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Emigration to another country is no longer a one-way passage. Recent research recognizes the complexity of international migration, under the rapidly expanding rubric of transnationalism, not as a single event but as embarking upon a way of life that places, and re-places, individuals and families within a new spatiality, stretching human relations across great distances. In the process, transnational migrants disrupt many taken-for-granted notions about immigrant settlement, renegotiating identities and citizenship practices.Our research is part of a large and ongoing project designed to understand how the concept of citizenship has changed for one of the largest groups of transnational migrants, people who moved from Hong Kong to Canada during the 1980s and 1990s. Based on intense conversations among migrants in focus-group sessions, as well as on extensive background information derived from questionnaires, we have explored the disruptions and connections that occur both in the regularities of everyday life and in the ideas and assumptions according to which everyday life is enacted.In this paper, we explore the concept of civic participation, asking how patterns of participation have changed through the course of migration and how participation

The effects of macrostructural processes (institutional and organizational) on Chinese immigrant women are examined, as well as the effects of Canadian immigration policies, past and present, on middle class Chinese women. Race, gender, and class relations inform and at the same time are informed by the institutional processes of Canadian immigration policies, and such practices are modified and transformed through historical, social and political fluctuations. Using information deriving from in-depth interviews, the everyday experiences of middle class Chinese immigrant women who have recently immigrated from Hong Kong is investigated. How these women's lives have been transformed due to institutional processes, as well as the difference in the social organization of Canadian society vis-a-vis Hong Kong society, are examined.

This paper discusses some of the results of a study aimed at exploring how highly skilled professional immigrant women from China and India, two of the top source countries of immigration to Canada since 1998, learned to reorient and reshape their skills, experiences, and aspirations in order to secure employment. Drawing on Bourdieu's notion of class as relational space, his differentiation of forms of capital and his concept of habitus, we explore ways in which these women mobilize the resources they have at their disposal transnationally in order to realign their class position in Canada. Issues of gender and race are also incorporated into the discussion of class.