Citiwire.net

For Release Sunday, September 13, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group

BOSTON — Get ready for the century of the transnational man–or woman.

Alvaro Lima offers a perfect example. He was born in Brazil, so he’s Brazilian. Having grown up in South America, he’s a Latino. But he’s the director of research for the Boston Redevelopment Authority–qualifying him, of course, as a Bostonian.

If that’s not sufficiently confusing, check Lima’s regular activities. In Boston, he interacts frequently, by phone or e-mail, with family, friends and colleagues in Brazil. He switches between American and Brazilian television stations on Boston’s cable system. As a legal resident of the U.S., he can return to Brazil frequently, where he freely advises Brazilian officials on economic and urban development issues. Because he is married to a Canadian, his two sons, both born in the U.S., hold passports from three countries.

In the old days, migrants typically left their home towns forever, boarded ships, sailing to America to stay forever, their contacts with “home” steadily diminishing. Foreign tongues were lost in a generation or too. We called the process “Americanization.”

Now migrants may have a MySpace page. Many e-mail or call home daily or weekly. By satellite TV, they check home country news, sometimes even continue to vote in their home town and country elections. Often they have savings accounts, sometimes even mortgages back home. They watch the Internet for good travel deals to visit their stay-put relatives. And they send money–a stunning $150 billion a year, enough cash to prop up the economies of entire nations.

“We transnationals,” says Lima in a recent essay– “Living Here And There” — “are boundary spanners and border jumpers. We are explorers and crafters.”

Such talk may easily turn America’s anti-immigration commentators apoplectic. And to many of us transnationalism is unsettling. It blurs all our familiar distinctions between citizen and alien, native and foreign, local and global. And it undercuts the idea of sovereign America, the world dominant power that defines its own way and then curtly tells other cultures and powers to take a second row seat. But “through the kaleidoscopic lens of transnational experience,” notes Lima, “you no longer see homogenous, mono-cultural nation-states; you see people in motion between places and perspectives.” Immigrants aren’t simply told “go assimilate” –rather they “can maintain global ties and bring to and take away rich value from America.”

And the transnational experience, Lima contends, promotes “global brain circulation.” Immigrants aren’t limited to enterprises like ethnic restaurants or small markets; they can use e-mail, telephones, global banking to venture into global markets–import and export, shipping, communications services, new technologies.

It’s true the U.S. has received millions of unskilled (and in many cases undocumented) workers. But many immigrants arrive with great “prepaid” skills. More than 53 percent of immigrants who came to the Detroit area in 2004-2005 had bachelor’s degrees or higher. A recent count of immigrants in Massachusetts found 36 percent had bachelors, masters or PhD degrees–educational value calculated to otherwise cost the state, through its own schools and colleges, $31 billion to produce.

Global cities welcoming all, building on the energy of their immigrants, may be the lead beneficiaries of the transnational phenomenon. These are the metropolises–New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, the San Francisco Bay Area, Vancouver, London and the like–that constantly reinvent themselves precisely by liberating their immigrants to innovate on broad intellectual, artistic, economic fronts. Foreign-born professionals lead in 56 percent of Silicon Valley start-ups.

More and more, it’s transnationals who are the sparks, the contact points of the most imaginative global citistates–in stark contrast, often, to their bumbling national governments.

It’s transnationals, for example, who provide the top talent in films, introducing a dizzying array of diverse cultures, hybrid forms of identity and community, a clear advance from sterile old Hollywood formulas. They end up, Lima asserts, “promoting higher levels of multiculturalism and tolerance.”

The same’s true in politics. Candidates for presidency of the Dominican Republic routinely stop in New York City and Boston for campaign funds–and votes. A Mexican restauranteur from Chicago helped build new roads in the Mexican town of Teloloapan; the townspeople responded by electing him mayor in a landslide. Ideas of free and fair elections flow mostly from the U.S. to the developing world. But transnational migrant workers from Mexico and Central America were critical in helping our Service Employee International Union gain better pay and working conditions for janitors.

Could a repressive right-wing wave in U.S. politics squash these kinds of developments? It seems highly unlikely. The Internet, phone and other global electronic connections are a vital, probably irrepressible force. And then there’s the transnationals’ breadth and smarts. Immigrants are historically the folks with the most moxie, ambition, in any society. That’s the one constant that’s likely to endure.

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