Explanatory Frameworks Transnationa Multiscalar 2015

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Explanatory frameworks in

transnational migration studies:

the missing multi-scalar globalperspectiveNina Glick Schiller

Published online: 24 Aug 2015.

To cite this article: Nina Glick Schiller (2015) Explanatory frameworks in transnational

migration studies: the missing multi-scalar global perspective, Ethnic and Racial Studies,

38:13, 2275-2282, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1058503

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Explanatory frameworks in transnational

migration studies: the missing multi-scalar globalperspective

Nina Glick Schiller

( Received 13 April 2015; accepted 22 May 2015)

In this article, I argue that while providing an excellent summary of the past two decades

of research on migrants’ transnational connections, the concepts of intersocietal and

interpolity convergences and divergences that Roger Waldinger offers in his book TheCross-Border Connection do not contribute to an explanatory framework that can move

beyond the descriptive nature of much of the transnational migration literature. The article

briefly speaks to this need by offering three concepts necessary for the analysis of cross-

border connections: (1) a multi-scalar global perspective on migration; (2) displacement as

an outcome of accumulation through dispossession; and (3) global historical conjunctures.

Keywords: transnational; migration; multi-scalar global analysis; global historical conjecture;

dispossession; displacement

At a time when migrants with ties to elsewhere are increasingly suspect as threats to

the national unity and security of states around the world, many prominent scholars

who are supportive of immigrants have retreated to an assimilationist perspective.

They strive to reassure a seemingly alarmed citizenry that immigrants do not threaten

the body politic. Among these, a handful take a gradualist position, encompassing

first-generational transnational ties and identities within a narrative of eventual

integration into the national social fabric (Alba and Nee 2003; Morawska 2007). In

his recent book, The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants and their

Homelands, Roger Waldinger (2015) turns out in the final analysis to be such agradual linealist. He assumes that not only over time do immigrants or at least their

descendants become part of the social and political life of the country in which they

have settled, but that inevitably most abandon their home ties. However, unlike many

others who take this position, Waldinger has acknowledged the significance of many

migrants’ various and sundry cross-border ties. In the current moment when

politicians everywhere stir up sentiments to close the gates and salute the flag, it

takes some courage to take even a gradualist position that sees the benefits of

immigrants’ transnational ties. Waldinger is to be commended for a thoughtful

overview of the processes of settlement and simultaneous transnational connection.However, although Waldinger claims that he is providing a novel approach that

goes beyond the transnational migration project, the strength of The Cross-Border

Connection is that it speaks to an audience who may not be reading the now vast

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015

Vol. 38, No. 13, 2275 – 2282, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1058503



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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1058503



transnational migration literature, and provides them with an excellent summary,

although with a predominantly US-centric focus. He outlines what transnationalmigration scholars have learned in the course of more than two decades about the

parameters, solidarities, contr adictions, tensions, contestations and constraints of

transnational lives and politics.1

A sector of a larger domain of transnational studies(Levitt and Jaworsky 2007), transnational migration studies has become a veritable

industry, especially in Europe, where literally millions of euros have been spent on

multinational research projects to train doctoral students and collect new data.

Waldinger rightly notes that this large volume of work is largely descriptive and

that explanatory frameworks are generally lacking. He claims that, in contrast, The

Cross-Border Connection moves ‘ beyond transnationalism’ (Waldinger 2015, 23) by

offering a conceptual framework that addresses the strictures of time and space.

In this article, I argue that the concepts that Waldinger offers in his analysis – that

of intersocietal and interpolity convergences and divergences –

cannot provide anadequate explanatory framework to move beyond the descriptive nature of much of the transnational migration literature. The weaknesses of Waldinger ’s key concepts

reflect his failure to address basic questions of social theory, namely the nature and

location of society; how to conceptualize globe-spanning intersecting political,

economic and cultural power; and how to address multi-scalar global transformations.

In a multi-scalar analysis, local, regional, national, pan-regional and global are not

separate levels of analysis but are part of mutually constituting institutional and

personal networks of unequal power within which people both with and without

migrant histories live their lives. As a result of his failure to address the way in which

people, institutions, localities and states construct themselves within these globe-

spanning yet locally grounded networks of power, Waldinger is unable to provide an

analytical framework that can explicate how individual places are constituted,

adequately address the nature of the border regimes in which states are imbricated,

and elucidate when, how, where and why people establish or maintain personal cross-

border networks. He is also unable to understand the historically contingent

relationships between space and time.

