Josh DeWind

International Perspectives on Transnational Migration: An Introduction

This special issue of the International Migration Review on transnational migration represents both a victory and a challenge. For those who have advocated for the recognition of transnational migration, this publication is a victory in that it attests to the importance and growing acceptance of a transnational perspective among migration scholars. It is also a challenge because many of the criticisms raised initially by detractors have been quite valid. Making sense of transnational practices and placing them in proper perspec-

A Cross‐Atlantic Dialogue: The Progress of Research and Theory in the Study of International Migration

The articles included in this issue were originally presented at a conference on Conceptual and Methodological Developments in the Study of International Migration held at Princeton University in May 2003. The conference was jointly sponsored by the Committee on International Migration of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Center for Migration and Development (CMD) at Princeton, and this journal. Its purpose was to review recent innovations in this field, both in theory and empirical research, across both sides of the Atlantic. The conference was deliberately organized as a sequel to a similar event convened by the SSRC on Sanibel Island in January 1996 in order to assess the state of international migration studies within the United States from an interdisciplinary perspective. A selection of articles from that conference was published as a special issue of International Migration Review (Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter), and the full set of articles was published as the Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (Hirschman, Kasinitz and DeWind, 1999).

Everything old is new again? Processes and theories of immigrant incorporation.

After three decades of renewed, large-scale immigration to the United States, social scientists are increasingly turning their attention to processes of immigrant incorporation and reexamining the perspectives of social scientists who studied similar processes in the past. This essay reviews the insights and questions raised by the foregoing articles in this special issue of the International Migration Review and assesses their theoretical contributions to understanding relations between immigrants and native-born Americans in contemporary processes of incorporation.

Korean Development and Migration

Our introductory paper to this special issue of JEMS on Korean development and migration provides a sketch of internal migration in Korea, and international migration from and to that country. It positions these movements within the great transitions experienced by Korea over recent decades: the transition from an agricultural to an industrial and then a tertiary economy; the transition from a rural to an urban society; and the transition to low fertility and mortality. A transition in migration can also be observed from rural to urban and from emigration to immigration. The papers in this issue each illustrate a different facet of Koreas migration—the importance of internal remittances in the process of urbanisation, the range of destinations in Koreas diaspora, the different enclave economies and societies around the Pacific rim, ethnic ties and the incorporation of Koreans into the economies of destination areas, the importance of transnational families and whether Korea will ever become a ‘settler’ society are all examined as part of Koreas local and global migrations. They all demonstrate, in different ways, how Koreas development into a member of the global economy has interacted with migration to change its volume, direction and composition.