Transnational Migrants: When "Home" Means More Than One Country . What Does Home Mean To You ?

Migration movements are not like one-way streets. They do originate from insecure and lead to (slightly) securer regions and from areas lacking employment and living opportunities to areas which are hoped to offer better economic, political, cultural and/or social prospects.

 

However, even after the wave of emigration by Europeans due to industrialisation and urbanisation in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, estimates suggest that about a third or half of all emigrants returned to their regions of origin. 

Apart from the ideal types of emigrants and ‘returned emigrants’ or return-migrants, history shows that there have always been people for whom migration and the change of places is not a nonrecurring and unusual undertaking, but actually a way of living. 

Transnational migration is then defined as “a process of movement and settlement across international borders in which individuals maintain or build multiple networks of connection to their country of origin while at the same time settling in a new country”

 The assumption that people will live their lives in one place, according to one set of national and cultural norms, in countries with impermeable national borders, no longer holds. Rather, in the 21st century, more and more people will belong to two or more societies at the same time.

Transnational migrants work, pray, and express their political interests in several contexts rather than in a single nation-state. Some will put down roots in a host country, maintain strong homeland ties, and belong to religious and political movements that span the globe. These allegiances are not antithetical to one another.

When migrants live their lives across national borders, they challenge many long-held assumptions about membership, development, and equity. Understanding this reality requires new methodological and conceptual tools. It also requires new policy responses.

The challenge is to figure out how individuals who live between two cultures can best be protected and represented and what we should expect from them in return.

Denis Maronga.