Therefore, despite acknowledging the validity of the critique of ‘methodological

nationalism’, Waldinger is unable to move beyond a conflation of the social with the

boundaries of a polity. Waldinger ’s analysis of the world is fundamentally composedof independent polities so that, despite passing references to policies of the World

Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the American Development Bank (Waldinger

2015, 4) and the private sector of transnational banking, the nation state remains his basic unit of analysis.

Waldinger is only able to see cross-border connections by conceptualizing

immigrants as creating, in the short term, a somewhat more expansive society bymerging aspects of the social life of two states. He describes them as pulling ‘one

society into the territory of another nation-state [and] … creating a convergence of here

and there’ (Waldinger 2015, 38). Waldinger does not actually describe what ‘convergence’ looks like in terms of daily social relations, how it works, how ‘one

society’ within ‘another nation-state’ could be operationalized for study, or how this

concept of ‘society’ is to be understood. He does assert that intersocietal convergences

abate eventually, destroyed by (Waldinger 2015, 177) time, the ‘abundance’ of

2276 N. Glick Schiller





experiences that migrants sustain in their ‘new world’ and the challenges of

maintaining relationships across physical distance.

As do other methodological nationalists, by continuing to speak of ‘we’ and ‘they’,

Waldinger projects an assumption of social and cultural homogeneity within the unit

of the nation state as well as within the migrant population, although in the periodof convergences he posits a dyadic interaction in which ‘we are there’ and ‘they

are here’ (Waldinger 2015, 110). Moreover, he maintains that convergences are

ephemeral because the disparate sovereign polities and their competing nationalisms

intervene. Even if immigrants wish to maintain home ties over time, ‘the migrant ’s

quest to belong both here and there is contested by nationals [which often includes the

political leaderships] of both sending and receiving sides’ (Waldinger 2015, 49).

It is hard to reconcile the world according to Waldinger with the planet on which

we all actually live. For more than five centuries, the world has been organized within

multiple intersecting networks of unequal power that have taken the form of pr ocessesactuated by the dynamics of capital accumulation that encompass the world.2 Over

twenty years ago, Linda Basch, Cristiana Szanton Blanc and I (Basch, Glick Schiller,

and Szanton Blanc 1994) argued that a global perspective on migration was

fundamental to the development of a ‘transnational migration paradigm’. We argued

that to build such a paradigm, scholars must recognize transnational migration as

‘inextricably linked to the changing conditions’ of global capitalism and its processes

of accumulation (1994, 22). Past and ongoing modes of accumulation led to imperial

war, colonialism, political destabilization and racialization. These were accompanied by social and physical displacements including migration across borders. Using a

perspective that Giddens called structuration, we noted that whether or not people

with migrant histories abandon or reconstitute cross-border ties and identities is

inextricably linked to their relationships to the changing conditions of global

capitalism. These included the restructuring of the conditions within which people

produce and consume goods and services, reproduce social life and engage in

struggles for social and economic justice.

We were cognizant of nation states’ continued powers to generate and enforce

national identities, narratives and loyalties. In fact in the face of global economic

restructuring that reconfigured state functions, we traced revitalized efforts at nation-

state building. However, we argued that the fact that national borders persisted shouldnot preclude migration scholars from understanding that all states and their localities

were being restructured by globe-spanning and changing forms of capitalaccumulation.

At one point Waldinger equates his term intersocietal convergence with what my

colleagues and I have defined as a ‘transnational social field’ (Basch, Glick Schiller,and Szanton Blanc 1994; Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001; Levitt and Glick Schiller

2004), but the concepts are very different. Our social field approach was multi-scalar.

Approached as a network of networks, the concept of transnational social fields builds

on empirical observations that allow a researcher to trace multiple, intersecting andoften unequal social relations across space and through time. It is a building block of

a relational sociology through which the political borders of states do not delimit the

world of the social, although the role of states is one important element in the analysis

of power relations. The concepts of multi-scalar, globe-spanning capitalist processes

Ethnic and Racial Studies 2277







and Glick Schiller forthcoming).4 The analytical framework and the concept of global

historical conjuncture that I am outlining here are important for the future of transnational migration scholarship and its study of trans-border connections. First,

the concept of conjuncture allows scholars to understand something that Waldinger

notes but is unable to explain: although descriptions of transnational lives and long-distance nationalism abound in the migration literature (Bourne 1916; Chaney 1979;

Vassady 1982; Glick Schiller 1999), the phenomenon of transnational migration has

been acknowledged only intermittently in migration scholarship. Second, the concept

of changing conjunctures allows migration scholars to better assess the dynamics,

class configurations and possibilities of migrants’ future cross-border ties. It isincumbent upon scholars of transnational migration to examine to what extent the

further developments of processes of capital accumulation – including the power of

cross-border institutions of financial and regulatory power (European Union, World

Trade Organization, North American Free Trade Agreement, Frontex, InternationalOrganization for Migration) and the power and pre-eminence of globe-spanning

corporations – have fundamentally altered the conditions for either physical or social

mobility for people around the world. In light of these changes, the global perspective

on migration offered in Nations Unbound requires updating in order to speak to the

current new period of dispossession.

