Intellectual rationale
There is a paradox at the core of the migratory phenomenon: emigrants depart one society to become immigrants in another, yet in so doing, they tie those very societies together. Evidence of the interconnections between place of origin and destination abound, starting with the remittances that migrants abroad send to families at home: the monies received by developing countries are large (the second largest source of development finance); rising (up by almost five-fold between 1989 and 2011); stable (with less volatility than other sources); and free, requiring neither interest nor repayment of capital. But migrants connect to close relations at home in myriad other ways: a century ago, a flood of mail crossed the Atlantic, spurring the development and upgrading of postal systems. Today, the need to connect destination and origin has made the volume of international telecommunications grow exponentially, with developing, rather than developed, countries producing the more rapid growth in US-bound traffic. Around the world, members of a common hometown displaced to foreign ground come together, seeking comfort in the presence of familiar faces, but also using their new found resources to engage in long-distance philanthropy, gathering funds among immigrants to improve conditions in the very communities that the emigrants left behind. Emigration states follow the migrants across boundaries, trying to shore up loyalties among nationals living abroad, while also gaining access to the resources, innovations, and skills generated by residence in a richer country. Whether the focus is Italy and Italian emigrants a hundred years ago or Mexico and Morocco and the emigrants of today, cross-border phenomena of these varying sorts reappear across the globe. Their significance has also been recognized well beyond the halls of academe, as international organizations like the World Bank, aid agencies like the Inter-American Development Bank, and sending country governments have all become partisans of what has been called diaspora engagement, a matter of increasing interest even to developed countries who now realize that they too have emigrants whose experiences abroad could be mobilized to advantage.
If international migrations inherently generate cross-border connections, the prevailing intellectual division of labor has made that hard to observe, as one literature is situated at the point of destination studying immigration and the other is at the point of origin studying emigration. While this division of labor is understandable, it is problematic, obscuring both the connections between “here” and “there” and the distinctive nature of population movements across boundaries. For most scholars, the concept of transnationalism provides the prism for understanding the ways in which international migration brings here and there together. In a sense, the fascination with transnationalism has been a scholarly boon, pushing researchers to shift their intellectual stance. Instead of standing with one’s back at the borders, looking at the “immigrants” and the ways in which they become like the people among whom they now live, the transnational perspective has refocused attention on the connections between places of origin and destination and the factors that make distant places so often interlaced.
Knowing that migration builds circuits through which people, resources, ideas, and influence subsequently cross borders is a good place to start. Yet connectivity between sending and receiving societies is cause and effect of international migration. Hence, discovering that migrants engage in cross-border activities just begs the question, sidestepping the challenge of understanding the sources and types of variations in these connections that migration almost always produces: why might these linkages persist, attenuate, or simply fade away? What different patterns characterize the many forms of cross-border involvement – whether occurring in political, economic, or cultural spheres, or involving concerted action or every day, uncoordinated activities of ordinary immigrants? What happens as the experiences and resources acquired through migration feed back to home territory? How, why, and to what effect do migrants use the political and economic resources gained through immigration to affect changes in the country of emigration? And how do emigration states, who often follow where “their” people go, manage the relationship with nationals who have voted with their feet for life in another state?
Thus, this summer seminar, is oriented towards a new generation of scholars ready to go beyond the conventional distinction between immigration and emigration, prepared to attack the topic with the tools and perspectives furnished by an interdisciplinary approach, and appreciating the intellectual advantages to be gained by considering the phenomenon in global perspective.
