbouring or nearby host countries. That is especially true to Hungary that has elaborated a sophisticated system of kin-state policies composing inseparable factor both in its domestic and foreign politics. The ongoing crisis in Ukraine generated such push factors that resulted in boosting out-migration in its westernmost region, Transcarpathia, where sizeable ethnic Hungarian community resides. The out-migration is further facilitated by pull factors manifested in intensified political presence and kin-state politics of Hungary, Poland and Czechia, three Visegrad countries in need of fresh labour force. The present paper - after reviewing recent migratory processes - offers an analysis on the interrelatedness of migration, geopolitics and kin-state politics in Transcarpathia.We argue that Ukraine's crisis resulted in a major shift in regional geopolitical power relations opening the floor to the Visegrad countries to intensify their presence and influence in Western Ukraine, primarily seeking for human resources to satisfy their demographic and workforce needs. Focusing on Hungary, we intend to prove that the out-migration of Transcarpathian Hungarians posed a serious challenge to the well-built system of Hungarian kin-state policies resulting in major modification of measures targeting Transcarpathia. We point to the ambiguous nature of the prime kin-state policy measure, the dual citizenship without residency introduced in 2010 by Hungary, arguing that following 2014 in the post Euromaidan Transcarpathian context it represents a tempting pragmatic tool embodying practical opportunities, even material benefits attractive for all Transcarpathians, including non-ethnic Hungarians. Finally, we conclude that Hungary's kin-state politics not only contribute to the decrease of the number of Transcarpathian Hungarians, but there is a high risk that - with their Hungarian citizenship - they will resettle in Western Europe, not in Hungary.

The heroines of their own stories: Insights from the use of life history drawings in research with a transnational migrant community

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we discuss how life history drawings can serve as a valuable method for global health research. The introduction discusses qualitative approaches to concepts such as reliability, validity and triangulation, and situates the use of participatory visual methods within the broader field of participatory research. The paper reports on an experience using life history drawings as part of extended ethnographic research in rural Mexico and among Mexican migrants living in Atlanta. The primary method for that parent project was comparative ethnographic research, which included life histories collected from 13 pairs of women over 15 months of participant observation. Early in the research, the drawings contributed to a major reorientation in the direction of the research project. The insights generated through analysis of the life history drawings exemplify how this participatory research technique can direct attention to social processes that feel salient to community members. In this case, they called attention to the enormity of social change in this community over one generation, reorienting the study from one focused on change causes by migration to one that focused on two trajectories of change: generational and migration-related.

The Role of Diasporas in the Current World Politics

The author's intention is to access the impact that diasporas have on world politics. The notion “diaspora” implies a transnational migrant community, which maintains material and emotional bonds with territory of origin and simultaneously adapts to limitations and possibilities of host society. The emotional component of a community entails psychosocial complex that includes the group solidarity and certain myths about the territory of origin. Taking into account the specifics of a given community, diasporas meet in general all the requirements of a non-state actor that have been elaborated in the current studies on the world politics. In particular, a diasporas exist independently and participates in the transnational interactions. Moreover, there are several situations which enhance diaspora’s ability to interfere. These situations may include the unsatisfactory status of the given community, migrants’ desire to improve certain political or economic conditions in the territory of origin, the prerequisites for changes in the relationships between the hostland and the homeland, urgent crises in the country of origin. In addition, diasporal influence depends on demographic and geographic characteristics of the particular community. Diasporas achieve their goals on global, regional and national levels mainly by influencing state’s institutions. However, some developments have been evolved that can facilitate a substantive diasporas’ involvement in the world political processes, involvement without dependence on state’s capabilities. Elite of the community plays a crucial role in the resource management. The elite presents “the controlling centre” that forges a strategy of action and makes transactions of resources. Stability within “the controlling centre” can be named as an indicator of diaspora’s ability to manage the potential available.

Food Practices and Transnational Identities

Food has long been understood as a potent marker of cultural identity. In the context of transnational migrant communities, food practices express group and individual identities as well as multiple social positionings within the current environment. At the same time, food practices are part of navigating between local and global attachments. This article examines how food practices in two Punjabi-Canadian families are implicated in identity constructions in the context of transnational migration. In particular, we challenge notions of dietary acculturation, and resistance to acculturation as a form of ethnic identity maintenance, instead exploring how food practices may reflect simultaneous, ongoing attachments to multiple national identities. Participants' food practices reproduced, challenged and reinvented cultural norms, particularly in gender roles concerning food preparation, and the consumption of Punjabi food. Their food practices were products of, as well as tools for the production of, transnational migrant identities.

