"id","author_first1","author_last1","title","year","publication","volume","issue","pages","summary","keyword0","keyword1","keyword2","keyword3","keyword4","keyword5","keyword6","keyword7","type" "381","Luis E.","Guarnizo","Los Dominicanyorks: The Making of a Binational Society","1994","The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science","533","May","70-86","

Question(s) addressed by the author and working arguments

Examine the US-linked Dominican migration group own socioeconomic, cultural, and political characteristics and its relationships with the two national states. The latest evidence suggest that instead of looking at migrants as a flow of people moving from one nation-state to another, it is better to conceptualize migrants as a distinct social group emerging from the intricate web of political, economic, social, and cultural forces emanating from the migration experience of US-bound Dominicans.

Conceptual references to transnational – transnationalism

Dominican migrants, despite their social, educational, and regional heterogeneity and precisely because of their shared migratory and social experiences in the United States and in the Dominican Republic, have become a group whose territory is a borderless transnational space.

Conclusions or Final Remarks

The historical convergence of contradictory forces has generated the particular conditions for the emergence of a binational society from the Dominican migration process. The continuous struggle of the migrant population against adverse contextual forces, and even forces within itself, has induced the transnationalization of migrants.

The stronger the attempts in both countries to control migrants’ own spatial and social mobility and settlement, the stronger the migrants’ resistance and thus the stronger their cohesion and their binationalism. Migrants have acquired a de facto binational citizenship. The US and Dominican governments would be better advised to join efforts to foster connections between the linkages, resources, and demands generated by these binationals and by the development efforts in the Dominican Republic and in Dominican settlements in the United States.

","Caribbean Countries","Dominican Republic","Immigrant Groups","Immigration","State","Transnational Communities","US","US-Caribbean Relations","journal"