Combining Civic Stratification and Transnational Approaches for Reunited Families: The Case of Moroccans, Indians and Pakistanis in Reggio Emilia

How migrant families are put together and the forms they take varies with the cultural and social origins, though also with the family’s migratory strategy, the sociocultural context of the host country and the latter’s chosen migration policy. Exploratory fieldwork in an Italian area led us to adopt a combined analytical framework in studying such families, bearing in mind both the theory of civic stratification and the transnational perspective of migratory processes. In the first part of the article, we shall explore certain implications of transnationalism and conclude that reunited families are intrinsically transnational. In the second part, we shall apply the concept of civic stratification to the study of family reunification. A third section will analyse some of the results of our fieldwork, on which to validate the combined analytical approach. Our contention is that a transnational perspective and civic stratification can be usefully integrated and provide a new interpretive key to various aspects of family reunification.