After the transnational turn: Looking across borders to see the hard face of the nation‐state
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Author | Roger Waldinger |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12868 |
92
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International Migration. 2023;61:92–104.
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/imig
INTRODUCTION
The transnational turn i n migration studies is n ow almost thirty years old. It began with t he appear ance of a
publication that rarely capt ures much attentio n: the collected pa pers of a conference held under the a uspices of
an organiz ation mainly con cerned with the health and p hysical sciences. That publicatio n promised to provide a
« transn ational perspec tive on migr ation». In fac t, the book 's introductio n never explai ned what a transnational
perspect ive on migrat ion might ent ail, nor h ow such a perspective might differ from those that then prevailed.
Instead the then- unknown, later fa mous org anizers of the conference — Nina Glick Schiller, Lin da Basch and
Cristina Blanc- Szanton — highlighted a pheno menon so new and distinctive that it required the novel conce pt that
they introd uced, transnatio nalism. The phe nomenon involved a ‘new kind of migrating populat ion, composed of
those whose net works, activities and pa tterns of life encompass both thei r host and home societies (Schill er et al,
Received: 12 Jul y 2020
|
Revised: 25 March 2 021
|
Accepted: 27 March 20 21
DOI: 10.1111/imig.12868
SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE
After the transnational turn: Looking across
borders to see the hard face of the nation- state
Roger Waldinger
© 2021 The Author s. Internationa l Migration © 2021 IOM
Departm ent of Sociology, UCL A, Los
Angeles, C alifornia, USA
Correspondence
Roger Waldinger, Dep artment of Socio logy,
UCLA, Lo s Angeles, CA 90 095- 1551, USA.
Email: waldinger@soc.ucla.edu
Abstract
This pape r leverages the repressive turn in U.S. migration
policy to understand how a cross- border perspect ive can
illuminate the ex periences of two different, but contem-
poraneous second- generation populatio ns: Thos e whose
lives hav e unfurled in th e United States , all the while gr ow-
ing up in interna tionalized families with ongoin g homeland
ties; and thos e whose childhoods began in the United
States, but were disrupted as part of the ‘Great Expulsion’,
and thus migr ated to Mexico, albeit of ten with U.S. citi-
zenship a nd almost always with cross- border ties to f am-
ily mem bers still living in the United States. As the paper
demon strates, l ooking acro ss borders hi ghlights th e impor-
tance of the territorial frontier and the continuing power of
the n ational to undermine the forces that produce cr oss-
border connections.
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