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JOURNAL TITLE:
Journal of American ethnic history
USER JOURNAL TITLE: Journal of American ethnic history
ARTICLE TITLE:
Nation of Migrants, Historians of Migration.
ARTICLE AUTHOR:
GOODMAN, ADAM
VOLUME:
34
ISSUE:
4
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2015
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7-16
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0278-5927
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Nation of Migrants, Historians of Migration
Author(s): Adam Goodman
Source: Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer 2015), pp. 7-16
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Immigration & Ethnic History
Society
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Nation of Migrants, Historians of Migration
Adam Goodman
The United States is a nation of immigrants, or so the saying
goes. This popular mythology continues to loom large in the twenty-­first
century, in no small part thanks to its constant reiteration and reinforcement
by public figures. Barack Obama’s 2013 Constitution Day and Citizenship
Day proclamation could have just as easily been an excerpt from John F.
Kennedy’s posthumously published 1964 book A Nation of Immigrants: “We
are a proud Nation of immigrants, home to a long line of aspiring citizens
who contributed to their communities, founded businesses, or sacrificed their
livelihoods so they could pass a brighter future on to their children.”1 The
media is also partially responsible. To give just one recent example, in a 2014
New York Times column titled “Still a Nation of Immigrants,” Charles Blow
asserted that “[t]he American melting pot appears to be heating up again,
and its ingredients have grown ever more varied.”2 These tired clichés are
all too common today, and reinforce inadequate and inaccurate stereotypes
of immigrants and the United States.
For most of the twentieth century, historians, like Chicago School sociologists before them, helped to create and cement the United States’ identity as
a nation of immigrants. Oscar Handlin’s Pulitzer Prize-­winning 1951 book
The Uprooted may have popularized the field of immigration history, but it
also did more than any other work to establish the “immigrant paradigm,”
or the traditional notion that the history of immigration to the United States
is the story of one-­way European immigration and assimilation—in short,
the “making” of Americans.3 Scholars like Rudolph Vecoli and John Bodnar offered important revisions to Handlin’s thesis, but their critiques still
treated Europeans as prototypical immigrants.4 Indeed, as George Sanchez
reminded us in a 1999 article published in this journal, the field of immigration history was “constructed around European immigrants being the norm
to understand the histories of all ethnic groups in the United States.”5 Or, as
Dirk Hoerder put it, “the gates of Ellis and Angel Islands admitted people
into the population long before historians, as gatekeepers of national lore,
admitted the newcomers—and resident Others—into national memory.”6
The dominance of the nation of immigrants paradigm within the scholarship gave European immigrants a privileged place in U.S. history, while
Journal of American Ethnic History Summer 2015 Volume 34, Number 4
© 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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treating non-­European immigrants as secondary actors, and excluding African Americans and Native Americans altogether. Over the last two decades,
historians have dismantled the nation of immigrants myth. Instead of examining stories of European immigration to the United States, historians
have turned their attention to the diverse origins and stories of people who
migrated to the United States. Scholars have rightfully incorporated Latin
Americans, Asians, and other non-­Europeans as central actors in U.S. history, but, for the most part, they have broadened the nation of immigrants
paradigm rather than replacing it. While this is both historically accurate and
important in contemporary political terms, doubling down on the nation of
immigrants paradigm does nothing to fold African Americans and Native
Americans into the larger narrative of U.S. history. Moreover, it fails to
recognize the fact that many migrants returned to their countries of origin,
thus reinforcing the stereotype of the United States as “a melting pot” and,
in turn, promoting notions of American exceptionalism.
Still, many recent trends in the field are encouraging. Scholars today
utilize multiple methods, rely on sources in multiple languages, and incorporate an interdisciplinary approach that, when necessary, pulls from sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, and legal studies. The best
work often bridges divisions within the discipline as well, and can best be
described as some combination of social, cultural, political, economic, and
diplomatic history. And, over the last fifteen years, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to migration rather than immigration. A search of
JSTOR’s 421 history journals indicated that the number of articles with the
words “immigration” or “immigrant” in the title increased over the course of
the twentieth century. Those whose titles contained the words “migration”
or “migrant” also increased, although not as rapidly. However, since 2000,
the number of articles with the words “migration” or “migrants” in the title
(349) has outpaced those with the words “immigration” or “immigrants”
(299).7
As the scholarship has evolved from immigration history to migration
history and mobility studies, institutions and professional organizations
have lagged behind in some respects. The field’s professional association
remains the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS).8 At the institutional level, many colleges and universities still offer courses in immigration—rather than migration—history, and a considerable number—if not the
majority—of job listings in recent years have been in immigration history.
