Working Papers Series #16 Transnational Communities: Their Emergence and Significance in the Contemporary World System* Alejandro Portes Department of Sociology Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA aportes@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu April 1995 Copyright 1995 Alejandro Portes *Keynote address delivered at the 19th annual conference on the Political Economy of the World- System: Latin America in the world-economy, North- South Center at the University of Miami, April 21, 1995. I acknowledge the assistance of Patricia Landolt, Maria Pozas, and Min Zhou who contributed significantly to my reflection on the topic. However, they bear no responsibility for the final content. The aphorism "capital is global, labor is local" sits at the base of an edifice built relentlessly during the last half century. From different theoretical quarters, this edifice has been celebrated as the final triumph of free trade and economic rationality or denounced as the tomb of proletarian rights and national liberation. Whatever the outlook, the narrative that follows portrays an increasingly bound global economy with capital--criss-crossing the earth in search of accumulation. The success of these initiatives correlates inversely, in most cases, with the economic autonomy achieved by national states and the economic prerogatives of local labor. For the most part, however, the momentum acquired by global capitalist expansion is such as to sweep away everything in its path, confining past dreams of class equity and autonomous national development to the dustbin of history. The process of capital going abroad in search of valorization is, of course, nothing new and is indeed the cloth from which numerous accounts of the growth of the modern world-system have been fashioned. What is new at present are the modalities and intensity of the process, driven by technological improvements in communications and transportation. Today instantaneous investments and disinvestments are made in the bourses of remote Asian and Latin American countries and, as Castells (1980) puts it, a garment design conceived in New York can be transmitted electronically to a factory in Taiwan, and the first batches of the product received in San Francisco in a week's time. The advantages of the process seem to be entirely on the side of those able to avail themselves of the new technologies, thus turning globalization into the final apotheosis of capital against its adversaries, be they state managers or organized workers. Yet, as sociologists we are professionally trained to look at the dialectics of things and hence understand that a social process of this magnitude can not be all one-sided. By its very momentum, the process is likely to trigger various reactions giving rise to countervailing structures. In the end, the technology-driven revolution that we are witnessing at century's end may not usher the era of unrestrained global capitalism after all, but a new form of that age-old struggle of exchange versus use values or, put differently, of the formal rationality of law vs the substantive rationality of private interests. As a contribution to this analysis, I attempt here to give theoretical form to the concept of transnational communities, as a less noticed but potentially potent counter to the more visible forms of globalization described in the recent literature. I embark in this task not without some hesitation since the concept of transnationality, like that of globalization itself, threatens to become part of one of those passing fads that grip social scientists' attention for a while only to fade into oblivion. I believe, however, that there is enough real substance here to make the effort worthwhile. If successful, the concept may actually perform double duty as part of the theoretical arsenal with which we approach the modern world-system but also as an element of a more neglected enterprise, namely the analysis of the everyday networks and patterns of social relationships that develop in and around that system. The latter goal belongs in the realm of a mid-range theory of social interaction which I will seek to outline after considering two past initiatives in the same general direction. Failed Mid-range Efforts: Labor Standards and Flexible Specialization From policy and academic quarters, there have already been efforts to come to terms with the new mobility of capital by finding ways to rein its footloose ways. One of these efforts has seen institutional economists, industrial sociologists, and trade unionists deplore the consequences of de- industrialization in the developed world and call for governmental measures to reverse it. This approach pits the regulatory capacity of national states against the global opportunities for profit created by new technologies tapping on vast differentials in wage levels. The result has been the Labor Standards movement which seeks to restrict imports produced under conditions which violate labor rights commonly accepted in the First World. In the words of one of the movements' most prominent academic supporters: . . . new communication technologies have virtually eliminated international barriers to trade. They have brought the most extreme income disparities in the world into play, and this change has happened vary rapidly. . . If you let the market play itself out, it could undermine our capacity to redeploy the economy towards high-wage