FROM IMMIGRANT TO TRANSMIGRANT - THEORIZING TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION

Contemporary immigrants can not be characterized as the ''uprooted.'' Many are transmigrants, becoming firmly rooted in their new country but maintaining multiple linkages to their homeland. In the United States anthropologists are engaged in building a transnational anthropology and rethinking their data on immigration. Migration proves to be an important transnational process that reflects and contributes to the current political configurations of the emerging global economy. In this article we use our studies of migration from St. Vincent, Grenada, the Philippines, and Haiti to the U.S. to delineate some of the parameters of an ethnography of transnational migration and explore the reasons for and the implications of transnational migrations. We conclude that the transnational connections of immigrants provide a subtext of the public debates in the U.S. about the merits of immigration.