Frontier Hybridisation or Culture Clash? Transnational Migrant Communities and Sub-National Identity Politics in Andalusia, Spain

Frontier Hybridisation or Culture Clash? Transnational Migrant Communities and Sub-National Identity Politics in Andalusia, Spain

Strengthening Social Capital through Bilingual Competence in a Transnational Migrant Community: Mexicans in Upstate New York

ABSTRACTTemporary migrants in the United States face the challenge of adapting to their host society while maintaining a cohesive social network within their newcomer communities. Among the principal factors affecting Mexican migrant social networks is bilingual competence. Most Mexican migrants plan to live in the United States for only a few years, sending money to support their families and communities in Mexico. While in the United States, they work long hours in jobs largely invisible to the public, often alongside other Spanish speakers and with little exposure to English. They have few opportunities and little motivation to integrate into the English‐speaking community.In upstate New York, where few people in the host community speak Spanish, Mexican migrants remain largely dependent on English speakers as they negotiate housing, employment, health care, and other basic resources. Lack of English language is a barrier to obtaining local cultural information essential for migrants to navigate these resources successfully. On the other hand, migrants’maintenance of a close‐knit transnational social network provides invaluable resources both for those living in the United States and those in Mexico. Young migrant children immersed in English at school with little positive valuation of Spanish are socialized in a network from which their parents are excluded, and risk losing the social capital provided by their Mexican social networks. To maintain and strengthen communal social capital in their transnational migrant communities, these temporary Mexican migrants must preserve their close‐knit internal social networks while simultaneously forming social links with outsiders in the host society.In this paper, I examine the interplay of language and social networks in a recently formed Mexican migrant community in upstate New York. I suggest that, despite the challenges Mexican migrants face in obtaining fluent Spanish‐English bilingualism, some degree of bilingual competence is well within their reach. The expansion and adaptation of local language programmes in English and Spanish could contribute significantly to migrants’bilingual competence, increasing their communal social capital and facilitating successful adaptation into their host community, as well as reintegration into their sending community.

Transnational Twist: Pecuniary Remittances and the Socioeconomic Integration of Authorized and Unauthorized Mexican Immigrants in Los Angeles County

Annual U.S.-Mexico pecuniary remittances are estimated to have more than doubled recently to at least $10 billion – augmenting interest among policymakers, financial institutions, and transnational migrant communities concerning how relatively poor expatriate Mexicans sustain such large transfers and the impact on immigrant integration in the United States. We employ the 2001 Los Angeles County Mexican Immigrant Residency Status Survey (LAC-MIRSS) to investigate how individual characteristics and social capital traditionally associated with integration, neighborhood context, and various investments in the United States influenced remitting in 2000. Remitting is estimated to have been inversely related to conventional integration metrics and influenced by community context in both sending and receiving areas. Contrary to straight-line assimilation theories and more consistent with a transnational or nonlinear perspective, however, remittances are also estimated to have been positively related to immigrant homeownership in Los Angeles County and negatively associated with having had public health insurance such as Medicaid.

Transnational migrant communities and education strategies among Pakistani youngsters in Denmark

Education has become an increasingly important factor in relation to migration and the social reproduction strategies of migrants. This article examines how migration and its minority/majority relational dimension play a part in the development of education strategies of Pakistani youngsters. Transnational migration research has shown that the relation of minority groups to the receiving society is clearly affected by local migration strategies, continuing relations with the place of origin, and the actual opportunities available in the host society. The transnational perspective is also crucial to understanding how minorities conceive their host society and the ‘national’ schooling system, and how they manage within these. Following a discussion of the notions of transnational migration, transnationalism and transnational migrant communities, I examine the significance of transnational migrant communities for understanding the education strategies of Pakistani youngsters in Denmark. Pakistani minorities have a long history of experience with migration and the need to integrate a widening and varied set of socio-economic conditions across local and national boundaries. Employing education as a social mobility strategy has become a more common practice among groups in traditionally caste-dominated social relations. Furthermore, among Pakistani migrant communities, biradari relations also operate as a flexible social category that affects the opportunities groups have to convert economic capital into schooling and education capital, and future symbolic capital.

