Transnational Lives and De-Nationalization

In the context of growing international mobility of persons around the globe, social scientists have focused their attention on the political participation of immigrants.  This research provides descriptive and explanatory information regarding the immigrants’ level of integration and empowerment in host societies.  While the traditional focus has been on resource-poor immigrant groups fleeing poverty or political persecution and on the host population’s attitudes to them, a more recent literature has examined the political attitudes and behavior of middle-class, highly-skilled professionals benefitting from the removal of barriers to mobility in different world regions.  Implicit in these literatures is the factual hypothesis that, other factors held constant, immigrants’ levels of emotional and political engagement with host countries are lower than those of nationals.  This paper expands on these literatures to encompass the emotional and practical political attachment and engagement of citizens with different degrees of transnational experience and different amounts of transnational skills.  The goal is to examine the extent to which the lower attachment to host communities and the lower political engagement generally observed among foreign residents not only results from lower social and economic capital, as often emphasized, but actual cognitive de-nationalization processes.  To answer this question, I use survey and qualitative information from two research projects, Eumarr and Eucross.  These data sources of information include unusually rich information on respondents' background and experiences which allow for a rigorous statistical analysis of the mechanisms (social and cognitive) that mediate between migration and other transnational experiences and skills and de-nationalization.