productive strategies. We can't get to the high-wage business strategy because it . . . is continually being undermined by the attraction of essentially a Third World system (Piore 1990: 48-49). This contest of domestic and globalized interests has so far produced some interesting ironies such as North American industrialists, formerly notorious opponents of organized labor, becoming ardent advocates of trade unions and workers' rights abroad. Spearheaded by such powerful organizations as the International Labour Office, the effort to reproduce the achievements of two centuries of labor struggles in Europe and North America in the newly industrialized countries of the periphery has met with some notable formal successes. Since the mid-1980s, for example, the United States Congress has enacted four different laws that make access to the United States market contingent upon respect of "internationally recognized labor rights". The United States has also sought to introduce the issue of international labor rights into multilateral trade agreements. In the European Union, workers' rights were taken up in the community's Charter of Fundamental Rights of Workers in 1989. Although provisions vary widely, they are all guided by the same premise that poor working conditions in one country will adversely affect labor and competitiveness in others (Lawyers Committee for Human Rights 1991). These impressive declarations contrast markedly with their failure to alter conditions on the ground. The fundamental reason is that the task of enforcing such lofty goals falls on peripheral governments that are not keen to do. Officials in these nations know that excessive zeal in applying imported labor standards would only lead to the exodus of foreign investments to the next-door labor surplus country. Their position is buttressed by arguments about the long-term consequences of labor-intensive export industrialization. Linda Y. C. Lim, a Chinese Singaporean economist puts this argument succinctly: While initially low labor standards may be one of the factors attracting investors, export manufacturing itself tends to raise these standards . . . In Thailand, as in other developing countries, successful export manufacturing has rapidly expanded the industrial proletariat and labor organization, arguably at an earlier stage of development than occurred historically in the developed countries themselves (Lim 1990: 93). The attempt to impose First World standards in the less developed countries leads to another perverse consequence, namely the transfer of many productive activities to the informal sector. Though well- concealed from public view, informal subcontracting and off-the-books hiring represent important mechanisms in labor-surplus economies to escape costly state regulation. Formal industry and commerce in these countries commonly avail themselves of this strategy, creating in the process a working-class segmented between a relatively high-paid and protected minority and a mass of unprotected workers in manifold informal activities (Beneria and Roldan 1987; Castells and Portes 1989). In these contexts, the "underutilization" of labor by the formal sector is, in many cases, more apparent than real. The literature documents a number of instances in which the problem is not the absorptive capacity of the modern economy, but the ways in which it utilizes labor in order to by-pass relatively advanced regulatory structures (Fortuna and Prates 1989; Birbeck 1979; Davies 1979). A dense network of formal-informal relations is characteristic of peripheral economies with extensive rules and indicates, in turn, the futility of attempting to equalize labor market conditions on the basis of externally imposed standards. By the same token, this situation points to a theoretical dead-end, namely the effort to apprehend a global process on the basis of normative structures designed to regulate national economies. A second mid-range approach to productive globalization was pioneered by economists Michael Piore and Charles Sabel who theorized the experience of the small-firm economy of central Italy into a new model of industrial organization. In their view, the old model of mass production based on Taylorist principles is being superseded by new forms of flexible production based on smaller units able to nimbly adapt to changes in the world market. This structural change coincides with the globalization process and makes use of the same technologies. It is precisely through them that formerly centralized assembly line production can be parceled out to smaller units and thereby rendered more flexible (Piore and Sabel 1984; Sabel 1982; 1986). Simultaneously, flexible specialization opens up new opportunities for artisans and small producers to insert themselves into the networks of global trade. This is what happened in the central Italian province of Emilia Romagna where networks of skilled workers and artisans managed to create a competitive export economy based on technological prowess and cooperative relations. Italian students of this experience have been skeptical about the possibility of reproducing the industrial know-how and bounded solidarity on which it is based in other national contexts (Capecchi 1989; Brusco 1982). Nevertheless, Piore and Sabel forged ahead, defining the process as universal and identifying numerous other "industrial districts" where, in their view, it is also taking place. Sabel went