Den globale familie: opløsning eller transnationalisering af familien?

Ninna Nyberg Sørensen: The Global Family – Disintegration or Transnationalization of the Family? The identification of the family with the domestic group has given rise to various analytical problems in migration research. Many researchers have argued that family separation due to migration leads inevitably to family disintegration. Prediction of such negative outcomes has been conspicuously salient in work dealing with migrant mothers who leave spouses and/or children behind. Nevertheless, the proliferation of long-distance and sometimes long-term transnational family ties challenges conventional notions of the family. This article, which is based on qualitative interviews with Latin American migrants in various European countries, discusses two related issues. The first concerns the question of whether the feminization of particular migration streams translates into new and distinct transnational family relationships. The second concerns the roots and consequences of spatially fractured husband-wife/ parent-child relations. The article concludes that migration transforms, reorients and reprioritizes family relationships, but not necessarily in the way predicted by conventional demography or migration analysis.