The transnational strategies of migrants: - marginalization or new forms of citizenship?

Certain activities among migrants take place in a social space spanning the sending and receiving societies. Migrants who e.g. take part in activities in hometown associations or in Islamic activism tend to do so in these social spaces, increasingly conceptualized as transnational. Our understanding of transnational activities and why they often form part of migrants’ everyday lives even decades after the break up from the sending society, is however limited. In some cases, the off-spring of migrants is also involved in transnational activities, a fact which is even more complicated to explain.

It has been suggested that transnational strategies are applied as a safety net to substitute for prospects of a secure future in the receiving society. Solidarities or obligations, sometimes in the shape of a social contract between stayers and leavers of a family, are another suggestion. While both these suggestions obviously have some resonance, against them goes the observation that those who take up transnational strategies are active and most capable of succeeding and managing their lives in the receiving society. In other words, the transnational engagements of migrants – their continued attachment to the sending society manifested in concrete actions – represents some mystery and bewilderment which is approached and discussed here by examining migrants to Denmark, more specifically the formation of hometown associations by Kurdish and Alevi migrants from Turkey on the one hand, and on the other women’s Islamic activism, carried out by young women of Moroccan descent. What are the motivations for these migrants to engage in transnational strategies? Are transnational activities a sort of escape from defeats in the receiving society for the migrants in question or could transnational strategies be regarded as a continuation of corresponding activities that these migrants have in the receiving society? The latter explanation opens a discussion of experiences of citizenship and the extent to which these experiences are transnational.