Forming a Transnational Narrative: New Perspectives on European Migrations to the United States

NEW CONCEPTUAL MODELS for understanding international migration to the United States are currently entering our historiography. One pertains to the role of race in a structuring of political rights and social and economic opportunity that assisted in the incorporation of white Europeans, while depressing the social position of Asians, Africans, Native Americans, and Latinos.' The other, which is the subject of this essay, stresses the transnational experiences of international migrants. Resisting the logic of the conventional categories of analysisimmigration, emigration, assimilation, acculturation, etc.transnationalism posits the existence of modes of understanding and of behavior that span homelands and destinations and defy conventional time and space, especially national boundaries. American immigration historians have been slow to adopt transnational conceptual models to analyze the general outlines of international migration and its consequences.2 Transnationalism has largely been employed not by historians, but by contemporary behavioral scientists who have been almost exclusively involved in analysis of the late twentieth century migrations of non-European peoples to the United States. These analysts have often proceeded on the premise that transnationalism is a recent phenomenon which has only been made possible by jet travel and instantaneous