The seminar’s intellectual goals – those of crossing the intellectual boundaries that have separated the study of emigration from immigration – will facilitate the crossing of other boundaries as well: those separating the disciplines as well as those separating the students of the migrations converging on the United States from those whose attentions are focused more globally. Readings will draw from across the social sciences with contributions attending to both contemporary as well as historical aspects of the phenomenon, pursued in a range of global contexts. Visiting scholars (from History and Political Science) will further expand our horizons, providing insight into aspects of the phenomenon beyond my own expertise (emigration from the Middle East; immigration to Latin America); a day spent at the College of the North Frontier in Tijuana, Mexico, will yield exposure to the view from Mexico, which, as it focuses on emigration, is often quite different from the ways that U.S. scholars see Mexican immigration. For these reasons, the seminar should be of interest to scholars concerned with a broad range of migrations and correspondingly diverse geographical patterns, whether more focused (like Mexico to US or Algeria to France) or more global and diasporic (as among Armenians and Chinese), as well as those that are mainly taking place within a south-south context (such as most African migrations) in addition to those migrations that take migrants from developing to developed societies (whether in the 19th or the 21st centuries) or the reverse.
The seminar reflects my own intellectual biography: my vistas have progressively expanded in scale and scope as migration has become a global phenomenon of enduring nature. A sociologist to the core, I nonetheless think of myself as a migration scholar, studying a phenomenon that cuts across the areas of my own field as well as the disciplines. In recent years, I have taught with a political scientist, a geographer, and a legal scholar; I work with graduate students in geography, political science, and history, in addition to sociology; for the past decade, I have been dedicated to building an interdisciplinary UCLA-wide program on international migration, which now involves over 25 faculty across many disciplines and academic units.
My attention to migration’s global reach leads me to see migration studies as moving beyond the “immigration” frame and its preoccupation with the immigrants and the places where they settle to encompass the societies of emigration and the spillovers that connect points of origin and destination. Though until now I have principally been a scholar of immigration to the United States, my interests have taken a more global turn, as reflected in a growing concern with the societies of emigration as well as work on immigration outcomes and policies in international context. Having developed collaborations with French and Mexican scholars, having taught in France, Holland, and Mexico, and having worked in close tandem with a historian, I have developed a commitment to an internationally-oriented approach drawing from all the social sciences.
Project content
Week 1: Perspectives and approaches:
Though the “transnational” concept has a long career, its application to the study of migration dates from the early 1990s when the articulation of a transnational perspective on migration had a sudden electric effect. Influence stemmed from a key insight: connections between “here” and “there,” between place of reception and place of origin, between homes new and old, between emigrants and emigration states, are an inherent component of the long-distance migrations of the modern world. With the lens trained on the cross-border sphere, scholars and students could see an aspect of the phenomenon that prior approaches had necessarily obscured. The historic preoccupation with assimilation focused on the receiving society and internal differences between the immigrants and the mainstream. But this new view extended the scope externally to the society of origin: making clear that geographic dis-placement did not necessarily lead to geographic dis-connection, the transnational perspective put the question of influences coming from, but also going to the home community on the intellectual agenda. Not surprisingly, an upstart approach was instantly met with pushback: debate over how best to understand the cross-border connections generated by migration, their consequences, and their enduring nature and impact began early and has continued to this day.
We will begin by reading Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Schiller, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton’s now classic 1990 statement, which launched the field. These anthropologists designated “transnationalism” as the concept to identify the social connections between receiving and sending countries and “transmigrants” as the concept for denoting the people who forged those ties and kept them alive. But as these sorts of connections appear everywhere migrations occur, this formulation seemed to deprive the transnational concept of clear meaning, precisely the criticism developed in a contribution by sociologist Alejandro Portes to which we will turn next. In this text, Portes and his collaborators try to distinguish the transnational from other aspects of the migratory phenomenon, further drawing out the methodological implications. As an alternative, we will turn to an agenda setting piece written by sociologist Peggy Levitt and political scientist Sanjay Khagram: rather than tighten the focus, as does Portes and his co-authors, they widen it, developing an approach for applying a transnational perspective to a broad range of phenomena, including but extending beyond migration. Then, we will move across the Atlantic and read a chapter from Diasporas, a book by French sociologist Stéphane Dufoix. Here, Dufoix traces the intellectual history of the cognate concept of “diaspora,” which while stemming from a different geneology, intersects with the literature on transnationalism and also highlights the underlying difficulties in defining the phenomenon of interest. Last, we will read a chapter from my book, The Cross-border Connection, explaining how the processes that extend migrant networks across state boundaries collide with the forces that cut those ties at the border’s edge.
