Clara Boixader Muñoz

Sociology of International Migrations

Erasmus Bachelor Student
Tilly, C. 'Transplanted Networks', in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration Reconsidered:
History, Sociology, and Politics (New York, 1991; online edn, Oxford Academic, 3 Oct. 2011),
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195055108.003.0004, accessed 19 Oct. 2023.

Transplanted Networks by Charles Tilly

In this chapter from the book “Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and
Politics” written in 1991, Tilly jointly investigates the various opinions of the authors
and individual articles on the collective aspects of migration in the United States.

The author cites how the historian Handly puts American history as “the tale of many
peoples who became, or who are still becoming, one: E pluribus unum.” However,
the social organization of immigration in the United States, intertwined with racial
division produced high inequality and ethnic groups. Some people thought that
insufficient Americanization caused that inequality, and assimilation would eradicate
it.

The United States has been a country of immigrants since its inception. In the
nineteenth century, the Europeans of North America formed a fairly homogeneous
mass, dominated by English-speakers who had created or assimilated a local variant
of English culture. In different ways, Indians and blacks lived in utter alienation from
white Europeans.

Later, after the Second World War, as European immigration resumed at an

unprecedented pace, the rights of blacks presented white Americans with a dilemma.
The United States generally held strong commitments to equality of rights and
opportunities, but whites had thus far chosen to define blacks out of the competition.
The opening up of opportunity to successive immigrant groups established the
capacity to extend it to blacks as well. The fact that the social organization of
nineteenth-century Europe changed - the separation of households from their means
of production, the spread of wage labor, the rising labor productivity of agriculture,
and the concentration of capital in cities combined to establish long-term - result in a
long distance migration as an increasingly common response of Europeans to
contraction at home and expansion elsewhere. Eventually, the decline of European
fertility, mortality, and natural increase counteracted the effects of proletarianization
and turned some European countries toward the importation of labor, which can be
explained through the Neoclassical Economics approach, through the macro
perspective of the theory of immigration by Harris-Torado. It explains the migration
as a result of labor market gaps between countries.

Furthermore, it usually did not draw on isolated individual decision makers but on
clusters of people bound together by acquaintance and common fate. Nor were there
clusters mere categories, but they migrated as participants in social processes that
extended far beyond them. Where kinsmen, friends, neighbors, and work associates
already have good contacts with possible destinations, reliance on established
interpersonal networks for information minimizes and spreads the risks. They draw
their chief information for decisions from members of their interpersonal networks
and rely on those networks for assistance both in moving and in settling at the
destination. This can explain, through Network Theory, why migration persisted.

The author also underlines the differences between networks and categories.
Networks migrate, in the sense of moving, changing shape and sending new
roots without entirely severing the old ones. Categories, on the other hand, stay put.
While the labels did not simply represent outsiders' tags for groups of people who
ordinarily identified themselves in quite other ways, they belonged to the situation at
the origin and not necessarily at the destination. Sets of connected immigrants who
did not have a common identity at the point of origin often acquired a new
identification during interaction with others at the destination. Therefore, networks
create new categories, and also can transform existing ones. For instance, in the
United States, Piedmontese, Neapolitans, Sicilians, and Romans forgot their
differences and became all just Italians. However, not all groups huddled together
with equal intensity, or maintained their networks with the same solidity, it depended
on the networks' size, density, and relationship to other groups.

We cannot think of Americanization as straightforward assimilation to a dominant

American culture. Instead, members of networks whose identities and internal
structures were changing continuously created new relations with other networks,
including those in the country of origin. The creation of these categories and the
social practices that complement them, emerge from interaction with other groups,
especially competitors, enemies and dealing with external discrimination. This logic
of inclusion and exclusion did not only set off blacks from whites; it also
distinguished ethnic groups from one another, and established a rough hierarchy
of advantage and opportunity. They also develop through struggle within the group,
as different sets of leaders and interpreters seek to impose their own definitions of
the group's origins, character, interests, and destiny. Members of immigrant groups
often exploited one another as they would not have dared to exploit the native-born.

Lastly, the importance of social networks becomes clearer when we stop thinking
about migration as a single homogeneous experience, and start recognizing its
sharply contrasting forms. The paper introduces a rough but useful typology
distinguishes colonizing, coerced, circular, chain, and career migration. The
distinctions rest on the links between sending and receiving networks. According to
Tilly, American immigration has taken all five forms, singly and in combination:
Colonizing migration characterized the early decades of North America's
settlement. Coerced migration applies most evidently to the arrival of enslaved
Africans, and also to the experience of many refugees. The mass of American
immigration has fallen somewhere in the range from circular to chain migration.
Finally, career migration has played a relatively small part in American
immigration.

We should emphasize that circular migration often has some familiar correlates. Due
to the fact that it commonly rests on the maintenance of households in the area of
origin, it rarely moves whole families and often draws disproportionately on one sex
—for example, males for common labor, or females for domestic service. It often
means some form of inexpensive collective living for the migrants, hard work,
rigorous saving of wages, extensive remittances, and relatively little contact with the
receiving population.
The history of American immigration therefore combines the general and the
particular in a compelling way. On the one hand, it is everyone's history, in which
chains of migrants connected distant places. On the other hand, its concrete form
differs a lot in different groups and even from person to person; “each of us has his
own tale of migration to tell.” Connections among persons established by
nineteenth-century immigration networks still affect inequality today,so when
examining the history of immigration, “we are analysing the roots of American
democracy.” We could say that migrants did not necessarily "assimilate"; they did,
however, construct social relations that helped assure their survival on a strange
terrain.

- 1062 words