as far as suggesting that informal activities in Latin America and other Third World regions may be converted, under certain conditions, into models of flexible specialization, reproducing the small firm successes in central Italy. In his words: The second surprising setting in which flexible specialization might emerge is the immeasurably vast and poorly understood informal sector in Latin American economies. . . It would not be the first time that such a thing happened: many of the small firms in the Third Italy that today vaunt their numerically controlled machines and foreign customers had their start when large firms decentralized production in the early 1970s to avoid growing union control (Sabel 1986: 48). The problem with this optimistic scenario is that it finds few instances of empirical support. Examples of communities of successful integrated producers and exporters are exceptional, being particularly rare in Latin American countries. The global wave of industrial re-structuring has not substituted Fordist production in the de-industrializing areas of the advanced countries by flexibly specialized districts in the backward ones. Instead, re-structuring has, for the most part, merely transplanted assembly line production organized along typical Taylorist lines to export zones in the Third World. The production regime in these zones can be every bit as harsh and mind- numbing as those documented at the height of assembly line production in the industrialized countries (Fern ndez-Kelly 1983; Deyo 1989; Perez- Sainz 1994). Back in the First World, there is evidence that the experiences of successful small firms do not so much oppose as complement the long-term plans of large corporations. Although portrayed as organizational dinosaurs by some advocates of flexible specialization, many corporations have proven quite adept at appropriating the ideas of small innovators. As Bennett Harrison (1994) has noted in his recent critique of the flexible specialization school, such appropriation can occur either through the direct acquisition of successful small companies or through copying and internalizing their technological breakthroughs. Although the founders of the raided small companies can benefit from these transactions, their activities do not provide a systemic counter to the dominance of large-scale capital. In fairness to Piore and Sabel, they show themselves quite aware of the depredations of runaway industries in the periphery as well as of the ability of some large firms to implement flexible and innovative production arrangements in the advanced countries (Piore and Sabel 1984; Sabel 1986). However, if their analysis were limited to these points, it would be no different from so many reports of global re-structuring or competition among factory regimes in North America, Europe, and Japan. The core point that makes their argument attractive is the vision of an emerging opportunity for grassroots economic actors to gain a niche in an expanded global system (Harrison 1994). Unfortunately, this is also the most doubtful part of their story. Hence, like the effort to stop the excesses of transnational capitalism with nationally imposed labor standards, the promise of a new economic order where the coordinated activities of artisans and small entrepreneurs can out-compete the corporate giants falls short. Although one perspective comes from the practical realm of trade unions and the other from the academic field of institutional economics, the two coincide in keeping labor local while conceding globality to large-scale capital ventures. Neither national laws nor cooperative efforts of small producers are enough by themselves to counterbalance that age-old tool of the moneyed class: its footlooseness, its ability to identify profitable options world-wide and seize them or buy out those initially profiting from them. To be effective, any social reaction to current trends must have some of the same elements of geographic mobility and, more importantly, it must be driven by the same forces promoting industrial re-structuring rather than running against it. The Onset of Transnational Networks The popular response to the globalization of capital has been more subtle than the imposition of labor standards and more widespread than the emergence of flexible industrial districts. It consists of the gradual growth of communities that sit astride political borders and that, in a very real sense, are "neither here nor there". The economic activities that sustain these communities are grounded precisely on the differentials of advantage created by political boundaries. In this respect, they are no different from the large global corporations, except that these enterprises emerge at the grassroots level. A group of well-informed social anthropologists has pioneered in the identification of this phenomenon and in the attempt to make theoretical sense of it. In their words: We define "transnationalism" as the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi- stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders. . . An essential element . . . is the multiplicity of involvements that transmigrants sustain in both home and host societies. We are still groping for a language to describe these social locations (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Blanc-Szanton 1994: 6). Their puzzled attitude toward this emergent phenomenon is understandable when we begin to grasp the array of activities that it comprises and the potential for social and economic transformation that it holds. The existing literature suggests three tentative theoretical points: 1) That the emergence of these communities is tied to the logic of capitalism itself. 