Week 2: Historical perspectives
Though cross-border connections appear ubiquitous, questions related to change over time have consistently been a source of controversy. While Glick Schiller and her colleagues asserted that the homeland connections of contemporary international migrants were unprecedented, historians instantly countered, showing that the last age of mass migration entailed a continuous trans-oceanic ebb and flow of people, goods, and ideas. Trans-Atlantic movements unleashed a torrent of remittances described by economic historians as a “rain of gold;” students of Italian migration have concluded that the monies sent home by the migrants had a catalytic effect on Italy’s economy. Nor was a preoccupation with homeland politics new, as many nationalist movements were born in exile. The Irish comprise the paradigmatic case of diasporic state-seeking nationalism: as soon as they moved to the United States, they used their new refuge as a platform for encouraging revolt in the home they had left behind, continuing to do so up until recently. They thus cut a path followed by subsequent long distance nationalists, as migration from the Hapsburg and Romanov empires gave birth to nationalist movements among Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Armenians and other nationalities living in the U.S.
Faced with the onslaught from the historians, anthropologists and sociologists conceded that cross-border connections were not entirely new. However, this early debate never fully met the challenge of thinking through long-term patterns, as opposition between “now” and “then” overlooked the persistent nature of many migrations, whether involving emigration from Italy that began in the late 19th century and continued until the middle of the 1970s or Mexican migration, which began in the early 1900s and has persisted to our times. In these cases of longstanding migration, an old/new contrast is unlikely to shed much light; yet one wants to understand how and why cross-border connections changed over these relatively long intervals.
For context, we will begin by an article on “World migration in the long 20th century,” co-authored by visiting scholar, Jose Moya. Then we will move to a 2006 “Conversation on Transnational History,” published in the American Historical Review, highlighting the multiple meanings and ambiguities of the “transnational” and the difficulties entailed in distinguishing it from such similar concepts as global or international. This will lead us to a discussion of methodological questions involving the tension between transnational and comparative history, which we will pursue through discussion of an article by historian Donna Gabaccia. Focusing on the Italians, Gabaccia seeks to escape the US-centrism of immigration history, emphasizing the multi-polar nature of Italian migration and the ongoing interactions between Italy and the myriad places of destination. Though an example of transnational history Gabaccia’s article also emphasizes the ways in which migrant experiences are affected by the specificities of the reception context and thus enters into dialogue with the first week’s discussion regarding the relationship between comparative and transnational history. Last, we will venture into the debate about temporal changes in the relationship between emigrants and emigration states and societies. We will read a chapter from a book by Nancy Foner (trained as an anthropologist, now in a department of Sociology) comparing immigrant transnationalism at the turns of the 20th and 21st century, largely focusing on the connections linking migrants and their core networks at home. We will also discuss an article by historian Mark Choate, focusing on the political sphere, looking at the ways in which emigration at the turn of the century triggered responses from the Italian state.
Week 3: Ties across borders:
Cross-border ties typically spring from the connected survival strategies pursued by both migrants and their closest relatives at home. In developing societies, emigration is often undertaken without the goal of immigration: rather, relocating to a developed society takes place so that emigrants can gain the access to resources that can only be found there, which are then channeled back home in order to stabilize, secure, and improve the options of the kin network remaining in place. While relocation to a richer state yields the potential for enjoying the fruits of its wealth, the emigrants encounter risks and uncertainties of myriad sorts. When trouble strikes the emigrants have no choice but to turn to the stay-at-homes for help. As assistance from the latter is often the condition of exit – grandparents taking care of children or siblings looking after property – the emigrants’ dependency on the stay-at-homes gives the former all the more reason to attend to the needs of the latter. Thus, the intertwined survival strategies of emigrants and stay-at-homes yield continuing exchanges of money, support, information, and ideas; as migrant populations grow those exchanges broaden and deepen, producing an infrastructure that facilitates and reinforces these bi-directional flows.
