Review

Review

In a worldwide context of growing migration processes, international research confirms the central role that families play in the migration plans and strategies of individuals, including the decision to emigrate and which family members must or can do so. The family also takes on considerable importance in defining subsequent modifications, such as the length and development of migratory projects. The “migrant family” is located in a social system where roles and relationships can be partially or completely different. The settlement of individuals in the receiving country, and their changing migration plans and strategies follow multiple pathways. The experience of migration, with its cultural and emotional break-ups can redefine and reorganise networks and relational dynamics, particularly between men and women, parents, grandparents and children. In particular, transnational families designate family networks composed of members who live in two or more countries, but maintain a sense of ‘familyhood’ across distance, time, and exchange, to various degrees, care and support. Relevant are the various ways in which they maintain family ties and connections across national borders and across generations and the pressures and transformations that may arise within and across the generations because of their embeddedness in different socio-cultural contexts.

The article proposes an in-depth analysis of the link between family migration and educational mobility, using data deriving from an original qualitative research on successful students with an immigrant background. First of all, a conceptual framework is provided, identifying some crucial theoretical and empirical issues concerning migrant families: educational mobility as a family strategy and project; the challenges of intergenerational transmission in revisiting cultural and ethnic identities; the importance of the “act of passing on” trough family relations. Secondly, autobiographies of immigrant-origin students are used to examine whether and in which conditions family functions as a driver of educational success. Through the biographical approach, strategies and narratives students adopt to represent family migration and the relationships with parents are reconstructed. Finally, using the outlined conceptual frame, the emblematic stories of Amna, Ikram, and Sole, three girls with Moroccan origin, are analyzed, illustrating different ways to negotiate values, norms, behaviors, and to reshape family identities and ties, towards a common goal of educational success.

In modern economic systems, discrimination – and the resulting allocative inefficiency – occurs when “individuals with the same economic characteristics receive different wages and the differences are systematically correlated with certain non-economic characteristics of the individual” (Stiglitz, 1973). A significant example of this is occupational segregation: the gender stereotypes from which it originates reduce the efficiency of the economic system and the prospects for development, determining, on the one hand, under-utilization of the female workforce and, on the other, a distortion in the investment in human capital (Hartmann, 1976). The former can be translated in terms of the gender pay gap (articulation of the more general global gender gap index) even though there has long been a decrease in the gap in the employment rate (World Economic Forum, 2018, 2019, 2020). Female employment remains more concentrated in precarious, low-skilled, and therefore low-paid jobs. This depends not only on the glass ceiling (which hinders the careers of professional women) but also on a greater inequality among women themselves, between high-skilled and low-skilled workers (Saraceno 2015, 2017). It entails the risk of producing feedback effects that not only perpetuate the gender gap but feed, within the female population, the same dynamics found between men and women. On these premises, this paper investigates how two factors - the widening economic gaps and the crisis of the last decade - have impacted on the gender gap trend. We will also consider the consequent structural and socio-cultural changes.

Adopting a family perspective on the migration phenomenon means considering the relevance of the links between the various components along a multi-generation temporal and relational axis. The research in question, through a qualitative methodology, analyzes how socialization processes can evolve through generations within the family dimension. Migration experiences are indeed very different from one generation to another. Moreover, it turns out like the transnational social fields in which migrants and their descendents are embedded, span different countries and form a significant context for their everyday lives. It seemed interesting to propose a study that deal with the Italian emigration of the past, analyzing however the most recent implications. The country chosen as case study is also for this reason Belgium, where the Italian presence is still very relevant. The study was attended by descendants of Italians who arrived in the country after the Second World War.

This essay will focus on the relations between food, gender, and generation among Italian Americans at the beginning of the XX century. Families had been the center of a generational shock, in which parents forced sons and daughters to accept a tradition to keep the power on new generations. The tradition they claimed to belong to, was an ideological construction suitable for the American life, which witnessed the decline of the patriarchal family. Food also played an important role in family business development in Italy and United States. Some family-run, or family-owned companies developed their business on the two sides of the Ocean influencing at the same time the Italian and American industrial landscape. This essay will connect cultural and social history of the Italian American families with economic and business histories elements, key references to understand the way Italians shaped their ethnic identity in the Americans diaspora background.

Understanding the relationship between migration, social protection and doing family in transnational settings is important, both at academic and policy level. Migration disturbs safety nets and it created new realities such as transnational families. Migrants and their left behind families try to close the gap that arises between mobile social needs and static services and provisions. In doing so they (re)invent doing family in a transnational context and the protection they offer to one another primarily in the form of remittance, knowledge transfer, time and emotional care tend to provide solid grounds for bonding them across borders. Looking at the case of Albanian migrants and their transnational families, we reconfirm old patterns and sketch new trends in informal transnational protection practices which construct main fundamental ties holding transnational families together and are key in building and strengthen intergenerational solidarity among Albanian migrants and their left behind family and kin.