2) That, while following well-established sociological principles of the development of social structures, these communities represent a distinct phenomenon at variance with traditional patterns of immigrant adaptation. 3) That because the phenomenon is fueled by the dynamics of globalization itself, it has greater growth potential and offers a broader field for popular initiatives than alternative social structures. Let us begin by looking at the origins of these communities. As the preceding quote indicates, they are composed by immigrants and friends and relatives of immigrants. Public opinion in the advanced countries has been conditioned to think that contemporary immigration stems from the desperate quest of Third World peoples seeking to escape poverty at home. In fact, neither the poorest of the poor migrate nor is their move determined mainly by individualistic calculations of advantage. Instead contemporary immigration is driven by twin forces that have their roots in the dynamics of capitalist expansion itself. These are, first, the labor needs of First World economies and, second, the penetration of less developed countries by the productive investments and consumption standards of the advanced societies. Contrary to widespread perceptions, immigrants come to the wealthier nations less because they want to than because they are needed. A combination of social and historical forces has led to acute labor scarcities in these economies. In some instances, these are real absolute scarcities such as the dearth of industrial workers in Japan and the deficit in certain professions, such as nursing and engineering in the United States. In other instances, however, the scarcity stems from the culturally-conditioned resistance of native-born workers to accept the low- paid menial jobs commonly performed by their ancestors (Piore 1979; Gans 1992; Portes and Guarnizo 1991). The list of such stigmatized occupations is large and includes, among others, agricultural labor, domestic and other personal services, and garment sweatshop jobs (Sassen 1989). By 1990, the foreign-born population of the United States had reached almost 20 million, the largest absolute total in the century (Fix and Passel 1991; Rumbaut 1994). The legislated loopholes of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) plus new generous provisions in the 1990 Immigration Act virtually guarantee that this absolute number and the proportion that immigrants represent in the total U.S. population will increase significantly by the century's end. In Germany and France, despite official termination of the foreign guestworkers program in the 1970s, immigrant communities have continued growing through a variety of legal loopholes and claudestine channels (Zolberg 1989; Bade 1995). Today, Germany has a foreign population of 7 million or roughly 9 percent of the total, a proportion quite similar to that in the United States (Mnz and Ulrich 1995; Rumbaut 1994). Even in ethnically homogenous Japan, labor scarcity has prompted a variety of legal subterfuges including the use of foreign company "trainees" and visa overstayers to perform line industrial jobs. By 1990, the foreign- born population of Japan numbered about 1.1 million, still an insignificant proportion of the total, but expected to double during the present decade (Cornelius 1992). The other side of the equation is the effects of the globalization process in the supply of potential immigrants. The drive of multinational capital to expand markets in the Third World and, simultaneously, to take advantage of its reservoirs of labor has had a series of predictable consequences. Among them, are the remolding of popular culture on the basis of external forms and the introduction of consumption standards bearing little relation to local wages (Alba 1978). The process pre-socializes prospective immigrants about life abroad and increases them to move because of the gap between local realities and imported consumption aspirations. Paradoxically, this process does not so much affect the very poor, as working- and middle-class sectors who are frequently the most exposed to marketing messages and cultural symbols beamed from the advanced world. (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Portes and Bach 1985). The fundamental point is that contemporary First World-bound immigration is not a contingent process, but one driven by the very dynamics of global capitalism. For this reason, the immigration flow to the developed world can be confidently expected to continue in the years ahead. This foreign population provides, in turn, the raw material out of which transnational communities develop. The Rise of Transnational Enterprise Immigrant workers attracted by growing demand in the advanced countries for fresh sources of low-wage labor soon become aware that the pay and labor conditions in store for them do not go far in promoting their own economic goals. To by-pass the menial dead- end jobs that the host labor market assigns them, they must put into play their networks of social relationships. Immigrant social networks display two characteristics that those among domestic workers do not generally