Summary

International migration presents the human face of globalization, with consequences that make headlines throughout the world. The Cross-Border Connection addresses a paradox at the core of this phenomenon: emigrants departing one society become immigrants in another, tying those two societies together in a variety of ways. In nontechnical language, Roger Waldinger explains how interconnections between place of origin and destination are built and maintained and why they eventually fall apart.

Newcomers moving away from the developing world find that migration is a good thing, letting them enjoy the benefits of residence in the developed world, some of which they send on to their relatives at home in the form of remittances. Residing in a democratic state, free from the long arm of their place of origin, emigrants mobilize to produce change in the homelands they left. Emigration states, in turn, extend their influence across boundaries to protect nationals and retain their loyalty abroad. Time, however, proves corrosive, and in the end most immigrants and their descendants become progressively disconnected from their home country, reorienting their concerns and commitments to the place where they actually live.

Although widely studied, cross-border connections remain misunderstood, both by scholars convinced that globalization is leading to a deterritorialized world of unbounded loyalties and flows, and by policy makers trying to turn migration into an engine of development. Not since Oscar Handlin's classic The Uprooted has there been such a precisely argued, nuanced study of the immigrant experience.

Choice Review

When are immigrants "us"? When are they "them"? Waldinger (sociology, Univ. of California, Los Angeles) implores readers to reframe the debate from a before-after dichotomy to a new transnational approach, revealing migrants to be here, there, and in-between at all stages of their migration tenure. That is, they do not incorporate (integrate) in a linear trajectory but rather through a jagged, interwoven, intersocietal convergence and intersocietal divergence in their political, economic, social, and cultural affairs. The ability to engage with those left behind actually increases through migration as immigrants now have more money, influence, and capacity to exert. Their ability to function as immigrants, untethered from the support of left-behind communities, is bolstered by social remittances, reverse remittances, and acquisition of new social and political skills attained in the receiving state. As a result, there is a bidirectional, continuing exchange of ideas, support, money, and new migrants. The book's real strength is in the elegance of the author's argument, supported by evidence that transnationalism itself is not static but an ongoing dialectic. Focuses mostly on the US case, raising questions about how the argument holds elsewhere. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections. --Robin A. Harper, York College