Displaying items by tag: immigration

Contemporary migration is distinct from past migration, and the transnational family currently encompasses an increasingly wider range of family structures that affects a wider range of cultures and nations. In the 1960s and 1970s, labor migrants from a developing South Korea left spouses, mostly wives, and children for economic opportunities abroad only to have their families re-connect with them in a more or less permanent move overseas. More recently, Korea's new position in the global economy has shifted family demography and strategies for social and economic mobility. It is in this context that the transnational family has re-emerged and taken a new form. This time children are being sent abroad for edcuational opportunities, leaving one or both parents to work in Korea, and often with the hope of re-uniting as a family back in Korea. But, this type of transnational family in contrast to the intact migrant family remains little understood. In this paper, we begin with a brief discussion of the social and political context of transnational family migration from South Korea to Canada and then using TKFS 2011 survey data, we situate our empirical comparisons of transnational and intact families in the literature on migration motivations and on those dimensions understood to be important for structuring transnational opportunities such as motivations, social class background, gender and the division of household labor, and social networks and previous exposure.