In the course of the past few years, anthropologists have increasingly noted that immigrants live their lives across borders and maintain their ties to home, even when their countries of orign and settlement are geographically distant. To describe this new way of life, some social scientists have begun to use the term “transnational.” However, this term is being used loosely and without specificity. Much conceptual work needs to be done to move fiom the perception that “something new is happening here” to the development of a new conceptual framework within which to discuss contemporary international migration. As part of an effort to conceptualize and analyze transnational migration in May of 1990 we brought together a group of researchers who had found in their own field work evidence of a new pattern of migration and who had each been trying to grapple with the implications of what they were seeing all around them. The decision to have a workshop was a result of an odyssey that we had embarked upon several years before. When comparing our observations of the social relations of immigrants to the United States from three dfferent areasthe eastern Caribbean, Haiti, and the Philippines-we found that migrants from each population were forging and sustaining multistranded social relations that linked their societies of origin and settlement. We called this immigrant experience “transnationalism” to emphasize the emergence ofa social process in which migrants establish social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders. Immigrants are understood to be transmigrants when they develop and maintain multiple relationsfimilial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and politicalthat span borders. We came to understand that the multiplicity of migrants’ involvements in both the home and host societies is a central element of transnationalism. Transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and feel concerns within a field of social relations that links together their country of origin and their country or countries of settlement. Having identified and defined transnationalism, we sought to locate this process historically and theoretically. Was transnationalism actually a new im-