have. First, they are simultaneously dense and extended over long physical distances. Second, they often generate high levels of solidarity by virtue of uncertainty. The sociological principle that exchange under conditions of uncertainty creates stronger bonds among participants applies particularly well to immigrant communities (Kollock 1994). Their economic transactions in the receiving country tend to occur with little initial information about the trustworthiness of exchange partners and the character and reliability of state regulation. This high uncertainty creates the need to "stick together" and to remain loyal to trustworthy partners, regardless of tempting outside opportunities (Guarnizo 1992). Geographically extended and solidary networks among immigrants can be put into play for a number of strategic initiatives. At first, discussed by Sassen (1994), leads to long distance, cross-national labor markets where job opportunities in far away locations are identified and appropriated. A second, described by Zhou (1992), leads to living arrangements designed to lower consumption costs and produce savings for business or real estate acquisition abroad. A third, extensively studied by Light (1984); (Light and Bonacich 1988), leads to the emergence of credit associations where pooled savings are allocated on a rotating basis. A fourth, which is our topic of inquiry, consists of appropriating the price and information differentials between sending and receiving countries through the creation of transnational enterprises. Grassroots transnational enterprise benefits from the same set of technological innovations in communications and transportation that underlie large- scale industrial relocations. A class of immigrant entrepreneurs who shuttles regularly across countries and maintains daily contact with events and activities in them could not exist without these new technologies and the options and lower costs that they make possible. Put more broadly, these grassroots initiative do not rise in opposition to global re- structuring or technological innovation, but is driven by them. Through this strategy, labor (initially immigrant labor) joins the circles of global trade imitating, often in ingenious ways, the initiatives of large corporate actors. This parallel between the strategies of corporations and immigrant entrepreneurs is only partial. Though both make extensive use of new technologies and both depend on price and information differences across borders, corporations rely primarily on their financial muscle to make such ventures feasible while immigrants must depend entirely on their social networks (Guarnizo 1992; Zhou and Bankston 1994). The long distance ties that underlie the viability of such initiatives are constructed through a protracted and frequently difficult process of adaptation to a foreign society that gives them their distinct characteristics. In turn, the onset of this economic strategy strengthens such networks. Hence, transnational entrepreneurs expand and thicken, in a cumulative process, the web of social ties that make their activities originally possible. The Construction of Transnational Communities The cumulation of activities across national borders by former immigrants may lead eventually to a qualitatively distinct phenomenon. This qualitative leap, adumbrated by the recent experience of a few immigrant groups, is what the concept of transnational community attempts to capture. Before discussing its formal characteristics, a few examples from the recent literature are in order to put some flesh into this so for abstract considerations. There exists today in the Dominican Republic literally hundreds of small and medium enterprises that are founded and operated by former immigrants to the United States. They include small factories, commercial establishments of different types, and financial agencies. What makes these enterprises transnational is not only that they are created by former immigrants, but that they depend for their existence on continuing ties to the United States. A study of 113 such firms conducted in the late 1980s found that their mean initial capital investment was only $12,000, but that approximately half continued to receive periodic capital transfers from abroad averaging $5,400. Moneys were remitted by kin and friends who remained in the U.S. but were partners or co-owners of the firm. In addition to capital, many firms received transfers in kind, producer goods or commodities for sale (Portes and Guarnizo, 1990:16). In the course of fieldwork for this study, we found a second mechanism for capital replenishment, namely owners' periodic trips abroad to encourage new potential immigrant investors. Such promotions may take place directly, through existing kin and friendship networks, or through the mediation of Dominican-owned financial and real estate agencies in New York City. These trips are also used by factory owners and managers to sell abroad part of their production. Proprietors of small garment firms, for example, regularly travel to Puerto Rico, Miami, and New York to sell their wares. It is common practice to have a pre-arranged verbal agreement with buyers abroad, including small clothing stores. On their way back to the Dominican Republic, the informal exporters fill their empty suitcases with inputs needed for business such as garment designs, fabrics, and needles. To the untrained eye, these loaded down