Peggy Levitt

Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society

This article explores the social theory and consequent methodology that underpins studies of transnational migration. First, we propose a social field approach to the study of migration and distinguish between ways of being and ways of belonging in that field. Second, we argue that assimilation and enduring transnational ties are neither incompatible nor binary opposites. Third, we highlight social processes and institutions that are routinely obscured by traditional migration scholarship but that become clear when we use a transnational lens. Finally, we locate our approach to migration research within a larger intellectual project, taken up by scholars of transnational processes in many fields, to rethink and reformulate the concept of society such that it is no longer automatically equated with the boundaries of a single nation-state.

Social remittances: migration driven local-level forms of cultural diffusion.

Many studies highlight the macro-level dissemination of global culture and institutions. This article focuses on social remittances – a local-level, migration-driven form of cultural diffusion. Social remittances are the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving- to sending-country communities. The role that these resources play in promoting immigrant entrepreneurship, community and family formation, and political integration is widely acknowledged. This article specifies how these same ideas and practices are remolded in receiving countries, the mechanisms by which they are sent back to sending communities, and the role they play in transforming sending-country social and political life.

Transnational migration: taking stock and future directions

Increasing numbers of sending states are systematically offering social and political membership to migrants residing outside their territories. The proliferation of these dual memberships contradicts conventional notions about immigrant incorporation, their impact on sending countries, and the relationship between migration and development in both contexts. But how do ordinary individuals actually live their lives across borders? Is assimilation incompatible with transnational membership? How does economic and social development change when it takes place across borders? This article takes stock of what is known about everyday transnational practices and the institutional actors that facilitate or impede them and outlines questions for future research. In it, I define what I mean by transnational practices and describe the institutions that create and are created by these activities. I discuss the ways in which they distribute migrants’ resources and energies across borders, based primarily on studies of migration to the United States.

Social remittances reconsidered

In this article we revisit the concept of social remittances. First, we show how peoples experiences before migrating strongly influence what they do in the countries where they settle; this, in turn, affects what they remit back to their homelands. Second, just as scholars differentiate between individual and collective economic remittances, we also distinguish between individual and collective social remittances. While individuals communicate ideas and practices to each other in their roles as friends, family members or neighbours, they also communicate in their capacity as organisational actors, which has implications for organisational management and capacity-building. Finally, we argue that social remittances can scale up from local-level impacts to affect regional and national change and scale out to affect other domains of practice.

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-

Roots and Routes: Understanding the Lives of the Second Generation Transnationally

While using a transnational optic to study first-generation immigrants is now widely accepted, most scholars assume that the same approach is not necessary when studying migrants’ children. They claim that, while immigrants might be involved in the economic, political and religious life of their homelands, their children are unlikely to follow suit. In this paper I argue against summarily dismissing the power of being raised in a transnational social field. When children are brought up in households that are regularly influenced by people, objects, practices and know-how from their ancestral homes, they are socialised into its norms and values and they learn how to negotiate its institutions. They also form part of strong social networks. While not all members of the second generation will access these resources, they have the social skills and competencies to do so, if and when they choose. Capturing these dynamics, and tracking how they change over time, requires long-term ethnographic research in the source and destination countries.

“You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant”: Religion and Transnational Migration

The purpose of this article is to summarize what we know about the role that religion plays in transnational migration and to outline a strategy for further research in this area. While migration scholars now generally acknowledge the salience of migrants’ economic, social, and political transnational activities, we have largely overlooked the ways in which religious identities and practices also enable migrants to sustain memberships in multiple locations. My goals in this article are threefold. First, I provide a brief overview of related bodies of work on global, diasporic and immigrant religion and differentiate them from studies of migrants’ transnational religious practices. Second, I selectively summarize what we have learned about the role of religion in transnational migration from prior research. Finally, I propose an approach to future research on these questions.1

Local-level global religion : The case of U.S.-Dominican migration : Religion in global perspective

Recent work calls attention to religious globalization - the proliferation of transnational religious structures and movements that challenge the nation state. But contemporary migration prompts a different type of religious transnationalism that has not been sufficiently explored. Sustained connections between communities of origin and destination give rise to a set of transnationalized institutional relationships, discourses, and practices that globalize everyday religious life at the local level. This articles aims to contribute to a more systematic understanding of local-level religious globalization by exploring the case of Catholic church ties spanning Boston and the Dominican Republic. It also stresses the importance of taking into account sustained homeland attachments in understanding everyday immigrant religious life. Strong ties between migrants and nonmigrants created a transnational religious sphere within which people, resources, and social remittances were constantly exchanged. Religious life in Boston and the Dominican Republic were reciprocally transformed as a result. Subsequent emigres continue to infuse fresh Dominicanness into the Boston church, though it is a Dominicanness that is increasingly pan-Latino in tone. In this way, transnational ties reinforce religious pluralism at the same time that they limit its scope.

Transnational Politics as Cultural Circulation: Toward a Conceptual Understanding of Migrant Political Participation on the Move

Abstract This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on transnational politics by bringing tools used by scholars of cultural diffusion and circulation into these debates. We build on research on social remittances and their potential to yield broader and deeper effects or to ‘scale up’ and ‘scale out.’ Based on a variety of empirical examples, we propose that processes such as circulation, portability, and contact, viewed through a transnational optic, help to nuance recent research on political transnationalism and its empirical indicators – including, most notably, external voting.

Transnational social protection: setting the agenda

Abstract Social welfare has long been considered something which states provide to its citizens. Yet today 220 million people live in a country in which they do not hold citizenship. How are people on the move protected and provided for in the contemporary global context? Have institutional sources of social welfare begun to cross borders to meet the needs of individuals who live transnational lives? This introductory paper proposes a transnational social protection (TSP) research agenda designed to map the kinds of protections which exist for people on the move, determine how these protections travel across borders, and analyze variations in access to these protections. We define TSP; introduce the heuristic tool of a ‘resource environment’ to map and analyze variations in TSP over time, through space, and across individuals; and provide empirical examples demonstrating the centrality of TSP for scholars of states, social welfare, development, and migration.