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5 Transmigrants and Nation-States: Something Old and Something New in the u.S. Immigrant Experience Nina Glick Schiller THE PHONE RlNGS, and the news is as she expected . Sitting alone in her basement bedroom in her cousin's home in New York City, Yvette begins to shake. Her older sister in Haiti, a sister she barely knows, is calling to announce the death of Yvette's nephew. Although she has received the call while the body is still warm, Yvette shakes not so much from the loss of the young man, whom she had met only once, as from knowing that it is her obligation immediately to find the money for an elaborate funeral in Haiti complete with cars, band, and imported flowers. The year before, from her salary as a mail clerk in New York, Yvette had buried her niece, whose education and wedding she had also financed; in fact, Yvette has only recently finished paying her debts from that funeral. Yvette's heavy burden of kinship responsibilities also comes with rewards. In the United States her earnings would make no social mark, even if she were to hoard them or expend them on consumer goods. To her network in Haiti, Yvette is a person of influence. On the few trips she can afford back home, she is treated as a visiting dignitary. Not only do bad economic and political times in Haiti increase the demands on her labor, but what happens in Haiti, both good and bad, affects her sense of who she is and where she belongs. Her fellow workers identitY her with Haiti, and her friends at work bring her atticles about Haiti. Consequently, the kin work Yvette constantly undertakes in Haiti and her sense of personal accomplishment link her to broader identifications with Haiti as a nationstate . Yvette's continuing home ties, her experience of being identified as Haitian while living and working in the United States, and her daily exposure through Haitian radio and television, which she watches in her kitchen in Queens, all contribute to her understanding that her life is connected to Haiti, even as she and her family strive to become further incorporated into the United States. Although she is neither a political aCtlvlst nor part of a Haitian ethnic organization, Yvette's occasionally makes her identification with Haiti clear and public. In June 1997, Yvette sat in a commencement audience in Washington, D.C., with nineteen other kinfolk and family friends, some of whom had flown in from Haiti and Canada, to watch Giselle, her cousin's daughter, graduate from law school. When Giselle was handed her law school diploma, Yvette, who is usually quite proper and somewhat reserved with strangers, jumped up and yelled, "Haiti! Haiti!," surprising even herself. Giselle's victory in obtaining a law school degree from a prestigious university in the United States became Haiti's victory.! In the 1980s a handful of scholars of contemporary migration took note of the transnational networks of immigrants such as Yvette and began to assess the political implications of such processes (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992a; Glick Schiller and Fouron 1990; Kearney 1991; Rouse 1989, 1991). To do this, we rejected the prevailing view of immigrants as persons who had uprooted themselves from their old society to settle in a new land. Calling attention to the fact that a significant propottion of the immigrants who settle in and become well incorporated into the United States still maintain home ties, we proposed transnational migration, or transnationalism , as a new paradigm for the study of migration across the borders of nation-states.' This new approach makes visible the networks of immigrants that extend across international borders. It posits that even though migrants invest socially, economically , and politically in their new society, they may continue to participate in the daily life of the society from which they emigrated but which they did not abandon. The study of international migration is transformed into an investigation of migration as a transnational process. In this chapter, I focus on two sets of interre- lated questions that have emerged among those building or critiquing this new paradigm of transnational migration. First of all, how new is transnational migration? Are we witnessing a new form of human settlement, or is it only our analytical paradigm that has changed? Second, what is the relationship between transnational migration and nation-states? Does contemporary transnational migration serve as an indicator that the link between state and nation...

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