Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc in their book Nations Unbound postulate the development of a process in international politics they call transnationalism, a way of understanding the migrations taking place in the world and the effect of those migrations on political life in the home country. The authors find that many of these migrants are at home in both their home country and their adopted country to such a degree that it is difficult to state where they "belong." The authors define their terms clearly at the outset of their discussion:
We define "transnationalism" as the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders. Immigrants who develop and maintain multiple relationships--familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political--that span borders we call "transmigrants" (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 7).
Haiti serves as a case in point, with a large population of Haitian immigrants in the United States who have an influence in Haiti and on Haitian politics today.
The authors note the importance of transnationalism in Haiti when they write,
Haitian transnationalism has its own particularity shaped by the interpenetration of two sets of factors: Haitian hegemonic constructions of color, class, and nation that continue to configure immigrants' understandings of their identities; and the emergence in Haiti, perhaps for the first time since the Haitian revolution, of a political debate about identification with the Haitian state that encompasses all classes and regions of the country (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 150).
As described by the authors, transnationalism in the Haitian experience is related to the colonial history of Hait...