An up-­to-­date examination of what migration and immigration historians
are teaching is needed since, as far as I know, the last systematic study of
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Goodman9
this sort was conducted over twenty years ago.9 If we were to examine the
content of the courses being taught and the work being done by members
of the IEHS, we would probably find that they reflect recent changes in
the field and developments in the scholarship. But language matters, and
conceptualizing our courses as immigration history and our field as immigration and ethnic history reinforces the nation of immigrants myth and
privileges histories of one-­way migration and community formation, even if
unintentionally. By contrast, using migration as an analytical tool to frame
the teaching and writing of U.S. history helps to actively combat this myth
and the destructive lore surrounding it. It also helps us see the United States
for what it is: a nation of migrants, rather than a nation of immigrants.
Migration has been “ubiquitous and ever-­present” throughout human history. Historians such as Dirk Hoerder, Leslie Page Moch, Patrick Manning,
Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen, Adam McKeown, and Jose Moya have all made
this point, in addition to situating humans as but one of many species with
a history of migration over the last five million years.10 However, world
historians have also stressed the importance of noting that not all migration
is the same, and human migration has changed over time. As McKeown and
Moya point out: “Moving may have been one of the elemental activities of
our species, along with eating and reproducing, but mass movement [which
they date to the middle of the nineteenth century] was a new phenomenon—
as was the related ‘massification’ of reproduction, production, trade, and
transportation, as well as communication, consumption, and culture.”11 The
growth of nation-­states in the late nineteenth century, and states’ subsequent
attempts to control migration across international borders through passports,
quotas, and citizenship, marked another important shift in the history of
migration.12
While the nation may be a useful unit of analysis to study movement
across international borders, it is limited in important ways. Putting U.S.
history in conversation with world history and treating the United States
as a nation of migrants allow us to think across temporal, geographic, and
political boundaries. In the process, we can de-­center the role of the nation-­
state and its relatively recently created and hardened borders, while still
recognizing it—and its growth—as important, albeit historically contingent.
By normalizing migration, rather than borders, U.S. historians have the
opportunity to depoliticize, to an extent, the highly controversial nature
of public and academic debates about immigration. Focusing on migration rather than immigration leads historians away from an “us vs. them”
mentality, and shifts the emphasis from the supposed history of American
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Journal of American Ethnic History / Summer 2015
exceptionalism to U.S. history as a part of world history, and the United
States as one of many nations of migrants.
A migration-­based approach—in which internal and international migrations, both short-­and long-­distance, are considered together rather than
separately—enables us to incorporate the free, forced, and coerced migrations that have shaped U.S. history into a single narrative: from Native
American migration before 1492 to the arrival of European colonizers, to
westward expansion and the Trail of Tears, to the spread of the railroads and
the arrival of the Asian labor immigrants who built them, to industrialization, urbanization, and the arrival of Europeans in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, to the two great migrations of African Americans,
to the internment of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans, to the
fall of the Rust Belt and rise of the Sunbelt, to the long history of Mexican
migration to the United States and the boom in Latin American, Asian, and
African immigrants since 1965.13 Seeing U.S. history as a product of international and internal migrations forces us to break down the artificial divisions that the nation of immigrants paradigm creates between (European)
immigrants and “others.” If, as Donna Gabaccia has argued, the creation
and persistence of the immigrant paradigm was meant to exclude African
Americans from the larger narrative of U.S. history, a migration paradigm
is a way to include African Americans and other non-­Europeans.14 Native
Americans, African slaves, Asian labor migrants, African Americans, temporary Mexican agricultural workers, and Southeast Asian refugees, among
others, all become integral actors in the nation of migrants narrative.
Treating European immigration as just one of the many important internal
and international migratory flows that shaped United States history also
allows us to bridge fictitious geographic boundaries and highlight regional
similarities, differences, and connections. Instead of being the focal point
around which U.S. history is told, in a migration paradigm, the Northeast
becomes the principal receptor of some of the earliest European and African
migrants and, later, Caribbean migrants. Meanwhile, the Southeast becomes
the place of forced slave migration, the place African Americans left during
the two great migrations, and the part of the country that until relatively
recently was notable for its lack of immigrants. And the West becomes the
region of Mexican and Asian immigration, and the destination of many
internal migrants over the last two centuries. Each region moves to the
forefront of the narrative at distinct moments, and all become essential to
the telling of U.S. history. Future work that does more to connect multiple
national historiographies and incorporate the literature on immigration with
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Goodman11
the literature on the settling of the West and other internal migrations is
something to aspire to.