To understand how cross-border ties are implanted, we will begin with a chapter from Return to Aztlan, a now classic book on Mexican migration co-authored by sociologist Douglas Massey and three Mexican colleagues. As these authors show, connections linking points of origin and destination cannot trigger migrations, but once created they keep migrations flowing: information about opportunities found elsewhere leaks out beyond the initial circle; veteran migrants help newcomers, who then appear where the previous movers had settled; ongoing contacts tell the stay-at-homes that they would do better by moving elsewhere, while exporting forms of consumption and behavior learned in the society of destination and that often depart from local norms. But while cross-border networks lubricate migration, they also serve for the exchange of resources that both migrants and stay-at-homes need. As shown by development economist Valentina Mazzucatto in her article on informal insurance arrangements between Ghanian migrants in the Netherlands and their relatives at home in Ghana, these interdependencies provide the glue that keep cross-border connections in place. Looking at these interactions helps understand why a cross-border approach yields value added, as Mazzucato demonstrates that the ties linking emigrants to stay-at-homes are not a matter of nostalgia, but rather derive from concrete needs on both sides.
As many scholars have argued, these connections produce “transnational communities” and “transnational families” spanning home and host societies. Transnational families are connected through travel, communication, and material exchange, and yet have to struggle against the problems resulting from distance, long-term separation, and the difficulties entailed in moving back and forth across territorial boundaries. Enthusiasts have proclaimed the “death of distance,” contending that email, text, Skype, and social media allow migrants to live lives across borders. But as we will see by reading a particularly innovative study by Australian anthropologist Raelene Wilding, examining communication patterns on both the sending and the receiving sides, the introduction of new technology can actually have dual effects, reducing and intensifying the impact of distance. Moreover, technology is only one of the ingredients affecting long-distance ties. Reading Joanna Dreby’s work of multi-sited ethnography, we will see that transnational Mexican families may be connected through travel, communication, and material exchange, but much separated by the territorial boundary demarcating Mexico from the U.S.
Week 4: Emigrant politics and emigration policy:
As we will have seen in week 2, migration triggers political reactions from both emigrants and emigration states: the first mobilize to produce change in the homelands that they left; the second extends its infrastructure across boundaries to protect, influence, and retain the loyalties of nationals abroad. Though most immigrants pay little heed to political issues at home, a minority of immigrants cares deeply; paradoxically, the experience of migration to a richer, democratic country facilitates their continuing home country engagement. Living abroad migrant political activists enjoy protection from home state officials eager to tamp down dissent; the economic resources leveraged as a result of migration gives them clout that homeland officials generally cannot afford to ignore. Those very same emigrant initiatives spur emigration states to extend their reach beyond frontiers; moreover, as rank and file immigrants, though apolitical, undertake private actions with profoundly public consequences at home – as demonstrated by remittances – emigration states have additional reasons to attend to the needs of citizens living on foreign ground.
While these twinned reactions appeared in the last era of mass migration and reappear today, it would be wrong to say that plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose: there is, in fact, something new under the sun. The phenomenon is far more widespread and no longer confined to the trans-Atlantic sphere; whereas the many fewer emigration states previously acted in isolation, today they learn from each other and also from international organizations seeking to foster diaspora engagement and identify best practices; and interest has spread from developing to developed states, which find their populations increasingly dispersed as globalization has taken hold.
