On transnational migration, deepening vulnerabilities, and the challenge of membership

Abstract

This letter concerns itself with how transnational scholarship might orient itself to unfinished business: specifically, the theorisation of deepening vulnerabilities and persisting inequalities faced by con-temporary transnational migrants. I begin by identifying five inter-locking dimensions of vulnerability: norms about remitting and re-turning; cumulative causation and context of arrival; social rela-tions; civic participation; new racialisations. The paper argues that these vulnerabilities signal a crisis of membership, and goes on to identify how hybridity and what we understand by national com-munity must remain central to strategies that ameliorate vulnerability.