Chapter 6 in Nancy Foner’s From Ellis Island to JFK explores transnationalism and the impact and influence of technology on it. I’ve never really heard of this word before but I was familiar with its concept. My great-grandfather in fact lived in New York while my grandmother and her family was in Albania and I always found this weird and hard to understand. How and why would he leave his family and go across the globe? As I grew up though, and after reading this chapter, it made perfect sense. In fact I have an aunt in Greece at the moment who is thinking of doing the same thing because she has 5 children to support and her current job has not paid her in months. I also remember learning about this in High School when one of my teachers mentioned that when the dollar was worth more than the currency of certain European nations, people would come and work here and then send their money back home. It’s interesting to see though that now this still goes on even though the euro is worth more than the dollar.
It was so interesting to think about how technology has such a big impact on transnationalism and how it changed over time and made everything so much faster and more efficient. Thinking back it’s funny how I got to experience all these changes myself. When we first arrived in the US my mother received letters from home and I also would write to my cousins and my old classmates. Over time the letters stopped and we would get phone cards and call instead. Then we got a computer and we would send pictures of basically every event and holiday to each other. I totally forgot we did this but the book mentioned videos and I remembered that we would also make home videos and send them to each other when a relative would visit. Facebook came along and took the world by storm and I found my 2nd grade classmates on it (although we barely talk we’re still Facebook friends). Now my mother uses Skype almost every day to talk with my aunt. Although there was a period in time when we felt like we were at a distance from everyone in Greece since we hadn’t seen them face-to-face in a long time, things such as Skype and Facebook helped us reconnect with the past.
Another aspect that was brought up that I found very interesting was the concept of International Citizenship. I think it sounds great and it makes sense. Since we have so much trouble even defining what being an American citizen means, I believe it would be much easier to just make it that we are all citizens of this world. How feasible would this actually be? I don’t know, but I think it is an interesting thought to ponder over.