We will begin with an article by geographer Alan Gamlen, who coined the expression “Diaspora engagement” as a way to characterize the policies of emigration states. Gamlen turns traditional thinking about territory and state upside down, arguing that state-diaspora relations, not the territorially confined nation-states, represent the normal form of political organization. Examining the range of policies linking emigrants with emigration states, he notes the broad spread of these policies, encompassing both developed and developing countries. From this survey, we will move to a comparison of two similar cases, characterized by different histories and unfolding in distinctive locales: Mexico and Mexican emigrants (almost entirely in the United States) and Morocco and Moroccan emigrants (spread out throughout western Europe). This contrast, when added to week 2’s discussion of the earlier Italian experience, should help us identify both the recurrent and the more contingent factors affecting the relationship between emigrants and emigration states. Our discussion will be based on an article, appearing in the Journal of American History, by the Mexican diplomat responsible for designing Mexico’s emigration policy, two chapters from a book by sociologist, David FitzGerald, providing the historical background to Mexican emigration policy, and two chapters from visiting scholar, Laurie Brand’s book on emigration and emigration policy in the Middle East.
Home society impacts:
Our readings and discussions in week 2 will have focused on the conditions linking emigrants to stay-at-homes and the factors that reinforce, but also weaken, those connections. In this last week, we will ask how migrants’ continuing engagement with home communities is affected by the experiences acquired in the years abroad. Having spent week 4 on matters of politics and policy, here we will take a more micro view, looking at sending society feedbacks from migration that are experienced at the familial and community level.
Migrants consistently demonstrate their attachment to the place and people left behind. Those ties may be best exemplified by a global phenomenon: the houses that migrants build in their home community, but in which they often do not, or only rarely live. Another instance involves the ethnic tourism of return travel: though a big business, those visits can often take an organized and hence ritualized form, providing sending communities an opportunity to welcome the “absent sons” and symbolically re-integrate them into the communities that they have left. Hometown associations, a migrant universal, provide a final example: as migrants come together in the society of immigration to raise money for home communities in the society of emigration, these rank and file emigrant philanthropists have gained the attention of policymakers in international organizations and development agencies.
Ironically, these engagements are often suffused with conflict, precisely because migration doesn’t just provide the migrants with new resources but engenders a change in the interior of the person. As a result, the migrants develop a new set of wants, needs, and expectations that no longer fully compatible with the ways of life and modes of behavior back home. We will delve into The Remittance Landscape, a book by Sarah Lopez, an architectural historian and participant in my 2011 seminar, to understand how these wants get expressed in the home community context and with what consequences. We will see how the design of the remittance house simultaneously expresses the pull that the place of origin exercises on the migrants and the ways in which migration has changed the interior of the person, leading to the development of new needs and expectations no longer fully compatible with ways of life and modes of behavior back home. For a comparable case in a different context, we will turn to an article by Italian sociologist, Paolo Boccagni, contrasting the immigrant homes in which Ecuadorian immigrants reside in Italy with the emigrant houses they build for themselves in their communities of residence. While home construction is a private act, migrant philanthropy is a group endeavor, yielding “collective remittances.” As we will see by reading another chapter from David FitzGerald’s book, whether moving within Mexico or to the United States, Mexican migrants have banded together to help their hometowns, though with surprisingly different results. Moving further into Lopez’ book, we will see how these collective efforts alter the build environment in paradoxical and often, not productive ways.
Organization and implementation
The seminar will meet three times a week for sessions lasting three hours each, with two focusing on the readings and a third engaging with scholars’ projects. All readings will be posted on the seminar website, for downloading and reading at home. Similarly, scholars’ papers – proposals, chapters, or conference papers – will be made available on the website for downloading. I will provide written comments on the summer scholars’ papers; I will meet with every participant individually to discuss his or her research, as well as broader career matters (if thought relevant); I will be available for as many follow-up meetings as participants would like.
Discussions of scholars’ research will proceed according to the following format: Each fellow will post a paper (proposal, chapter, or conference paper) to the website, for downloading and reading by all. No fellow will present his or her own paper; rather, each fellow will present a paper by a different seminar member, first summarizing the paper and then providing critical commentary. We will then proceed to discussion; only after extensive back and forth will the author be given an opportunity to respond and reflect.
