Abstract
Transnationalism refers to the increased interlinkage between people all around the world and the loosening of boundaries between countries. With respect to migration, transnationalism describes immigrants’ engagement in economic, socio-cultural, and political activities across borders.
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Notes
- 1.
In the public as well as in the scientific discourse there is a heated debate on the concepts of integration and assimilation. The concept of assimilation is criticized for rendering incorporation into a receiving country as a unidirectional process, which requires the immigrants to give up their identity, which is said to be normatively as well as descriptively problematic with respect to pluralistic societies. However, the concept of assimilation as proposed by Esser (2006) distinguishes between processes and outcomes. While assimilation is one alternative investment strategy, Esser’s model allows for several outcomes. Moreover, as an outcome, assimilation merely describes a situation in which parity between two groups. This situation of similarity can, however, be reached via different routes and does not necessarily require a unidirectional adaption of the immigrant group.
- 2.
This work’s understanding of trajectories is level-based. Consequently, trajectories are defined as a time-dependent pattern of increase, decrease, or stability of a characteristic of interest (George 2009: 164–165).
- 3.
Of course, this is not entirely correct, as it is actually a trend analysis based on the same persons. Potentially selective panel attrition can thus result in inaccurate estimates. However, the direction of any bias is likely to be negative that is a potential bias will lead to an underestimation of the visits to the country of origin. If transnational involvement is linked to the drop-out probability, the only theoretical plausible way is that transnational involvement increases the probability to drop out, which then leads to a sample from which transnational involvement is underestimated. A potential remedy for this problem lies in using cross-sectional weights. But since appropriate weighting schemes for immigrants in the SOEP are not available (see Diehl and Schnell 2006: 798 for details), the waves of the SOEP in the descriptive analysis are treated as independent, unweighted samples.
- 4.
Moreover, income does not have a curvilinear relation to visiting the country of origin, as the inclusion of a squared income term does not result in a significant effect (results not reported here).
- 5.
Comparing models 4 and 5, a Hausman-test (p<0.001) favours the fixed effects model, suggesting that important, time constant unobserved characteristics have been omitted from the random effects model.
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Schunck, R. (2011). Immigrant Integration, Transnational Activities and the Life Course. In: Wingens, M., Windzio, M., de Valk, H., Aybek, C. (eds) A Life-Course Perspective on Migration and Integration. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1545-5_12
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