This project will deliver help to reduce the vulnerability of poor people in Haiti to the effects of climate change, while at the same time conserving threatened coastal and marine biodiversity. Investments in climateproofed and socially-sustainable BD conservation strategies, within the context of the National Protected Areas System (NPAS), will enable coastal and marine ecosystems to continue to generate Ecosystem-Based Adaptation (EBA) services; while additional investment of adaptation funds in the watersheds which drain into these ecosystems will serve to maximize BD benefits and ecosystem functions, as well as generating EBA benefits for the populations living in the watersheds themselves.

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The United Nations Development Programme

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 nationstate. Social scientists have long been interested in how immigrants are incorporated into new countries. In Germany and France, scholars’ expectations that foreigners will assimilate is a central piece of public policy. In the United States, immigration scholars initially argued that to move up the socioeconomic ladder, immigrants would have to abandon their unique customs, language, values, and homeland ties and identities. Even when remaining ethnic became more acceptable, most researchers assumed that the importance of homeland ties would eventually fade. To be Italian American or Irish American would ultimately reflect ethnic pride within a multicultural United States rather than enduring relations to an ancestral land. Now scholars increasingly recognize that some migrants and their descendants remain strongly influenced by their continuing ties to their home country or by social networks that stretch across national borders. They see

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Conceptualizing simultaneity: a transnational social field perspective on society

This introductory article defines the concept of transnationalism, provides a typology of this heterogeneous set of activities, and reviews some of the pitfalls in establishing and validating the topic as a novel research field. A set of guidelines to orient research in this field is presented and justified. Instances of immigrant political and economic transnationalism have existed in the past. We review some of the most prominent examples, but point to the distinct features that make the contemporary emergence of these activities across multiple national borders worthy of attention. The contents of this Special Issue and their bearing on the present understanding of this phenomenon and its practical implications are summarized.

The study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field

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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

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. The data concern migrants from the Dominican Republic to the Boston area of the United States. (EXCERPT)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2547666.pdf

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

Researchers working in Mexican communities have observed both regularities and inconsistencies in the way that transnational migration develops over time. This article presents a theory that accounts for these uniformities and discrepancies and proposes a method to compara the process of migration across communities. It also argues that studies must report and control for the prevalence of migration within communities. Data from 19 Mexican communities show that predicable demographic, social, and economic changes accompany increases in migratory prevalence. Although international migration begins within a narrow range of each community's socioeconomic structure, over time it broadens to incorporate other social groups.

Continuities in Transnational Migration: An Analysis of Nineteen Mexican Communities

This paper analyzes the institutionalized production of precarious migration status in Canada. Building on recent work on the legal production of illegality and non-dichotomous approaches to migratory status, we review Canadian immigration and refugee policy, and analyze pathways to loss of migratory status and the implications of less than full status for access to social services. In Canada, policies provide various avenues of authorized entry, but some entrants lose work and/or residence authorization and end up with variable forms of less-than-full immigration status. We argue that binary conceptions of migration status (legal/illegal) do not reflect this context, and advocate the use of ‘precarious status’ to capture variable forms of irregular status and illegality, including documented illegality. We find that elements of Canadian policy routinely generate pathways to multiple forms of precarious status, which is accompanied by precarious access to public services. Our analysis of the production of...

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Institutionalizing Precarious Immigration Status in Canada

The development potential of remittances has resurfaced as a topic of analysis, based in part on dramatic increases in migration and amounts of money ‘sent home’, and partly in the growing interest and involvement by states and non-state actors in gaining leverage over remittances. The trend is indicative of an emerging remittance-based component of development and poverty reduction planning. This article uses the case of Mexico to make two broad arguments, one related to the importance of extra-economic dimensions of remittances, particularly the social and political meanings of remittances, and the other based on a disaggregation of remittances into family, collective or community-based, and investment remittances. Key dimensions of this typology include the constellation of remitters, receivers, and mediating institutions; the norms and logic(s) that regulate remittances; the uses of remittances (income versus savings); the social and political meanings of remittances; and the implications of such meanings for various interventions. The author concludes that policy and programme interventions need to recognize the specificity of each remittance type. Existing initiatives to bank the un-banked and reduce transfer costs, for example, are effective for family remittances, but attempts to expand the share of remittances allocated to savings, or to turn community donations into profitable ventures, or small investments into large businesses, are much more complex and require a range of other interventions.

Family and Collective Remittances to Mexico: A Multi‐dimensional Typology

This article examines relations between the Mexican state and transmigrants through an analysis of migrant- and state-led transnational practices and policies. It addresses discussions of the strength and extent of Mexican state control and hegemony as well as debates in the transnationalism literature on the potential autonomy of transmigrant groups and the role of subnational linkages. The analysis is based on information on transmigrant organizations and Mexican political authorities in Los Angeles and Mexico and focuses on Zacatecas. Mexican transmigrant organizations predate current state initiatives aimed at Mexicans in the United States, but state involvement has been crucial to the institutionalizing of transnational social spaces. The state's hegemonic project involves the largely symbolic reincorporation of paisanos living abroad back into to the nation but depends on provincial and municipal authorities and transmigrant organizations for implementation. Because these vary, the project has been implemented unevenly. The complexity of these processes can be captured only by examining transnational social spaces at a subnational level. The case of Zacatecas shows how a corporatist and semi-clientelist transmigrant organization has managed to gain concessions that broaden opportunities for participation. It remains to be seen whether and how promises of political representation will be fulfilled.

The Mexican state and transmigrant organizations: Negotiating the boundaries of membership and participation

This article explores the relationship between precarious employment and precarious migrant legal status. Original research on immigrant workers' employment experiences in Toronto examines the effects of several measures including human capital, network, labor market variables, and a change in legal status variable on job precarity as measured by an eight-indicator Index of Precarious Work (IPW). Precarious legal status has a long-lasting, negative effect on job precarity; both respondents who entered and remained in a precarious migratory status and those who shifted to secure status were more likely to remain in precarious work compared to respondents who entered with and remained in a secure status. This leaves no doubt that migrant-worker insecurity and vulnerability stem not only from having ‘irregular’ status. We introduce the notion of a work–citizenship matrix to capture the ways in which the precariousness of legal status and work intersect in the new economy. People and entire groups transition ...

Luin Goldring

Papers

Continuities in Transnational Migration: An Analysis of Nineteen Mexican Communities

Institutionalizing Precarious Immigration Status in Canada

Family and Collective Remittances to Mexico: A Multi‐dimensional Typology

The Mexican state and transmigrant organizations: Negotiating the boundaries of membership and participation

Caught in the Work–Citizenship Matrix: the Lasting Effects of Precarious Legal Status on Work for Toronto Immigrants