Looking Beyond the Host Country: Immigrants’ Transnational Engagements

Abstract

Next to the mechanisms of international migration and patterns of incorporation to the receiver society, immigrants’ involvement in their home countries has been the third main issue informing the agenda of present-day social science studies of immigration. This subject was already addressed in a comparative assessment of the major similarities and differences of turn-of-the-twentieth-century and contemporary American immigrants’ transnational engagements. Here I consider more closely the different kinds of immigrant transnationalism as identified in the subject literature and, next, comparatively examine the structure-agency mechanisms of transnational involvements of members of the eight groups in our sample, and the forms of their coexistence with immigrants’ specific modes of integration into the host society. In the last section of the chapter I identify the main areas of the impact of actor-immigrants’ transnational engagements in their homelands on the local- and, when relevant, national-level societal structures of these countries.