UCLA International Institute

Immigrant organizations in the United States have proliferated by rapid international migration, globalization, and the rise of new transportation and communication technologies that facilitate long-distance and cross-border flows in recent years. The power and influence of these organizations have grown in tandem with immigrants’ drive to make it in America and their obligations to support families and communities in sending countries. An emergent literature on transnationalism has burgeoned since the 1990s to examine new patterns of immigrant settlement. However, the existing research to date has put more emphasis on the effects of transnationalismon the development in sending countries than in receiving countries, paid more attention to immigrant groups from Latin America than those from Asia, and focused more on the individual than the organization as the unit of analysis. As a consequence, we do not have reliable knowledge of the impacts of transnationalism on immigrant communities in the host society and the extent and sources of intergroup variations. In order to fill this gap, and to further supplement knowledge gained from Latin American experiences, we offer a conceptual framework for a systematic analysis of the relationship between transnationalism and community building and illustrate it with the Chinese case. We focus on four main questions: a) How has Chinese immigration shaped the ethnic community over time? b) What types of immigrant organizations have existed in the Chinese immigrant community and how have these organizations evolved ordeveloped over time? c) Under what conditions do some of the Chinese immigrant organizations operate transnationally, and what kinds of activities do they engage themselves across national borders? d) What bearings does organizational transnationalism have on the ethnic community and its group members? While not directly contesting the concepts of assimilation, we argue that transnationalism contributes to community building and immigrant incorporation in nuanced ways that are less understood. We show that immigrants often engage their ancestral homelands via organizations. Organizational development in turn enhances the capacity of the ethnic community to generate material and symbolic resources conducive to immigrant incorporation.