I will take advantage of our location in the nation’s premier immigrant metropolis to organize several field trips. I have arranged to spend a day with researchers at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a research center in Tijuana specializing in migration, with particular strengths in borderland studies. This will involve presentations by the researchers at COLEF, followed by a visit to the Casa de Migrantes in Tijuana. We will take one trip along the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border, guided by the Border Patrol. I will also program an optional tour of ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles, including a visit to one of the well-established, local immigrant rights organizations.
Project faculty and staff
To expand disciplinary horizons and encompass a broader range of global migrations, we will be joined by two visiting scholars. Jose Moya, Professor of History, Barnard College and Columbia University, author of the award-winning book, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930, and an expert on global migration, will participate in a session during the week on historical perspectives. Political scientist, Laurie Brand, Robert Grandford Wright Professor, University of Southern California and author of Citizens Abroad: States and Migration in the Middle East and North Africa, will participate in a session during the week on emigrant politics and emigration policy, discussing her ongoing research on the impact of diasporas on sending country political development.
Recruitment and selection of participants
The seminar will be open to participants from Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, Geography, History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology, as well as interdisciplinary fields, such as Borderland or Diaspora studies. Eligibility will be based on prior, ongoing, or clearly delineated future interest (and ideally, scholarship) in migration, as well as other related areas, such as ethnicity, race, nationalism, diasporas, and borderlands studies. I hope to attract participants with historical as well as contemporary interests and I will welcome applicants working on international aspects.
Institutional context:
UCLA, one of nine units of the University of California, has a faculty of almost 4,000 and enrolls roughly 27,000 undergraduates and 13,000 graduate students, spread across arts and sciences and a broad array of professional schools. The social science departments (including history) are among the highest ranked of departments on campus.
Participants will have access to, and will be able to borrow books from UCLA’s library; ranked seventh in the nation, it holds more than nine million volumes and receives nearly 80,000 serial titles annually. Library card holders also have access to the holdings of the other UC campuses, including Berkeley’s, with 9.5 million volumes; interlibrary loans from elsewhere in the system arrive very quickly. Via the library’s extensive electronic databases, participants will have access to the major migration and ethnic studies journals, all of which are on-line. Many other useful data bases are also available, such as Ethnic News Watch, which contains the complete text of articles since 1990 from 200 publications of the ethnic and minority press.
The seminar will be held under the auspices of the UCLA International Institute, with offices next to the library and conveniently located close to various campus amenities. Participants will have exclusive access to one of the Institute’s conference room throughout the day, where they will be able to work peacefully.
Participants will be able to enjoy Los Angeles’ unique status as a world class city surrounded by an easily accessible, beautiful physical environment. The Getty Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, both easily accessible by bus and car, are close to campus; a 15 minute car and 30 minute bus ride will take participants to the ocean; downtown is surprisingly accessible by bus; those with cars will find that summertime traffic is quite manageable. I will invite participants for a gathering at my house.
Project website and evaluation
We will set up a confidential website for posting of readings, syllabi, and participants’ work. The website will contain a message board, with threaded discussions, which should help conversations continue outside the seminar room. The website will be developed early, so that c.v.’s, biographies, and other material can be made available before arrival in Los Angeles.
After acceptance, I will contact participants by email to more clearly identify their needs and expectations and begin discussing their projects. Intense round of email exchanges preceded the 2011 seminar and I believe that these early contacts contributed substantially to the seminar’s success. During the seminar, I will request regular feedback and will be prepared to make adjustments in response to participants’ reactions. I will also ask participants to provide a confidential online evaluation at the workshop’s end, using the on-line NEH site. In the last week of the seminar, participants will be asked to complete an anonymous evaluation, which I will design, assessing the seminar’s effectiveness and the degree to which it met their expectations. I will maintain contact with members of the seminar after they have departed from Los Angeles and will offer to read and comment on a paper, related to the seminar.