international travellers appear as common migrants visiting and bearing gifts for their relatives back home. In reality, they are engaged in a growing form of transnational informal trade. The information requirements for this traffic are invariably transmitted through kin and friendship networks spanning the distance between places of origin and destination. By the same token, it is clear that the men and women who operate these firms are not "return immigrants" in the traditional sense of the term. Instead, they make use of their time abroad to build a base of property, bank accounts, and business contacts from which to organize their return home. The result is not final departure from the United States, but rather a cyclical back-and-forth movement through which the transnational entrepreneur makes use of differential economic opportunities spread across both countries (Portes and Guarnizo 1990: 21-22). A similar story, but with a unique cultural twist is told by David Kyle (1994) in his study of the Otavalan indigenous community in the highlands of Ecuador. Traditionally, the region of Otavalo has specialized in the production and marketing of clothing, developing and adapting new production skills since the colonial period under Spain. During the last quarter of a century or so, Otavalans have taken to traveling abroad to market their colorful wares in major cities of Europe and North America. By so doing, they appropriate the exchange value pocketed elsewhere by middlemen between Third World indigenous producers and final consumers. After years of traveling abroad, they have also brought home a wealth of novelties from the advanced countries, including European and North American wives. In the streets of Otavalo, it is not uncommon to meet these white women attired in traditional indigenous garb. During the same period, semi-permanent Otavalan enclaves began to appear abroad. Their distinct feature is that their members do not make their living from wage labor or even local self-employment but from the sale of goods brought from Ecuador. They maintain a constant communication with their home town in order to replenish supplies, monitor their telares or garment shops, and buy land. The back-and-forth movement required by this trade has turned Otavalans into a common sight, not only at the Quito airport but also in street fairs in New York, Paris, Amsterdam, and other large cities. According to Kyle, Otavalans have even discovered the commercial value of their folklore and groups of performers have fanned throughout the streets of First World cities. The sale of colorful ponchos and other woolens accompanied by the plaintive notes of the quena flute have been quite profitable. The economic success of these indigenous migrants is evident in their near universal refusal to accept wage labor abroad and in the evident prosperity of their town. Otavalo is quite different in this respect from other regions in the Andean highlands. Its indigenous entrepreneurs and returned migrants comprise a good portion of the local upper stratum, reversing the traditional pattern of dominance by white and mestizo elites. A third variant involves immigrants of considerably greater economic power. The growth of Asian communities in several U.S. cities has created opportunities for moneyed entrepreneurs from Taiwan, Hong-Kong, and South Korea to invest profitably in the United States and, in the process, become themselves part of the transnational community. Smith and Zhou (1995) explain, for example, how the rapid growth of Chinese home ownership in the New York suburb of Flushing has been largely financed by new Chinese banks established with Taiwanese and Hong Kong capital. The rapidly growing Chinese population in Flushing and adjacent cities in the borough of Queens is very motivated to acquire their own homes, but lacks the knowledge of English and credentials to seek credit from mainstream institutions. To meet the burgeoning demand for housing loans processed in the immigrants' own language, local entrepreneurs went to Taiwan and Hong Kong to pool capital for new banks and new investors came to the United States bearing the necessary resources. As a result, Chinese-owned banks in Flushing proliferated. Although small by conventional standards, they serve simultaneously the economic interests of the immigrant community and those of overseas investors. Three thousand miles to the West, the city of Monterey Park, California has been transformed into the "first suburban Chinatown" largely by the activities of well-heeled newcomers (Fong 1994). Many Taiwanese and Hong Kong entrepreneurs established businesses in the area less for immediate profit than as a hedge against political instability and the threat of a Chinese communist takeover. Opening a new business in the United States facilitates obtaining permanent residence permits and many owners bring their families along to live in Monterey Park, while they themselves continue to commute across the Pacific. The activities of these "astronauts", as they are dubbed in Chinese because of the frequency of their air travel, adds a new layer of complexity to the transnational community. In this instance, returned immigrants do not invest U.S.