El lunes 10 de septiembre de 11:30 a 13:30 tendrá lugar el seminario abierto “Mapping and Understanding Transnational Phenomena”, en la Sala de Juntas de la Facultad de Letras de la UAB com parte del kick-off del proyecto de investigación The Role of Social Transnational Fields in the Emergence, Maintenance and Decay of Ethnic and Demographic Enclaves, MINECO-FEDER (CSO2015-68687-P; 2016-2020).
El seminario consta de dos presentaciones:
José Luis Molina, UAB, “Industrial districts and migrant enclaves: a complex interaction”.
The relationship between Industrial Districts (IDs) and migration enclaves have been studied so far mostly through examples of ethnic economies developed within the district, and/or the racists conflicts that achieved notoriety through the media. In this study we contend that there is a more general and complex interaction among the two phenomena (interconnected clusters of local industries and migration enclaves, i.e. high concentration of international migrants from a single nationality). This interaction is mediated by the local context, the national regulations, and the international market organization. Taking as example the Ceramic ID of Castelló (Spain), we show as this ID with a low index of job informality, combined with other job opportunities, and a unique “institutional completeness” created by the Romanian evangelical churches during the first stages of migration, set up the conditions for a non-conflictive Romanian migrant enclave that accounted almost for the 10% of the province total population in 2008. After the financial crisis 2008-9, the ID exhibited better resilience than other sectors in a context where most migrants lost their jobs in construction and were forced to a national and international circular mobility but taking Castelló this time as the anchor point instead of the origin places in Romania. Finally, we suggest that this interaction should be analysed under the general dynamics of the international organization of value, and the exigencies of flexibility and reduction of costs that frame both IDs and migration processes.
Ashton Verdery, PennState, “Mapping transnational networks with a link-tracing design”.
While the concept of transnationalism has gained widespread popularity among scholars as a way to describe immigrants’ long-termmaintenance of cross-border ties to their origin communities, critics have argued that the over- all proportion of immigrantswho engage in transnational behavior is low and that, as a result, transnationalism has little sustained effect on the process of immigrant adaptation and assimilation. In this article, we argue that a key shortcoming in the current empirical debate on transnationalism is the lack of data on the social networks that connect migrants to each other and to nonmigrants in communities of origin. To address this shortcoming, our analysis uses unique binational data on the social network connecting an immigrant sending community in Guanajuato,Mexico, to two destination areas in theUnited States.Wetest for the effect of respondents’ positions in cross-border networks on their migration intentions and attitudes towards theUnited States using data on the opinions of their peers, their par- ticipation in cross-border and local communication networks, and their structural position in the network. The results indicate qualified empirical support for a network-based model of transnationalism; in the U.S. sample we find evi- dence of network clustering consistent with peer effects, while in the Mexican sample we find evidence of the impor- tance of cross-border communication with friends.