ABSTRACT
The previous two chapters dealt with patterns of functional and social incorporation in the receiving societies. However, irregular migrants also maintain ties to their country of origin. To understand how irregular migrants live in the receiving societies it is therefore important to take their transnational engagements into account. Transnationalism was defined by Basch, Schiller and Blanc (1994: 6) as ‘the process by which transmigrants, through their daily activities, forge and sustain multi-stranded social, economic, and political relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement, and through which they create transnational social fields that cross national borders’.
