There also are disagreements over how transnationalism affects newcomers’ commitment to their adopted lands.
Most Latino immigrants maintain ties to their native countries by sending money, calling or traveling to their homelands, but most see their future in the United States, a new study has found. Just 9 percent of the immigrants are “highly attached” to their birth countries — defined by researchers as doing all three “transnational activities”: Sending funds, phoning weekly or going home in the past two years. Most sustain moderate bonds by doing one or two. But those attachments fade with time, according to a Pew Hispanic Center report based on a nationwide survey of Latinos.
“What’s striking is that although the long-term trend is toward disengagement . . . most immigrants are involved in some form of contact with the place which they’re from,” said Roger Waldinger, a sociology professor at UCLA and author of the report. “What we have is a population that, as we tried to describe, is between here and there.”
Although research on transnationalism — having a life that straddles two countries — is fairly recent, scholars debate how new the phenomenon is. Some say Latino immigrants are in the vanguard of a phenomenon fueled by advances in communications and transportation.
Many others, including Waldinger, say this behavior is similar to that of 19th- and 20th-century European immigrants, who often sent letters and money across the Atlantic and later returned home to live. But no one collected the data back then, so direct comparisons are impossible, he said.