Traversing Ancestral and New Homelands: Chinese Immigrant Transnational Organizations in the United States

Over the past three decades, immigrant transnational organizations in the United States have proliferated with accelerated international migration and the rise of new transportation and communication technologies that facilitate long-distance and cross-border ties. Their impact and influence have grown in tandem with immigrants’ drive to make it in America—their new homeland—as well as with the need for remittances and investments in sending countries—their ancestral homelands. Numerous studies of immigrant groups found that remittances and migrant investments represented one of the major sources of foreign exchange of sending countries and were used as “collateral” for loans from international financial institutions (Basch et al. 1994; Glick-Schiller et al. 1992; Portes et al. 1999). Past studies also found that transnational flows were not merely driven by individual behavior but by collective forces via organizations as well (Goldring 2002; Landolt 2000; Moya 2005; Piper 2009; Popkin 1999; Portes et al. 2007; Portes and Zhou 2012; Schrover and Vermeulen 2005; Waldinger et al. 2008). But the density and strength of the economic, sociocultural, and political ties of immigrant groups across borders vary, and the effects of immigrant transnational organizations on homeland development vary (Portes et al. 1999, 2007). Nevertheless, the sum total of the transnational movements and the subsequent contributions of immigrants to families and communities left behind acquire structural importance for both sending and receiving countries as these flows affect both the pace and forms of incorporation of immigrants in the US and the economic prospects of those they left behind.