It is a truism that cross-border connections are the stuff of modern life. In the nineteenth century, Durkheim recognised that mobility was central to the social division of labour. The intensification of mobility since then has created dense networks linking all kinds of emigrants, immigrants and refugees across borders. To illustrate, I share three short vignettes.
About 10 years ago we remodelled our suburban Dublin house. This was at the time of the Celtic Tiger and Ireland (traditionally a country of emigration) had opened its doors to the EU accession countries in 2004. Tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans travelled to the western edge of Europe seeking work in a booming economy. Our Latvian foreman explained that his preference would have been to move to Germany, closer to home, but at that time only Ireland, England and Sweden were willing to admit new immigrants. He took tremendous pride in showing me the photographs on his mobile phone of the family and magnificently maintained home in Latvia he had left behind.
On the European mainland, the Galician village of Avion in Spain comes to life in the summer months when the population doubles with returning emigrants. Generations have left this rural village to seek their fortunes in Mexico or Madrid. And many have had spectacular success in doing so. Nevertheless, they retain a strong visceral connection to Avion, maintaining homes there and funding local initiatives (the story is chronicled in ‘Avion: the absent village’ a film by Maria and Marcos Hervera, 2012).
In 2015, Ireland held a historic constitutional referendum to grant gay couples the right to marry. A distinctive aspect of the campaign was its cross-border outreach. The #Hometovote initiative saw thousands of Irish emigrants travel from the United Kingdom, Europe and further afield to exercise their right to vote. They felt strongly they wanted to be part of a seismic change in Irish mores, heralding a transition to a new, more liberal Irish republic.
Cross borderedness has become an important element of modern social, political and economic practice. Roger Waldinger's study of the cross-border connection seeks to move beyond platitudinous understandings of migrant mobility by focusing on the Realpolitik that structures relations between sending and receiving countries. In particular, he carefully reviews the factors that both promote and obstruct cross border involvements. He proffers a view of transnationalism that emphasises ‘the regularity of international migration and its inevitable collision with the mechanisms by which nation-states attempt to keep themselves apart from the world’. (p. 13).
This is a worthy attempt to move beyond the confines of a transnational perspective which tends to underestimate the paradoxical, messy, sometimes contradictory impulses that structure the social field of cross-border connections. Waldinger poses a number of apposite questions to which migration scholars must address themselves if they are to truly understand the ‘situatedness’ of cross-border ties, and the range of structural, cultural and institutional forces which serve to strengthen or weaken those ties. As he suggests ‘the scholarly challenge involves identifying the mechanisms generating and attenuating cross-border connections’ (p. 35).
The book is largely written from an American perspective, where those who are foreign-born now constitute 13% of the population. It focuses on the continuities and changes over time within the immigrant population and the attendant relationships that unfold between the country of origin and the country of reception. Simply put, the book is premised on the view that people who are mobile across borders are not just immigrants, but emigrants, remaining connected in many variegated ways to the countries they have left behind. However, the nature, extent and remit of those ties shifts over time producing populations which are more likely to settle than to remain as eternal transnationals. Immigrants’ enmeshment in networks of social support carried with them from the sending country invariably helps to shape the nature and quality of life in the receiving country. A ‘zone of intersocietal convergence’ is created which links ‘here’ and ‘there’. Over time however, the emigrant's social centre of gravity shifts more to ‘here’ and away from ‘there’ reducing the significance of cross-border connections and transforming ‘intersocietal convergence’ into ‘intersocietal divergence’. Waldinger suggests that in reality only an elite group of ‘transnationals’ seem able to truly live their lives across borders. For the majority of immigrants (coming to the United States from less developed, less democratic countries) political ties with home are less salient and these are not generally sustained over the long term. Nevertheless, for a minority of immigrants the experience of American democracy ‘paradoxically facilitates their continuing home country engagement’ (p. 8). Waldinger has in mind Central and South American immigrants, but this also holds true for older immigrant groups such as the Irish. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish immigrants and their descendants were deeply implicated in the cause of Irish independence. In the latter parts of the twentieth century, during the period of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Irish Americans once again mobilised themselves to help effect a political solution.
