Difference Between Multinationalism And Transnationalism

Human is considered to come from a concept called nation. But how can a human being come from a concept? And why do you call a human from various origins, multinational? This is due to a fact that our world is constructed upon countries that are absolute, eternal, and singular naturally occurring. Our identity is partially constructed upon socio-political imagination of a national identity; people, thus, prefer to categorize a person based upon a stereotypical imagination of national identity, instead of, one’s personal experiential relationship. In this essay, I am going to discuss the differences between transnationalism and assimilationist approaches to immigration.

In TedTalk we watched in lecture, the speaker emphasized locality than

First, economic transnationalism refers to entrepreneurs whose network of suppliers, capital, and markets crosses nation-state borders. It is based upon the idea that capital is global while labor remaining local. The sole component that is missing from this formulation is the professional middle class and brain-drain immigrants. Second, political transnationalism involves the political activities of party officials, governmental functionaries, or community leaders whose main goals are the achievement of political power/influence in the sending or receiving countries. Third, sociocultural transnationalism consist of activities oriented towards the reinforcement of a national identity abroad or the collective enjoyment of cultural events and

Transnationalism and diaspora have ‘fuzzy boundaries.’ Whilst, transnationalism implying to migrants’ durable ties across countries, diaspora refers to religious or national group living outside an imagined homeland. One of important features of diaspora is the refusal to assimilate.

Assimilation, on the other hand, is believed to equalize with the melting pot ideology, according to Randolph Bourne. He saw the new immigrants that entered US, as an antidote to what he feared was the petrification of the national culture. He asserts that immigrants were necessary to save us from our own stagnation. Assimilationist approach to immigration implies the loss of past identity and immigrants’ links with a single nation state. This approach prioritizes nation state as the main scale of analysis.

Migration has never been a one-way process of assimilation into a melting pot or a Multicultural salad bowl but one in which migrants, to varying degrees, are simultaneously embedded in the multiple sites and layers of the transnational social fields in which they live. This implies the fact that people were still lobbying for the government abroad. This is also not a new phenomenon, but only showed signs of intensification in recent years due to globalization – this allowed for it to happen easier than before with advancement in technology and