What's New About Transnationalism?: New York Immigrants Today and at the Turn of the Century

Diaspora 6:3 1997 What's New About Transnationalism? New York Immigrants Today and at the Turn of the Century1 Nancy Foner State University of New York, Purchase Transnationalism is not new, even though it often seems as if it were invented yesterday. Contemporary immigrant New Yorkers are not the first newcomers to live what scholars now call transnational lives. While there are new dynamics to immigrants' transnational connections and communities today, there are also significant continuities with the past. One would not know this from reading the scholarly literature. In much of what has been written on the subject, transnationalism is treated as a contemporary phenomenon; a common assumption is that earlier European immigration cannot be described in the transnational terms that apply today. Transnationalism refers to the processes by which immigrants "forge and sustain multistranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement" (Basch et al. 7). In a transnational perspective, contemporary immigrants are seen as maintaining familial, economic, political, and cultural ties across international borders, in effect making the home and host societies a single arena ofsocial action. Perhaps, as Nina Glick Schiller notes, the excitement over the "first flurry of discovery of the transnational aspects of contemporary migration" led to a "tendency to declare ... transnational migration ... a completely new phenomenon" (4). A few years earlier , she and her colleagues had argued that transnationalism was a new type of migrant experience and that, therefore, a new conceptualization —indeed, the new term "transmigrant"—was needed to understand the immigrants of today (Glick Schiller et al., "Transnationalism" 1; Basch et al. 7). Comments like Elsa Chaney's —that new Caribbean immigrants "apparently differ from the settler immigrants of another era who left their homelands permanently"—are typical, Glick Schiller says, of the way ethnographers of the post-1965 migration have viewed the past (4). For example, anthropologist Constance Sutton suggests that, unlike earlier European arrivals, recent Third World immigrants forge social practices and ethnic identities that have a transnational character; rather than becoming hyphenated Americans, they operate with a transnational bilocal identity. Alejandro Portes has 356 Diaspora 6:3 1997 recently stated that if "today's US-bound immigrants faced the same economic and technological conditions as their European predecessors at the turn of the century, there would be no transnational communities" (76). There are, of course, hints in the current literature that modernday transnationalism is not altogether new—suggestions, for example, that it differs only in "range and depth" (Goldberg 205) or "density and significance" (Jones 219) from patterns in earlier eras. A recent paper by Glick Schiller marks an important step forward by beginning to systematically compare current transnational migration to the United States with past patterns.2 This essay offers a closer look at transnationalism past and present. By narrowing the field of analysis to one context—New York City—and comparing contemporary immigration with one period—the turn of the century—we can begin to identify the kinds of social, economic, and political relationships immigrants have established and maintained with their home societies in different eras. Many transnational patterns said to be new actually have a long history—and some of the sources of transnationalism seen as unique today also operated in the past. At the same time, much is distinctive about transnationalism today, not only because earlier patterns have been intensified or become more common but because new processes and dynamics are involved. This analysis is part of a larger project that compares immigrants in New York today with immigrants at the turn of the century—the two peak periods in the city's immigration history.3 Between 1880 and 1920, over one million immigrants arrived and settled in New York City, so that by 1910, fully 41% of all New Yorkers were foreign born. In studies of this earlier period, the focus is on Eastern European Jews and Italians; they were the vast bulk of the new arrivals at the time and defined what was then thought of as the "new immigration." Today, no two groups predominate in this way, and New York's immigrants now include sizable numbers from a variety of Asian, West Indian, and Latin American nations...