The de-­centering of the Northeast as the focal point of U.S. history also
pushes back against the specious notion that equates being American with
being a person—or a descendant of someone—of European ancestry who
immigrated, naturalized, and assimilated. Immigration, assimilation, and
ethnic community formation are, of course, an important part of many
migrants’ experience, but they are far from the only ones. As scholars such
as John Higham, David Gutiérrez, Erika Lee, Mae Ngai, Paul Spickard,
Daniel Kanstroom, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Cindy Hahamovitch, Hiroshi
Motomura, and a growing number of others have shown, nativism, exclusion, internment, forced internal migration, and deportation are also integral
to the larger narrative of U.S. history.15 My own research on the history of
deportation has revealed that whereas the United States has granted permanent residency to 41 million people in the postwar period, it has carried
out more than 54 million deportations. This ultimately raises important
questions about the reputation of the United States as a nation that has
welcomed immigrants throughout its history, and forces us to rethink what
constitutes “the immigrant experience.”16
A migration-­based framework also requires historians to explore migrants’ countries of origin and many transnational connections. International
migrants are at once emigrants, migrants, and immigrants, leaving one
country and arriving in another—oftentimes passing through additional
countries before reaching their final destination. Most historians are familiar with Oscar Handlin’s iconic lines: “Once I thought to write a history
of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were
American history.”17 Far fewer, however, know that thirty-­eight years earlier,
in 1913, Swedish demographer Gustav Sundbärg made an inverse proclamation: “To discuss ‘Swedish emigration’ is the same as to discuss ‘Sweden’;
there is hardly a single political, social or economic problem in our country
which has not been conditioned, directly or indirectly, by the phenomenon
of emigration.”18 If the United States was a nation of immigrants, then
Sweden was a nation of emigrants.19 These identities are not always fixed
over time. Whereas Mexico was once a nation of emigrants, today it is also
a nation of immigrants and a nation of transit: hundreds of thousands of
Central Americans pass through Mexico each year. Some settle, but many
more continue north to the United States.
Indeed, from a world history perspective, the United States was anything
but exceptional. Adam McKeown has shown that international migration
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within Asia far outpaced European migration to the Americas from 1846
to 1940.20 And as Frank Thistlethwaite noted as early as 1960, considering
the mass European migration to the Americas as a “peopling of the United
States” distorts the history. Only three out of every five (33 million out of
55 million) Europeans who emigrated between 1821 and 1924 went to the
United States. Many others settled in Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and other
“nations of immigrants” in Latin America. Moreover, an estimated thirty to
forty percent of those who went to the United States—and an even higher
percentage of those who went to Argentina and Brazil—returned to their
countries of origin. Many Southern and Eastern Europeans, like a considerable number of Mexican migrants, just to name one other example, never
planned on becoming U.S. citizens.21
Placing migration in a global context also helps us to better understand
U.S. diplomatic and international history. Despite the prevailing political
and popular idea that immigration is a domestic issue, scholars have shown
that it is unquestionably an issue of foreign relations, shaped by large structural economic transformations, geopolitical relations, and shifting international migration control policies, among other factors.22 For example, it
is impossible to understand the history of Mexican migration to the United
States without understanding the history of the Mexican-­American War,
the spread of industrial capitalism and railroads on both sides of the border, the Mexican Revolution, U.S. labor contractors’ active recruitment of
Mexican migrants, the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol, the bi-­national
labor accords known as the Bracero Program, subsequent changes in U.S.
law ending the Bracero Program and putting a cap on Western Hemisphere
migration, and demographic and economic pressures in Mexico during
the twentieth century. Similarly, the history of Southeast Asian, Filipino,
or Central American migration to the United States cannot be understood
without close attention to the history of U.S. imperialism and intervention
abroad, in addition to local, national, and regional contexts, not to mention
macro-­historical processes. As migration scholar Hein de Haas has posited,
to understand migration, we must ask “how processes such as imperialism,
nation state formation, the industrial revolution, capitalist development,
urbanisation and globalisation change migration patterns and migrants’
experiences.”23
Although states, state policies, and macro-­historical and geopolitical
trends play an important role in shaping migratory flows, ultimately, in the
words of Dirk Hoerder, migration results from “the will of men and women
to fashion lives.”24 This type of history may be more difficult to research
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and write (than the history of national migration policy, for example), but it
is essential to understanding the experiences, motivations, and decisions of
migrants, and their diverse reasons for migrating. The narrative of a nation
of migrants enables historians to focus on the migrants themselves, and
their decisions to move to, from, and within the United States. It recognizes
migration as contingent: individuals’ decisions to migrate cannot be boiled
down to simplistic “push” and “pull” factors, and migration cannot be
predicted or explained by neoclassical economics or the new economics of
migration alone. People also migrate to reunite with family, or to flee natural
disasters, violence, political instability, or war. Oftentimes the decision to
migrate is the product of a combination of these factors.25
Historians must accept that we cannot always know or predict how migrants will act, and treating all migrants as the same, or presuming they will
act in a certain way or make the same decisions, does a disservice to the
field and to our readers. So, while we should acknowledge assimilation and
ethnic community formation, we cannot treat them as inevitable, and cannot
ignore return migration or the transnational, transborder, transregional, and
transcultural connections that shape migrants’ lives and nations’ histories.26
By recognizing migrants’ agency, historians can stress the important role that
migrants play in challenging and changing the immigrant experience and
what it means to be American. And by focusing on migrants and incorporating a nation of migrants paradigm, historians can help others understand
the history of the United States as the shared history of many migrations,
and the encounters that resulted from those migrations.
