Religious transnationalism among Ghanaian immigrants in Toronto: a binary logistic regression analysis

Thanks to pioneering work within anthropology, students of international migration acknowledge that most immigrants do not sever their ties with the homeland, but rather maintain them through a variety of cross‐border relationships. While scholarly work has proliferated, since the early 1990s, over the transnational economic and political activities of immigrants, to date, only few analysts have examined the religious practices with which immigrants sustain memberships in multiple locations. In addition, most available studies on transnational migration has dwelled on qualitative methods, such as participant observation, focus groups discussions and in‐depth interviews with a handful of informants, with little or no inclination towards the quantitative measurement of key variables implicated in the process. The prevalence of ethnographic methods in this area of research has, quite understandably, engendered charges of exaggeration, given the tendency of such techniques ‘to sample on the dependent variable’, to borrow the phrase of Alejandro Portes. Using data collected from a survey among Ghanaian immigrant congregations in Toronto, this study seeks to statistically predict the propensity to engage in transnational religious practices by way of a binary logistic regression analysis. In addition, the study examines how the transnational religious activities of the sampled immigrants relate to, overlap with, and differ from other kinds of transnational practices they pursue.     

The aging of international migrants and strategic transnational practice in later life: Exploring Portuguese seniors in Toronto,Canada

The Portuguese community in Toronto is the largest in North America; however, its immigrant population is now aging. This paper addresses senior immigrants who had a transnational “later life” and discusses this practice in the transatlantic context, using a lifecycle model of transnational migration. Later life is a life stage that is highly feasible for transnational migration, as seniors are mostly disentangled from various obligations, such as work, child rearing, and caregiving for parents. Transnational senior migrants in Europe and North America can be categorized into four groups: Intra-Europe Rich, Intra-Europe Immigrant, North American Snowbird, and Trans-Atlantic Immigrant. Trans-Atlantic Immigrant seniors, the target group of this paper, differ from the other groups on several points, including seasonal preference for transnational migration, motivations, and legal regulations. The paper considers the questions of why senior Portuguese immigrants choose to stay in Portugal for an extended period each year, while mainly living in Canada, and how their later life is structured between the two countries. Transnational later life is a strategic practice of senior Portuguese immigrants in Canada in the last stage of their lifecycle, allowing them to maximize government pension payments while simultaneously enjoying the highest quality of life possible in both countries.