Migration is always a transformative experience. Place, space, nation and state profoundly shape the migratory trajectory. Immigrants are placed in the receiving society but retain ties with the sending society. Over time however, those ties with the sending society become attenuated for a variety of reasons and ultimately produce a degree of displacement. This is often articulated most acutely by those left behind in the sending society who no longer view ‘emigrants’ as part of the ‘we’ that has remained behind. Using empirical case studies, Waldinger specifies the factors that promote and supplant cross-border involvements, producing less convergence and more divergence in the intersocietal social field over time. He trenchantly argues that the transnationalism thesis and the notion of living unproblematically ‘across borders’ is overstated.
Though I accept the thrust of Waldinger's argument I think he underestimates the transformative potential of technological platforms to reconfigure cross-border relations in the short to medium term future. While he is correct that immigrants are less wired than native populations (figures are provided for the United States), it is probably fair to say that handheld devices such as smart phones are supplanting the personal computer, and are nowadays almost universally available. The functionality of a smart phone is evolving all the time. Thus I would take issue with his conclusions that migrants and those who stayed at home have to work hard to stay connected, and that technological advances do not transcend distance. Rather I think we are in uncharted territory, and cannot fully predict the outcome of the new techno-social capabilities upon which immigrants can potentially draw.
Three of the book's chapters provide a close examination of migrants and their political ties. Waldinger hones in on the political field because it is here that the dialectical relationship between immigrants, emigrants and sending and receiving territories is brought into sharpest relief. As generations of Irish immigrants in the United States can attest, American political culture historically has sustained hyphenated identities. This in turn Waldinger observes, encourages and legitimates homeland loyalties and ethnic trans-state social action. In particular, he notes that political mobilisation in the host country aimed at influencing American policy towards the home country has the unintended consequence of providing a useful apprenticeship in the politics of the host country. Migration entails capacity building and for those who are politically oriented, the ‘new political environment provides the space for autonomous migrant social action, unfolding in the place of destination but oriented toward the place of origin’ (p. 83).
In Chapter 6 the focus shifts to the interactions that occur between emigrants and emigration states. Drawing on a range of empirical reference points, Waldinger argues that cross-border population movements generate ties linking host and home society even as the process of immigration itself and the attendant demands made on immigrants weaken those cross-border connections. Importantly, the thesis advanced applies only to a subset of migrants, namely, those who are truly international and those who are moving from poorer peripheries to the richer democracies. Having crossed a territorial border, Waldinger argues, migrants find themselves in a country of destination but not of it. Their identity is marked by a high degree of fluidity. They simultaneously occupy the role of emigrant (benefiting from the resources of the host society and in many instances transferring some of those resources to the home society); the role of foreigner (navigating a new environment, language and socio-cultural system) and the role of alien (they stand outside of the polity and lack the full protections enjoyed by host country citizens). Waldinger illuminates the nature of the challenges that underpin transnationalism as they are experienced by emigrants/immigrants and the sending/receiving societies.
We are treated to a forensic empirical analysis of these processes through a comparative case study of Mexcio's effort to provide its emigrants with consular identification cards in the United States, on the one hand, and the Mexican's state experience with expatriate voting in the 2006 Presidential election, on the other. Waldinger's Chapter 7 provides a rich narrative account of the Realpolitik of emigration and, in particular, the dilemma faced by a sending state as it seeks to respond to immigrants problems in the host society, and to emigrants’ membership claims in the country of origin. For the mass of migrants moving from poorer to richer countries, Waldinger concludes, ‘their world is one in which national boundaries are crossed with difficulty, only to settle down among unwelcoming strangers’ (p. 151). Surviving and thriving as immigrants invariably necessitates a weakening of connection to those left behind. Chapter 8 continues the Mexican theme by focusing on the zone of intersocietal convergence within the framework of hometown associations dedicated to supporting local communities in the country of origin. The dual nature of Mexican immigrants/emigrants produces conflict as members seek to create sociability ‘here’ and development ‘there’.
The current movement of Syrian refugees across the Middle East and into Europe reminds us of one of Waldinger's central contentions: that people move to find a place where life can be better. Immigrants’ structural position and cultural location initially push them towards intersocietal convergence, but over time intersocietal divergence becomes the prevailing norm. The Cross-Border Connection makes an important conceptual contribution in terms of specifying the structural, cultural, political and individual factors underpinning the transnational process. Moreover, it proffers a dynamic, analytical framework for the pursuit of further scholarship on population movements between nation-states in a global context.