-accumulated savings in enterprises at home; rather immigrants bring new capital to invest in firms in the United States. The birth of a child in American soil guarantees U.S. citizenship and anchors the family definitively in their new setting. As a result of the twin processes of successful investments and citizenship acquisition, Chinese immigrants have moved swiftly from the status of marginal newcomers in Monterey Park to the core of the city's business class (Fong 1994). A fourth instance of transnationalization illustrates another facet of the process, namely the political and social influence that immigrant groups can acquire over the sending communities. The example is based on Smith's (1992) study of a small farming community in the Mixteca region of Mexico near the city of Puebla. Smith tells of the excitement of members of the Ticuani Potable Water Committee upon learning that new tubing had arrived and, with it, the long-awaited solution to the town's water problem. They immediately made plans to go inspect the new materials and organize their installment. Smith (1992:1) comments: On first sight, this is no more than an ordinary civic project. . . Yet when we consider certain other aspects of the scene, the meaning becomes quite different. The Committee and I are not standing in Ticuani, but rather on a busy intersection in Brooklyn. . . The Committee members are not simply going to the outskirts of the town to check the water tubes, but rather they are headed to JFK airport for a Friday afternoon flight to Mexico City, from which they will travel the five hours overland to their pueblo, consult with the authorities and contractors, and return by Monday afternoon to their jobs in New York City. As it turns out, the potable water project was only the latest of a series of public works in Ticuani initiated and paid for by its New York immigrants. For this particular project, the expatriate community contributed more than $50,000 gathered in donations of $100 or less. The waterworks also marked the twentieth anniversary of the successful completion of the first transnational public project and, for this occasion, the New York Committee unveiled its new seal, to be used in all future correspondence and public events. It read: "Por el Progreso de Ticuani: Los Ausentes Siempre Presentes. Ticuani y New York." (For the Progress of Ticuani: The Absent Ones, Always Present) (Smith 1992:1-2). I have dwelled on these examples at some length to give credibility to a phenomenon that, when initially described, strains the imagination. A multitude of similar examples could have been used, as illustrated in the pioneering collection by Basch and her collaborators (Basch, Glick Schiller and Blanc-Szanton 1994). The central point that these examples illustrate is that, once started, the phenomenon of transnationalization can acquire a cumulative character expanding not only in numbers but in the qualitative character of its activities. Hence, while the original wave of these activities is economic and their initiators can be properly labeled transnational entrepreneurs, subsequent activities encompass political, social, and cultural pursuits as well. Alerted by the initiatives of immigrant entrepreneurs, political parties and even governments have established offices abroad to canvass immigrant communities for financial and electoral support. Not to be outdone, many immigrant groups organize political committees to lobby the home government or, as in the case of the Mexican community studied by Smith, influence the local municipality on various issues. To provide yet another example, Colombian and Dominican immigrants in New York City organized during the 1970s and 1980s to demand the right to vote in elections in their respective countries and obtain the support from their home governments to combat negative stereotypes of their communities in the United States (Sassen 1979). Churches and private charities have joined the traffic between home country and immigrant community with a growing number of initiatives involving both. Finally, the phenomenon can acquire a cultural veneer as home performers and artists use the expatriate communities as platforms to break into the First World scene and as returnee artists popularize cultural forms learned abroad. The end result of this cumulative process is the transformation of the original pioneering economic ventures into transnational communities, characterized by dense networks across space and by an increasing number of people who lead dual lives. Members are at least bilingual, move easily between different cultures, frequently maintain homes in two countries, and pursue economic, political, and cultural interests that require a simultaneous presence in both. It bears repeating that the onset of this process and its development is nurtured by social forces unleashed by contemporary global capitalism. Paralleling Marx's description of the proletariat as created and placed into the historical scene by its future class adversaries, so today's roaming capitalist ventures have given rise to the conditions and incentives for the transnationalization of labor. The Structure and Long-Term Consequences of Transnationalization If conditions confronting today's U.S.