Transnational Migration in AP Human Geography

What a definition of transnational migration needs

A solid definition has two parts. First, the move crosses an international border. Second, the migrant chooses to move, so it's voluntary.

You can add that many transnational migrants keep active ties to their origin country, through remittances or visits. That's a useful detail for explaining effects, but it isn't required for a move to count as transnational migration.

This term comes from Unit 2: Population and Migration, Topic 2.11: Forced and Voluntary Migration. That topic asks you to sort human movement by whether people are compelled to move or choose to, and transnational migration is listed with the voluntary types, next to transhumance, internal, chain, step, guest worker, and rural-to-urban migration. When a question asks you to distinguish forced from voluntary migration, identify transnational migration as voluntary, since the migrant decides to leave, usually for jobs or higher wages.

Remittances, return visits, and dual citizenship as continuing ties

The first thing to check in a stem or stimulus is whether people are moving from one country to another by choice. Once you see that, these clues show the continuing ties many transnational migrants keep:

• Remittances, meaning money migrants send back to family in the origin country
• Regular trips home for holidays, family events, or seasonal returns
• Dual citizenship, or voting in home-country elections from abroad
• Daily contact through phone calls, video chat, and social media
• Investing in a house or business back home while working abroad

None of these clues defines the term on its own, because internal migrants can send remittances too. They describe what transnational migration often looks like after the international move.

Cheap long-distance communication, more affordable air travel, and easy money-transfer services make these ties easier to keep than they were for earlier generations of migrants. That's why many transnational migrants stay connected to home instead of following the older "leave and assimilate" pattern.

Tracing its effects from the village to the national economy

Free-response questions can ask you to explain effects at more than one geographic scale. Transnational migration fits that kind of question because its effects show up at several scales at once. In the one-stimulus question or two-stimuli question, a map of migration flows or a data set on remittances could be the starting point.

At the household and village scale, remittances pay for food, school fees, and new houses in the origin community. At the national scale, remittances can become a major source of income for a sending country, which links migration to economic development. On the downside, the origin country can lose working-age people and skilled workers (brain drain), and some villages end up with mostly children and older adults.

At the destination, transnational migrants often cluster in neighborhoods where their language, food, and religion stay visible, and their ties to home keep that culture active. For example, Mexican migrants make up large shares of the population in some southwestern U.S. towns while still supporting families in Mexican villages. A top answer names the effect, says which scale it happens at, and explains the mechanism (usually remittances or the continuing social ties).

Reading a Mexico-to-U.S. migration stimulus

Stimulus-based multiple-choice questions can give you a data set or map and ask what the pattern reveals. Suppose a table shows that most Mexican migrants first move from the rural interior to northern border states, and a majority of those later cross into the United States. A note with the table says that survey respondents chose to move to find work.

That pattern shows step migration followed by transnational migration. The border states work as an intermediate stop where migrants earn money, gather information, and build contacts before the international move. The move into the U.S. is the transnational migration, because it crosses a national border. If the stimulus also shows remittances flowing back to home villages, that illustrates the continuing ties many migrants keep after the move.

Because the survey note says migrants chose to move for work, the best answer choice ties the spatial pattern to voluntary, economically driven decisions made in stages, and a choice that calls the movement forced doesn't fit. Without information about why people moved, the table alone would only show step migration followed by an international move.

Transhumance, guest workers, and refugees as near-misses

Transhumance gets confused with transnational migration because of the shared prefix and because both are on the same voluntary list. Transhumance is the seasonal movement of herders and livestock between pastures, such as highlands in summer and lowlands in winter. Herders can sometimes cross an international border, so a border alone doesn't tell the two apart. If a stem centers on animals or grazing seasons, it's transhumance. If it centers on people choosing to move from one country to another to live or work, it's transnational migration. If the stem doesn't say why people moved, call it international migration.

Guest workers overlap with transnational migrants, and a person can be both. The guest worker label is about legal status, meaning temporary permission to work in another country, often in labor-short sectors. The transnational label is broader and covers any voluntary move across national borders. Pick guest worker when the stem stresses a temporary work program, and transnational migration when it describes a voluntary international move without that program detail.

Refugees and asylum seekers also cross borders and may keep ties to home, but their movement is forced by persecution or conflict, so in Topic 2.11 they go in the forced column. Transnational migration, as the course uses it, is a choice.