NOTES
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Michael B. Katz, my mentor and friend. Special
thanks to him, Donna Gabaccia, Peter Pihos, and Erika Lee for their insightful comments
on an earlier draft. I would also like to thank María Cristina García and Madeline Hsu for
organizing the “Globalizing Migration Histories” roundtable at the 2014 Organization of
American Historians annual meeting.
1. Barack Obama, “Presidential Proclamation—Constitution Day, Citizenship Day,
and Constitution Week, 2013,” September 16, 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-­press
-­office/2013/09/16/presidential-­proclamation-­constitution-­day-­citizenship-­day-­and-­constitut
(accessed June 10, 2014).
2. Charles Blow, “Still a Nation of Immigrants,” New York Times, May 21, 2014, http://
www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/opinion/blow-­still-­a-­nation-­of-­immigrants.html.
3. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migration That Made the
American People (Boston, 1951). It should be noted that the context in which Handlin wrote
his classic book—in the years immediately following World War II, during which many
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Journal of American Ethnic History / Summer 2015
European refugees were indeed uprooted—is important. Moreover, although Handlin’s account is Eurocentric, it fits within broader postwar liberal efforts to build a more inclusive
national history. For example, in Handlin’s The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in
a Changing Metropolis (Cambridge, MA, 1959), he argues that the experiences of African
Americans and Puerto Ricans were, in many senses, more similar than not to those of earlier
European immigrants.
4. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted,” Journal of
American History 51, no. 3 (December 1964): 404–17; John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A
History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, IN, 1985). For more on the history
of the “immigrant paradigm,” see Donna Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads,
Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1115–34; Gabaccia, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of
Immigration Historians,” Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (September 1997): 570–75;
Gabaccia, “Do We Still Need Immigration History?,” Polish American Studies 55, no. 1
(Spring 1998): 45–68.
5. George J. Sanchez, “Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies,” Journal
of American Ethnic History 18, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 68–69.
6. Dirk Hoerder, “From Immigration to Migration Systems: New Concepts in Migration
History,” OAH Magazine of History 14, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 8.
7. This is an admittedly crude, imperfect way to measure the field’s focus. The articles
in the search results were not limited to U.S. history. While the growth can be attributed, in
part, to the increase in the number of journals and articles published over the course of the
period examined, it is still instructive for comparative purposes. Donna Gabaccia utilizes a
similar approach in her chapter “Time and Temporality in Migration Studies,” in an updated
edition of Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield, eds., Migration Theory: Talking across
Disciplines, 3rd ed. (New York, 2014), 37–66.
8. For a detailed history of the IEHS, see June Granatir Alexander, “History Matters:
The Origins and Development of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society,” Journal of
American Ethnic History 25, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 5–42.
9. Donna R. Gabaccia and James R. Grossman, eds., Teaching the History of Immigration
and Ethnicity: A Syllabus Exchange (Chicago, 1993).
10. Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium
(Durham, NC, 2002), 8. For more on migration in broad historical context, see Leslie Page
Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington, IN,
1992); Patrick Manning, Migration in World History (New York, 2005); Jan Lucassen, Leo
Lucassen, and Patrick Manning, eds., Migration History in World History: Multidisciplinary
Approaches (Leiden, Netherlands, 2010); Jose C. Moya and Adam McKeown, “World Migration in the Long Twentieth Century,” in Essays on Twentieth-­Century History, ed. Michael
Adas (Philadelphia, 2010), 9–52; Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, with Donna Gabaccia,
What Is Migration History? (Cambridge, UK, 2009).
11. Moya and McKeown, “World Migration,” 9.
12. Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008); John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship,
and the State (Cambridge, UK, 2000).