-bound immigrants bore some similarity to those faced by their European predecessors at the turn of the century, one could wager that they would not have moved so decisively in the direction of transnationalization. That earlier era featured two significant conditions different from today. First, a plethora of relatively well paid wage jobs in industry; second, costly and time-consuming long-distance transportation. The first condition militated against widespread entrepreneurial ventures and gave rise over time to stable working- class ethnic communities. Most Poles and Italians in the United States became workers and not entrepreneurs because labor market opportunities in the industrial cities where they arrived made this an attractive option. By contrast, today's uncertain and minimally paid service sector jobs strongly encourage immigrants to seek an alternative automonous path. Second, communications and transportation technologies were such as to make it prohibitive for turn-of-the-century immigrants to make a living out of bridging the cultural gap between countries of origin and destination or lead simultaneous lives in both. No trans-Pacific commuting was possible. No means were available for Polish peasants to check how things were going at home over the week-end and be back in their New York jobs on Monday. Contemporary transnational communities are distinguished from comparable activities of earlier immigrant waves by three features. First, the instantaneous character of communication across vast geographic distances; second, the large numbers involved in these activities; and, third, the tendency for these activities to become normative in the immigrant community driven by the numbers who take part and the dearth of alternative opportunities in the host society. Just as migration abroad became the norm in certain regions of the Third World in the past (Massey and Garcia Espa€a 1987), today participation in transnational enterprises is turning into "the thing to do" among certain groups of immigrants. As I have repeatedly noted, transnational communities do not emerge in opposition to global capitalism nor is there anything in their operation that is set explicitly against the designs of large corporations. In this sense, the analogy with Marx' account of the emergence of the industrial proletariat partially breaks down. Grassroots transnational enterprises and the manifold social and political activities that follow them are not necessary for the structures of global capital accumulation; they represent instead the means through which some members of the working class escape their hold. Over time, however the process can acquire novel characteristics and lead to unexpected consequences. As more and more common people become involved in transnational activities, they come to subvert one of the essential premises of productive globalization, namely that labor stays put and that its reference point for wages and work conditions remains local. Immigrant workers who become transnational entrepreneurs not only deny their own labor to businesses abroad and at home, but become conduits for information about different labor conditions and novel economic opportunities. The growth of socio-political and economic ties across borders can also provide a measure of protection for immigrant workers against the vulnerability of cultural isolation and an inferior legal status in the First World. Flows of capital from newly industrialized countries of Asia to North American cities work in the same direction by facilitating home ownership and a swift move into self- employment in the immigrant community. The significance of transnationalization is already apparent in smaller labor-exporting countries. In the peripheral nations of the Caribbean Basin as well as those Asian countries with long ties to the United States, such as Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines, the entire economy has been remolded by the twin processes of corporate globalization and immigrant transnationalization. Scarcely a family exists that does not have a relative abroad and the back-and-forth movement of people, information, and investment has become integral to family mobility strategies. Consumption patterns and life styles are shaped as much by the global media as by the activities of former immigrants transformed into transnational entrepreneurs. Even governments get into the act by seeking, as in the case of President Aristide of Haiti, to transform the immigrant community into a symbolic "10th Department" in search of its contributions and political support (Glick Schiller et al 1992). It is still too soon to predict what the long-term implications of the process of transnationalization will be. While in smaller peripheral countries it already has great importance, in larger labor-exporting nations, such as Mexico, its visibility and significance remain limited. Yet, as the process continues, it may become a significant factor modifying a strategy of capitalist accumulation based on wage differentials and information asymmetries between different regions of the world. The main reason for this expectation is that, unlike labor standards or flexible specialization, the emergence of transnational communities places everyday people in the same plane as the corporate actors engaged in global re-structuring. The level of information and expertise thus acquired may partially neutralize, the power of First World employers to simultaneously exploit Third World populations at home and their immigrants abroad. Whether the process comes to acquire this systemic consequence or not, the spectacle of common people criss-crossing the world in search of opportunities otherwise denied to them possesses enough intrinsic appeal to deserve attention. 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