Transnational family relations in migration contexts: British variations on European themes

Abstract

In writing this chapter1 from near the western corner of the Eurasian landmass, it is evident that migration is involving an increasingly complex set of trans-jurisdictional activities worldwide. We have yet to come to grips with the kinds of legal navigation by individuals and families taking place across legal frontiers, although some theorists have begun to locate its place within wider phenomena of transnationalism.2 Recent events evidently demonstrate the often conflictual context in which migration occurs, as well as its many dysfunctional consequences. Just before I began writing this chapter in December 2010, news came of a suicide bomb attack in Stockholm by a man who had reportedly become ‘radicalized’ in the English town of Luton. A number of arrests in various European countries have been taking place more or less simultaneously of men of migrant origin suspected of involvement in terror-related activities. The fairly high-intensity conflict-ridden profile of migrants and their descendants being built in Europe and elsewhere, hides a more widespread, lowerintensity conflict in which official laws are also implicated. State authorities are penalizing trans-jurisdictional legal navigation, which occurs in a wide range of settings, and often concerns families and kin networks. It is well known that many of the major streams of post-Second World War immigration into Western Europe were followed by large-scale family reunification. By all accounts, such immigration has not stopped, but has diversified to a greater number of source countries, overlain by further, sometimes complex, processes of family reunification and formation. This