Transnational Innovation: Diaspora's Hidden Benefits

We've spent the last two years developing a portfolio of social innovations to strengthen transnational immigrants--people who move to the U.S., but also still live in their home countries--as they create a new type of economic, social, and political global space. Because of their unique circumstances, transnationals themselves are global developers and carriers of social innovations.

• They generate "social remittances," flows of ideas and culture back to their home countries, much as they send money back to their families. For example, as sociologist Peggy Levitt notes, Dominican women living in or visiting their families in the U.S. adopt and "transmit" the American gender relationships and structures when they are back in the Dominican Republic. Young women in the Dominican village Levitt studied wanted to marry men who had migrated to the U.S. because they were considered to be the ideal breadwinner and life partner. When immigrants increase their incomes, they change their consumption patterns and in doing so they also reorient social and economic stratification, change definitions of wealth and poverty, and set trends in consumption and style--all of which influences "back home" audiences. When Dominican immigrants who lived more private lives in Boston returned home they reacted against the more open social life in which unannounced visits are welcome--building walls around their houses to maintain the privacy they enjoyed in the U.S. A wealth of research shows that immigrants have enlarged the cultural and racial identity struggles in their home countries. Of course, not all social remittances are desirable. Gangs from Los Angeles spread into Belize when some Belizeans that joined gangs in LA returned home. For Belizean street youth whose parents had moved to California, the gangs becaused a new "family" option.
• They generate global exchange of information and ideas. In business, for instance, ideas learned by Indian students who then became entrepreneurs in the U.S. migrated to India. Indian information technology workers placed by Indian staffing companies as temporary workers to U.S. companies subsequently set up shop in India and helped to change Indian attitudes toward economic development and employment practices. The use of the Internet and cell phones has increased the speed, volume, and quality of information that immigrants move across national borders. Meanwhile, in the past decade, an increasing number of national governments with significant migrating populations, from the Philippines to Mexico, have been reconceptualizing themselves to include their emigrating populations as part and parcel of their nation-states. In the process, notions of citizenship, country, nation, society, culture, identity, local, and more are being modified globally.
• They generate innovations for their own social and place-based communities. As transnational immigrants find themselves in novel spaces, they create new transnational businesses and nonprofit services to meet new needs.

Our focus has been on the third of these dynamics: social innovations that help transnationals connect with each other, strengthen their communities, and become more aware of their unique potential. These include:

• Diaspora Capital. Design of private financial services to immigrants so they can leverage their remittances to create immigrant-driven philanthropic funds at community foundations that will invest in immigrant education and economic development in the U.S.
• Diaspora Media. Design of an Internet portal to serve the global diaspora of immigrants, such as Brazilians, providing cheap, efficient way to connect, share, and network with each other; preserve cultural artifacts of the disapora; create their own collective "diaspora story"; and develop diaspora e-commerce.
• ESL. Design an alternative system for immigrants to learn English, based on workplace language needs and employers' interests.
• Transnational Index. Design a Transnational Index, a data base for measuring the presence and impact of transnational immigrants in American communities.

Underlying these specific innovations is a set of "innovation concepts" of particular value to transnationals, which we use to build new projects in the portfolio:

• Transnational transfer efficiency--ways to facilitate the portability and full recognition of transnational "assets" (e.g., credentials and documentation such as medical records) in both nations. 
• Transnational dual financial bottom lines--ways to simultaneously create financial benefits for people and organizations in both nations.
• Transnational knowledge--ways to tap and share "indigenous" knowledge across places.
• Transnational economic advantage--ways to exploit and expand the market, business, and labor opportunities that arise from transnational space.
• Transnational inclusion and engagement--ways to ensure transnationals influence local decisions that affect their lives in their multiple communities.    
• Transnational connections--ways to link transnationals across places and cultures; align them; and help them collaborate in production.