The terms dispossession and displacement can be quite useful in precisely

indicating the changes that are transforming the world within the current historical

conjuncture. Dispossession can be defined as a process of capital accumulation

through the direct seizure of land, raw materials and human labour from those who

previously possessed it (Harvey 2003). Some of the initial capital that fuelled the

growth and expansion of Europe and the development of the USA took place through

such a process. Current scholarship revives Rosa Luxemburg’s argument that

accumulation by dispossession is an ongoing but constantly reconstituted feature of

the expansion of capitalism (Carbonella and Kasmir 2015). The privatization of public

resources and spaces that take place within urban regeneration processes and the

renewed seizing of land and resources among marginalized people are forms of

dispossession. Similarly, the transformation of human bodies into a commodity to be

bought, trafficked, or stored by multi-scalar agencies including private detention

centres and prisons is part of a process of accumulation through dispossession.Violent force in the forms of wars and conquest accompanies accumulation through

dispossession. Dispossession leads to various forms of displacement that range from

the forcible removal of people from their land and neighbourhoods, through urban

restructuring and privatization, to the economic restructuring that strips people of their

social positions and hopes for the future.

In the current global conjuncture with its new forms of dispossession, millions of people confront displacement and the need to migrate, yet the risks, costs and barriers

have become much higher. It is disingenuous to approach the current world situation

without acknowledging that it differs in significant ways from the migration regimesthat constituted the setting within which so much of the transnational migration

scholarship summarized by Waldinger was conducted. Certainly a concept such as

interpolity cannot begin to speak to the transformations of the past two decades.

Currently, border regimes include but are not delimited by the regulatory power of






the legal and police systems of nation states. National border controls intersect with

the operations of the multinational privatization of border surveillance and of the

restriction and regulation of mobility.

Entire migration industries (Sorensen 2014) have arisen to accumulate capital by

the surveillance, control and amassing of displaced people. Access to asylum, theright to move and settle, and family reunion migration have become severely

restricted; the borders have been securitized; and short-term highly controlled contract

work has once again become a favoured labour policy of states and employers. These

new strictures, tensions, growing disparities and struggles are not visible in the pages

of The Cross-Border Connection.

While the transformations of the costs, challenges and possibilities of mobility and

settlement are not addressed by Waldinger, they are increasingly the topic of an

emerging literature (Andersson 2014; Carbonella and Kasmir 2015; De Haas 2012;

De Genova and Peurtz 2010; Sassen 2014; Sorensen 2014). Conceptualizing theglobal conjuncture and its displacement of those cast as natives as well as foreigners

creates a new form of scholarship, a displacement studies, that can not only provide

adequate social theory, but can also allow us to contribute to multi-scalar movements

for social justice (Feldman-Bianco 2012).

Acknowledgement

I thank the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology for continuing institutional support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There are several recent introductory overviews (Faist, Fauser, and Reisenauer 2013;

Vertovec 2009) as well as multiple significant edited volumes in various languages (see e.g.

Nieswand and Drotbohm 2014).

2. Other processes of accumulation and dispossession extend back to the beginning of state

formation.

3. For further conceptual work that develops these points, see Glick Schiller (2009) and

Glick Schiller and Caglar (2011).

4. Waldinger ’s insightful earlier work on the changing opportunity structures offered by

various local industries such as New York City’s garment trade, and its reconfigurations within

global restructurings of production, which have altered the global positioning of the city, could

be profitably reread within this proposed framework.

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Vertovec, S. 2009. Transnationalism. London: Routledge

Waldinger, R. 2015. The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and their

Homelands. Cambridge. MA: Harvard.

NINA GLICK SCHILLER is Emeritus Professor in the Department of SocialAnthropology at the University of Manchester and Research Associate, Max Planck

Institute for Social Anthropology Halle (Saale), Germany.

ADDRESS: Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester and

Research Associate, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Advokatenweg

36, 06114 Halle (Saale), Germany.

Email: [email protected]




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Explanatory Frameworks Transnationa Multiscalar 2015