Garey Santano DB3

One explanation I heard from my boyfriend was an example of migration initiated by a kinship network and driven by educational disparity. His grandfather’s sister sponsored his grandfather’s family to migrate to the U.S. from Hong Kong so that the children would be more likely to attain higher education. This occurred after 1965, so the change in policy lifting restrictions on Asian immigration was also necessary for their immigration to be possible.  An example I can think of from my own family was when my grandfather, a Trinidadian of Indian descent, ran away from home in part because of a lower quality of life, the intercountry economic disparity motivating the immigration. A connection that allowed this migration to even be possible was that as Trinidad was a British colony, he could speak English, which facilitated his opportunities in the U.S.

I feel that Yang’s “multilevel causation theory,” his universal theory encompassing past, present, micro, and macro level connections, corresponds well to these explanations. In fact, his theory helps us explore our families’ journeys. Factors that were explicit, such as disparities or kinship sponsoring, and those that were implicit, like the changes in the law or language-based connections, come together to make these narratives clearer and coherent. However, I think it would be good to expand on religious factors, such as churches being an institution based social network, which can act to both sustain immigration and initiate it. For example, the Mormon church, which I was a member of, sends missionaries to Asian countries for converts. Often, these new converts feel the need to move to Utah, to adopt Mormon customs and traditions more closely, or otherwise to avoid being the only Mormons in the social circle of their hometown. Yang might describe Mormonism’s impact on these converts as strengthening their ideological linkages with American society or reducing their social distance with Americans, meanwhile social distance between themselves and people of their homeland can simultaneously increase because of their conversion.