Characteristics of Immigrant Transnationalism in ... - Metropolis BC

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This leads to our principal conclusion: whereas the American research identifies
transnationalism as a form of integration, if not assimilation (Portes 2001; Kivisto 2001; Itzigsohn and
Saucedo 2002), our Vancouver results locate membership in a transnational field among immigrants
who are weakly connected to the Canadian nation state. For this group, at least at present,
transnationalism is not a subset of integration, but an alternative to it.
Conclusion
In light of the few large surveys of transnational behaviour in Canada it would be unwise to press a
Canadian-American contrast too far. From our analysis we would concur with the American research
that transnational practices are widely shared in such routine events as maintaining social contact but
are far more restricted when it comes to entrepreneurial transactions. So too there is evidently
considerable variation among national-origin groups in their scale of activity, and to these differences
we would also add the distinctive effects of class of immigrant landing.
But our indicators of transnationalism also diverge from the influential CIEP study in important
respects. Our findings indicate that transnational entrepreneurs are far more likely to be recent
immigrants and not to hold Canadian citizenship. So too they are not well-specified by socio-economic
status. Our profile is closer to the original anthropological representation of transnationalism as an
alternative to social and economic integration—a view reinforced in Vancouver by more focussed
qualitative studies (Ley 2000, Waters 2002)—rather than to the view advanced by Portes and his team
that transnational behaviour is an aid to economic integration, indeed to assimilation, in the United
States for well-settled immigrants (Portes 2001, Kivisto 2001).