Explaining How "Strangers Become Fast Friends": The Role of Networks in Migration Historiography, 1900–2008

The late 1970s - 1980s marked the appearance of the migrant “network” construct in American e/immigration historiography.  At first interspersed with references to “chain migrations,” a decade later the migrant network had developed its own de facto explanatory power.   Socioeconomic ties among family, friends, or business associates –maintaining utility across long distances – came to serve as the mechanism for explaining how and why an increasingly global scale of “new” migrations occurred ca. the 1870s-1940s. Yet a particular aspect of this people-centered historiographical migration dynamic (the “family-and-friends” principle) requires explanation.  Twentieth century social scientists privileged one set of socioeconomic ties over another, and consequently, an entire group of migration-related individuals receded from their narratives.  Following the emphasis on strong family- or community-based ties pioneered in Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and the Americas (1918), migration analysts seem to have lost interest in the temporary ties which prior observers, as well as migrants themselves, had frequently credited with facilitating long-distance emigrations.  Migration promoters including steamship company agents in Vienna, Madrasi kanganies, and Russo-German immigrant aid officials alike were given less attention because of their temporary involvement in migrant networks.  

This paper locates this shift in historiographical understandings of the migrant network within the relationship between late twentieth-century migration historians and the canon of early-twentieth century sociological studies of the U.S. and global migration “problems.”  These studies re-framed the investigation of contemporary and historical migrations by calling for solutions to the social problem of immigrant assimilation.  When migration historians began borrowing from this literature in the 1970s-1980s, their understandings of what types of socioeconomic relationships could constitute a network were consequently influenced.  With that influence came an alternate understanding of how historical migration processes worked, and a different manner of allocating human agency within migrant networks.