Frontier hybridisation or culture clash? Transnational migrant communities and sub-national identity politics in Andalusia, Spain

In this paper, ethnographically focused on the southern Spanish frontier region of Andalusia, the intercultural support activities of local voluntary associations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are analysed in the context of ethnicised islamophobia. Currently, the recently emerging islamophobic actors, which tend to combine narrowly localist and Spanish nationalist identity horizons with an emphasis on Catholicism as a decisive 'ethnic marker' of Spanish-ness, are being countered by Andalusian regionalist strategies of islamophilia, which claim that a 'return of Islam' and/or the pluri-religious legacy of Al-Andalus will empower the region's ongoing search for a supra-local, but sub-national and non-Castilian common identity. The specific context and problematics of migrant community formation are illustrated for the Andalusian region, and then contrasted with the 'identity politics' of the non-migrant Andalusian host society and its struggle for regional autonomy inside the Spanish state. Finally, the increasingly important role of Andalusian NGOs as intercultural mediators and spaces of cultural hybridisation is analysed with regard to its socio-political as well as theoretical consequences for the study of identity politics.

Are There National Borders in Cyberspace?

This article emphasises the connections between online and offeine reality in the development of the use of the internet by transnational migrant communities. The internet is an example of what Arjun Appadurai (1996) has called ‘diasporic public spheres’. The article reviews the literature to establish the variety of uses that transnational groups make of this public sphere. However, it challenges Appadurai's argument that the development of the public sphere relates to the declining relevance of space, borders and ultimately the form of the nation-state itself. The strong influence exerted on online interactions by offline reality is clear from much of the literature. The article focuses on the example of two Algerian-operated websites to suggest that offline reality is strongly influenced by the national context of the site's location. In this way national borders superimpose themselves onto cyberspace.

Transnationalism and the spaces of commodity culture

This paper presents a critical assessment of the concept of transnationalism and its place within the current refiguration of cultural geography. Identifying three specific concerns with current theorizations of transnationalism (regarding the concept's scope, specificity and politics), the paper discusses the widely perceived need to ‘ground’ the study of transnationalism in specific empirical research. It argues that this discussion has been unhelpfully dominated by an overemphasis on identifying transnational migrant and diasporic communities. The paper highlights the authors' research with a range of food and fashion firms working between Britain and the Indian subcontinent to argue that an analysis of commodity culture provides an alternative way of advancing our understanding of contemporary transnationality. This approach suggests that transnational space can be recognized as both multidimensional and multiply inhabited. The paper concludes by outlining the alternative ways in which attention to commodity culture helps ‘ground’ the concept of transnationalism.

Spanish Language Literacy in the Community: Access and Practice

Scholars in Mexican migration have noticed that patterns of this migration have been undergoing a drastic change since the 1970s, with more people migrating to urban areas and settling more permanently in the US. This shift has formed the basis of modern transnational migrant communities. By transnational communities, we mean groups of immigrants who regularly participate in relationships, practices, and norms, that include both places of origin and places of arrival. This study explores Spanish language literacy maintenance and development in one working-class transnational Mexicano community in the Midwest. Although a substantial body of research has been conducted on language shift and maintenance on the "macro" level, there is little in the literature which deals with mother tongue literacy in specific in-migrant communities. The study looks at "South Side" residents' use of Spanish language literacy. The community whose Spanish language literacy practices I have studied in Milwaukee consists of primarily Mexicanos, and is a project still in progress. I focus on two main things: Access to Spanish print and primary language literacy practice. Access will report findings on the availability of Spanish reading materials in the immediate neighborhood as well as city-wide, considering the effect of power in the communities, educational policies, and anti-immigrant waves. Practice will look at self-reported literacy activity and how the question of physical access and economics affect opportunities to develop Spanish language literacy. In investigating issues of access and availability of print materials in Spanish "walking tours" of the neighborhood and adjacent areas were undertaken to see what was available to residents in terms of reading materials in Spanish. Access and availability have been shown to impact elementary school children's reading opportunities (McQuillan 1998; Pucci 1994), and it was hypothesized that it would also have an affect on those of adults in the larger community.

The Basic Elements of a Systematic Theory of Ethnic Relations

The theory of ethnic relations has developed ad hoc on an interdisciplinary basis. It has dealt with ethnicity in small communities, larger ethnic groups or “ethnies”, ethnic nations, modernising nation states, subordinate nationalisms, the establishment of empires, post- imperial situations, transnational migrant communities and the political problems facing modernising nation states in dealing both with subordinate nationalisms and with migrant ethnic minorities. This paper seeks to deal with these various elements in an interconnected and systematic way setting out the nature of communities, small-scale self contained communities, the enlargement of these communities to form ethnic nations and the relationship between these and the institutions of the modernising nation state. It also seeks however to deal with what I call “The second project of ethnicity” which is migration and finally goes on to look at the complex problems of multi-nationality and multiculturalism in modern nation states