The New-Old Transmigrants, their Transnational Lives, and Ethnicization: a Comparison of 19th/20th and 20th/21st C. Situations.

Transnationalism has two interpretations. In the first one, transnationalism refers to some combination of plural-civic memberships , economic involvements, social networks, and cultural identities reaching across and linking people and institutions in two or more nation-states in diverse, multillayered patterns. The author uses this first interpretation and argues that this new transnationalism literature makes several incorrect assumptions about the nature of the last (1880s-1914) great wave of (im)migration to the United States and the historiography it generated and, on this basis, unsupported claims as to the supposedly novel features of its present-day successor and, specifically, the unprecedented transnational character of contemporary (im)migrants' lives.