When people migrate to a new country, the assumption has long been that they gradually leave their old lives behind – learning the new language, adopting local customs, and eventually assimilating. But reality tells a different story. Peggy Levitt’s landmark research on Dominican migrants between the village of Miraflores and Boston, Massachusetts, showed that migrants don’t simply uproot and resettle – they build lives that span two worlds simultaneously. Scholars like Levitt and Robin Cohen have identified a set of concrete factors that drive the emergence and growth of these transnational communities. Understanding these factors helps explain why, today, millions of people around the globe live, work, and belong to more than one society at a time.
Table of Contents
What is a transnational community?
A transnational community is a social group whose members maintain meaningful, sustained ties across national borders – economically, politically, culturally, and socially. As Basch, Schiller, and Blanc-Szanton famously defined it, migrant transnationalism is the process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. These are not brief, nostalgic connections to a homeland. They are active, ongoing networks through which people send money, share ideas, vote in home-country elections, and shape the lives of those they left behind.
Crucially, transnational communities are not entirely new. Levitt acknowledged that earlier generations of migrants also kept ties with their homelands. What has changed in the modern era is the intensity and durability of those ties – and several specific factors account for this transformation.
Easier travel and communication
The most immediately visible driver of transnational community formation is the dramatic reduction in the cost and difficulty of staying connected across borders. Levitt identifies the ease of travel and communication as one of the primary factors heightening the intensity and durability of transnational ties among contemporary migrants. Where earlier migrants relied on infrequent letters and rare visits, today’s migrants can call, video chat, and send money home in minutes.
Advancements in technology, transportation, and communication have transformed the maintenance of cross-border connections. The proliferation of social media, the reduction in airfare costs, and the near-instant nature of digital communication have made it possible for a migrant in Boston to stay as informed about daily life in their home village as a neighbor living next door. In Levitt’s study of Miraflores, more than half of non-migrant households spoke to relatives in Boston by phone at least once a month – and this was before smartphones and social media became universal. Today, platforms like WhatsApp, Zoom, and Facebook mean that geographic distance no longer translates to social distance.
The economic role of migrants in home countries
A second major factor is the increasingly central economic role that migrants play in their countries of origin. Levitt points to the growing importance of migrants’ economic contributions to sending-country economies as a key element sustaining transnational ties. When migrants send remittances home, they are not simply transferring money – they are actively participating in the development and daily survival of their origin communities.
The scale of this economic involvement is striking. Emigrants and diaspora members send an estimated $685 billion via formal channels annually to low- and middle-income countries – a figure that far exceeds all official foreign aid combined. In countries like Nepal, Tajikistan, and Honduras, remittances sent through formal channels form more than a quarter of overall GDP. These financial flows create a structural interdependence between migrant and home communities that reinforces ongoing connection.
Beyond money, migrants also transfer what Levitt termed social remittances – the ideas, practices, identities, and social capital that flow between host and home communities. Social remittances capture the notion that migration entails the circulation of ideas, practices, skills, identities, and social capital between sending and receiving communities, not just financial transfers. A migrant returning home for a visit carries with them new norms around gender equality, democratic participation, or civic engagement – all of which can reshape local life in ways that further reinforce the transnational link.
The role of sending states
Transnational communities do not form in a political vacuum. Sending states – the governments of migrants’ home countries – have increasingly recognized their diaspora populations as economic and political assets, and have taken deliberate steps to maintain those ties. Levitt identifies attempts by sending states to legitimize themselves by providing services to migrants and their children as another factor sustaining transnational engagement.
This dynamic plays out in many ways. Increasing numbers of sending states are systematically offering social and political membership to migrants residing outside their territories – through dual citizenship laws, overseas voting rights, and dedicated government ministries for diaspora affairs. The Dominican Republic, for example, extended dual citizenship to emigrants and guaranteed their voting rights abroad. Mexico established programs to match migrant remittances with local and federal government funds for community development. In recent decades, a growing number of governments have implemented diaspora engagement policies to mobilize transnational resources to support long-term national development.
These policy moves create a feedback loop: when a home state actively reaches out to its diaspora, migrants feel acknowledged as full members of the national community despite their physical absence, which encourages deeper and more sustained transnational engagement.
The influence of receiving states
Receiving countries – the nations where migrants settle – also play a defining role in shaping transnational community formation. Levitt highlights the increased importance of receiving-country states in determining the character of transnational ties. Specifically, the policies and climate of the host country directly affect how migrants orient themselves – whether they invest fully in local integration or look elsewhere for belonging and security.
