This article examines the perceptions of Canada by Nigerian youths who have a desire to immigrate to Canada. It explicates why Canada remains an attraction to prospective immigrants in spite of documented accounts of racial discrimination against racial minorities in Canadian society. Based on semistructured and focus group interviews with thirty-five Nigerian youths, the study demonstrates that Nigerian youths chose Canada because the Canadian postsecondary education system can provide them with foreign credentials that will give them access to economic power and social prestige in an unfair and unequal Nigerian society. The youths are also impressed by the transnational lives of their peers and social groups residing in the West. Although the youths criticize the dysfunctions of key institutions of Nigerian society, especially the education institution, they do not deplore social inequality per se.

In Senegal, love, respect, and compatibility have historically figured into marital calculations, yet prospective husbands must also provide material support. After decades of stagnant economic growth, good providers are hard to find. In this article we examine two strategies that women employ in an attempt to achieve economic security: nonmarital sex and transnational marriage. Though recent anthropological literature proposes a global transition toward companionate marriage, evidence from Dakar suggests that Senegalese women are prioritizing short-term material gain over longer-term projects of social reproduction. Transnational marriage and nonmarital sexual relationships illuminate women’s new strategies to stabilize their social positions in increasingly precarious times.

Scholars have recently argued that globalisation processes have significantly altered not just the productive but reproductive sphere. ‘Reproduction’ is formulated to include both biological and social reproduction, and which at the individual level requires ‘care’ throughout the life-cycle – that is, from cradle to grave – in sustaining the body in its corporeal and affective aspects. Concepts that have emerged in the literature in recent decades such as the ‘transnational family’, ‘global householding’ and ‘global care chain’ draw attention to the observation that the formation and sustenance of households is increasingly reliant on the international movement of people and transactions among household members residing in more than one national territory. Applying these notions to the context of the city-state of Singapore where the predicament around eldercare (resulting essentially from rapid fertility decline, shortages of Singapore women's reproductive labour and rigidities in the gender household division of labour) accompanies rapid globalisation, this paper examines strategies of care substitution which draw on the lowly paid labour of two groups of transnational subjects (mainly women) – transnational domestic workers working in the privatised sphere of the home, and transnational healthcare workers in institutionalised settings. The paper reflects upon the interdependencies between flows of transnational care migration and delves into the gender and class implications of these flows for an understanding of the links between transnational migration and social change.

This article examines how Syrian immigrants in Argentina responded to the intersection of transnational politics and nascent nationalisms between 1900 and 1922. In particular, it studies the role of Syrian intellectuals in Argentina in advocating a variety of political allegiances that changed over time as their homelands suffered a series of intense political transformations during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The emergence of Syrian and Lebanese ethnic identities as well as an Arab racialised identity was the product of distinct political programmes circulating in the Levant and among the Syrian émigré communities in the Americas, threatening to undermine the immigrant colony's sense of community.

This paper examines the transnational migratory process and identity formation of a Japanese astronomer, Mutsumi Ishitkuta (born 1930). He moved to Peru in 1957 to build a solar observatory in the Andes Mountains, and settled there to develop a foundation for basic sciences in Peru. Through life story interviews, I explore the transnational migratory process of this scientist focusing on his profession in relationship to certain people, events, and situations that contributed to his identity formation. Tracing Ishitsuka's story may enable us to deepen our thoughts of scientists' identity and their role for the society.

This paper evaluates the use of the concept of ‘diaspora’ as an alternative way of thinking about transnational migration and ethnic relations to those ways that rely on ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’. It examines the heuristic potential of the concept, as a descriptive typological tool and as a social condition and societal process. Both approaches are described and key elements within each are assessed. It is argued that although very different in emphasis, and though containing different strengths and weaknesses, both approaches are problematised by their reliance on a notion of deterritorialised ethnicity which references the primordial bonds of ‘homeland’. It is also argued that both approaches are unable to attend fully to ‘intersectionality’, that is to issues of class, gender and trans-ethnic alliances. It is concluded that although potentially enabling a broader sweep of questions that can relate to the transnational aspects of population movements and settlement, the concept of ‘diaspora’, as it has been articulated so far, does not overcome fully some of the problems identified with the ‘ethnicity’ problematic.