MÓDULO FORMATIVO 5

Migrants perform different social actions and have different social ties which bound them to the sending and receiving societies. Boccagni has conducted research in Italy amongst Latin American migrants from a three-level actor-centred perspective: individual, family and the social group level. He found that there is little evidence of transnational social ties – migrants linking back to the social institutions of their homelands (political system, market and civil society), but that transnational ties occur rather at an individual level. Boccagni’s first terrain of analysis concerns the actual relevance of transnational ties and the possibilities of keeping them alive by examining immigrants’ personal attitudes towards their identity and belonging. Many of his respondents felt proud of their home country, their host country (Italy) on the other hand was for them simply the country in which they earned their living. Whether they felt exploited and misunderstood, or helped and supported, they did not feel equally at home in both countries. Transnational ties are mostly a tool for coping with the negative effects of an extended separation from one’s family, in terms of both time and space. Boccagni discovered that rather than transnational, most social ties maintained at distance are actually translocal, as they involve only a

specific local community of origin (Ibid.). His fieldwork results suggest scepticism about the over-generalised uses of the term ‘transnationalism’.

Faist (1999, 2000) has distinguished three types of transnational social ties amongst migrants – transnational kinship groups (prevalent amongst first generation migrants, e.g. family), transnational circuits (e.g. business networks) and transnational communities (high degree of social cohesion and strong symbolic and social ties). Faist and Boccagni are therefore similar in distinguishing the first individual and family level which then moves on to a higher, societal level. Janine Dahinden goes further in her study (2010) where she analysed migrants´ practices and has taken into account both physical mobility and locality. Her central argument is that transnational formations result from a combination of

country, on the other. Mobility has to be understood here as the physical movement of people in transnational space. Locality means being rooted or anchored – socially,

economically or politically – in the country of immigration and / or in the sending country. Locality and mobility are entwined - ´roots and routes´ (Clifford, 1994, in Dahinden, 2010:52) are both present in different transnational formations. Dahinden draws four ideal types of the transnational: localised diasporic transnational formations (low physical mobility and high degree of local ties), localised mobile transnational formations (high physical mobility and high locality), transnational mobiles (high mobility, low locality) and transnational outsiders (low mobility and low local anchorage).

Group 1, Localised diasporic transnational formations have low levels of transnational mobility, but high levels of locality in the receiving and low levels of locality in the sending country. People who develop this kind of transnationality have experienced one- way migration in their family from a place of origin to a new country, and perhaps also a secondary migration to a third or fourth country. (Dahinden, 2010:54) This group is called ’diasporic’ by Dahinden because the group members usually speak about themselves as classical diasporas. Group 2, Localised mobile transnational formations is characterised by more elements of mobility – simultaneously high levels of mobility and high levels of locality in both receiving and sending countries. In my research, I assume that they might be the majority of those first generation ’new’ migrants who move regularly back and forth between the new country and Estonia for their vacations, family events and in many cases also for business reasons. They are integrated into social and professional networks in both countries although not at the same level.

Group 3, Transnational mobiles according to Dahinden (p. 56) are “more or less permanently on the move”, they have low levels of locality in the receiving country (countries) but high levels of locality in the sending country. Mobility has become an important part of those peoples’ life strategies. In Dahinden’s typology, transnational mobiles contains of two very different groups, on one hand the ’transnational elite’ – highly skilled professionals who travel because of better career possibilities, and on the other hand – ’new nomads’ (Tarrius, 2000), the so-called nomadic entrepreneurs (suitcase traders and seasonal workers) who are creating circular territories and can simultaneously belong here and there, who do not want to settle in a receiving country. The fourth group, transnational outsiders (Dahinden, 2010:57) are people with both low transnational

mobility and locality. They do not circulate between countries and are not embedded locally. Dahinden mentions asylum seekers and undocumented migrants as a part of this group who are cut off from their families and countries of origin, but who cannot build up stable transnational fields. Some of these ideal types may actually not exist in practice or may be not relevant in case of Estonians in Scotland.

In addition, I realised that Dahinden’s model of transnational migrants lacks two important dimensions. First, one has to take in consideration the intensity and scope of transnational actions. Second, on top of taking a look at physical mobility (in terms of moving between countries and practicing transnational spatial activities), one has to take in consideration social capital and social mobility, and the ties migrants create in the receiving society – bonding and bridging (see Ryan, 2011 and 2016). According to Ryan (2011), bridging is the reaching out over differences, and it is more useful in terms of gaining social capital, while bonding is a comforting relationship which is based on similarities (ethnic or cultural, for example). I will look at this more closely in my empirical chapters and try to develop my own model in chapter 9.