Transborder Migrants and Their Multiple National Loyalties

Scholars such as Benedict Anderson have argued that nationality was the preeminent identity by the twentieth century. The rise of the nation-state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the importance of citizenship to obtain rights provide evidence for this argument. However, the lives of global migrants do not always fit into the national boxes that seek to contain them. Focusing on the diasporic communities formed by Chinese and Japanese migrants in the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I argue that national identity may have been a strategic claim, but not necessarily one that represented the complex affiliations that migrants maintained as they crossed multiple borders.