13. See, for example, James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration
and Okie Culture in California (New York, 1989); Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How
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the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill,
NC, 2005); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great
Migration (Chicago, 1989); Joe William Trotter, Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical
Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, & Gender (Bloomington, IN, 1991); Nell Irvin
Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York, 1992);
Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making
of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997); Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free
Labor: Padrones and American Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (New York,
2000). Two edited volumes that examine the interconnected histories of international and
internal migration are Marc S. Rodriguez, ed., Repositioning North American Migration
History: New Directions in Modern Continental Migration, Citizenship, and Community
(Rochester, NY, 2004); Silvia Pedraza and Rubén G. Rumbaut, eds., Origins and Destinies:
Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America (Belmont, CA, 1996).
14. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere?,” 1132–33.
15. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925
(New Brunswick, NJ, 1955); David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans,
Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, CA, 1995); Erika Lee, At
America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill,
NC, 2003); Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
(Princeton, NJ, 2004); Paul Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York, 2007); Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation
Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Kanstroom, Aftermath:
Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora (New York, 2012); Kelly Lytle Hernández,
Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley, CA, 2010); Cindy Hahamovitch, No
Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable
Labor (Princeton, NJ, 2011); Hiroshi Motomura, Immigration Outside the Law (New York,
2014). See also Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, eds., The Deportation Regime:
Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham, NC, 2010); Antje Ellermann,
States against Migrants: Deportation in Germany and the United States (New York, 2009);
Deirdre Moloney, National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy since 1882
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2012).
16. Adam Goodman, “Mexican Migrants and the Rise of the Deportation Regime, 1942–
2014” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, forthcoming). For U.S. immigration statistics,
see Department of Homeland Security, “Yearbook of Immigration Statistics,” http://www
.dhs.gov/yearbook-­immigration-­statistics (accessed June 10, 2014).
17. Handlin, Uprooted, 3.
18. Gustav Sundbärg, quoted in Frank Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas in
the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in A Century of European Migrations, 1830–1930,
ed. Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke (Urbana, IL, 1991), 22.
19. More recently, scholars have described countries like El Salvador and Mexico as “nations of emigrants.” See, for example, Susan Bibler Coutin, Nation of Emigrants: Shifting
Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States (Ithaca, NY, 2007); David
Fitzgerald, A Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages Its Migration (Berkeley, CA,
2008).
20. Adam McKeown. “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” Journal of World History 15, no. 2
(June 2004): 155–89.
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21. Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas,” 17–49; Walter Nugent, Crossings:
The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington, IN, 1992), 35–37; Mark
Wyman, Round-­Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca,
NY, 1993).
22. Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective
(Princeton, NJ, 2012).
23. Hein de Haas, “What Drives Human Migration?,” Hein de Haas [Blog], December
11, 2013, http://heindehaas.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/what-­drives-­human-­migration.html. See
also Sanchez, “Race, Nation, and Culture”; Spickard, Almost All Aliens; Paul A. Kramer,
“Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American
Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011): 1348–91; Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care:
Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC, 2003); Kornel Chang,
Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-­Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley, CA, 2012).
24. Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, xx.
25. Douglas S. Massey et al., Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration
at the End of the Millennium (Oxford, UK, 1998).
26. For a transnational approach, see Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-­
Szanton, eds., Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and
Nationalism Reconsidered (New York, 1992). Scholars subsequently made several critiques
of transnationalism, and in some cases, proposed other approaches. See, for example, Roger
Waldinger and David Fitzgerald, “Transnationalism in Question,” American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 5 (March 2004): 1177–95; Roger Waldinger, The Cross-­Border Connection:
Immigrants, Emigrants, and Their Homelands (Cambridge, MA, 2015); for a “transborder”
approach, see Lynn Stephen, Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California,
and Oregon (Durham, NC, 2007); for a “transregional” approach, see Harzig and Hoerder,
with Gabaccia, What Is Migration History?; for a “transcultural” approach, see Hoerder, Cultures in Contact; for an “inter-­National” approach, which combines aspects of transnational
and transcultural approaches, see Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and
Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York, 2005). Although transnational histories
of migration have become ubiquitous over the last twenty years, some migration historians
have made the point that such studies are not entirely new: Carl Wittke, Marcus Lee Hansen,
and Theodore C. Blegen, all historians of European migration, were writing what would now
be considered transnational history in the 1930s and 1940s. See, for example, Carl Wittke,
We Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant (New York, 1939); Marcus Lee Hansen,
The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United
States (Cambridge, MA, 1940); Theodore C. Blegen, Grass Roots History (Minneapolis,
1947).
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