When receiving states reduce social rights or create an uncertain legal environment for migrants, the calculus of belonging shifts. Levitt observed this in the United States during the 1990s, when legislative reforms scaled back welfare benefits and food stamps for many legal immigrants. Without the full protections of citizenship, migrants’ sense of long-term membership in the host society was weakened – making continued investment in home-country ties more appealing and rational. The receiving state’s policies, in short, help determine whether migrants feel they have a secure stake in their new home or whether they need to keep their options – and their ties – open elsewhere.
Societal and political marginalization
Closely related to receiving-state policies is the broader experience of marginalization. When migrants face racial discrimination, social exclusion, or limited political representation in their host society, they often turn toward their co-ethnic communities and home-country networks for solidarity and identity. Robin Cohen noted that many states, frightened by the extent of international migration and their inability to construct a stable, pluralist social order, have turned away from the idea of assimilating or integrating their ethnic minorities.
For their part, minorities subject to this exclusion often respond by holding more firmly to their cultural identities and transnational networks. Populations fleeing political unrest, ethnic conflict, persecution, and discrimination based on religious beliefs face severe challenges in rebuilding lives abroad – and these shared experiences of exclusion become powerful forces in binding transnational communities together. When a migrant is told – explicitly or implicitly – that they do not fully belong in their new country, they often invest more deeply in the community that does make them feel they belong: their diaspora network.
This dynamic is not merely psychological. It has practical consequences. Marginalized communities build their own institutions – churches, hometown associations, cultural organizations, and mutual aid networks – that operate transnationally and reinforce ties between migrants and their places of origin.
An ideological shift toward pluralism
Perhaps the most structural of the factors discussed by Levitt and Cohen is an ideological shift in how societies and scholars think about identity, belonging, and migration itself. For much of the twentieth century, the dominant model in migrant-receiving societies was assimilation: the expectation that migrants would shed their old identities and become fully absorbed into the new national culture. Hyphenated identities – being Dominican-American, or British-Pakistani – were sometimes viewed with suspicion.
That framework has increasingly given way to a tolerance of cultural pluralism. Cohen describes the possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in host countries with a tolerance for pluralism as a feature of modern diaspora existence. Under this shift, maintaining a dual or multiple sense of belonging is no longer seen as a failure of integration but as a legitimate and even celebrated aspect of modern life. Multicultural policies in countries like Canada, the UK, and Sweden have formally recognized this, creating space for communities to maintain their languages, customs, and cross-border identities.
Levitt argued forcefully that assimilation and transnational ties are not incompatible – in fact, ongoing transnational practices are not antithetical to full incorporation into host society. Migrants can, and do, integrate into their new countries while simultaneously sustaining rich connections to their countries of origin. The ideological acceptance of this dual reality has itself become a condition that enables transnational communities to persist and grow without social stigma.
Since the 1990s, due to advances in digital communication alongside fast and cheaper travel, interconnectedness between individuals and communities that transcends international borders has changed the way we think about international migration. What was once seen as an anomaly is becoming the norm. Living transnationally – with roots, obligations, and identities in more than one place – is increasingly how migration works in the twenty-first century.
How these factors work together
What makes these factors analytically important is that they do not operate in isolation. Cheaper communication enables migrants to stay close to home; economic interdependence gives them a reason to; sending states create formal incentives for continued engagement; receiving-state policies and social exclusion push migrants back toward their networks of origin; and an ideological embrace of pluralism removes the cultural pressure to choose one identity over another. Together, these elements create the structural conditions under which transnational communities not only form but persist across generations.
Empirical studies have indicated that migrants may maintain strong transnational ties over sustained periods and that these ties can even become trans-generational, with children and grandchildren of original migrants continuing to identify with and participate in their ancestral communities. Transnational community formation, in this sense, is not simply a reaction to migration – it is a durable social structure with its own logic and momentum.
What do you think? Given that both sending and receiving states shape whether transnational communities thrive or weaken, which actor – home government or host government – do you think bears greater responsibility for the wellbeing of transnational migrants? And as pluralism becomes more accepted in some parts of the world but faces political pushback in others, how might shifting attitudes toward multiculturalism affect the future of transnational communities?
References
- https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-transnational-villagers/paper
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Cohen
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275757085_The_Transnational_Villagers
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/114565.The_Transnational_Villagers
- https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rs/more.php?id=47_0_3_0
- https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/transnationalism-in-migration-and-development
- https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/diaspora-engagement-policies
- https://comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40878-016-0032-0
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peggy-Levitt
- https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/72/3/507/2471481
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360602452_Global_Diasporas_An_Introduction
- https://andrewblackman.net/2010/04/global-diasporas-an-introduction-by-robin-cohen/
- https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/the-transnational-villagers/
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4744987/
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