From Immigrants to Refugees: Transnational Practices of Latin-Americans Who Took Refuge in the United States.

Forced migrations have been approached in the social sciences as from the problematization of the dichotomy between voluntary/economic and forced movements. Our proposal here is to reflect upon the migrations generated by requests of asylum in the United States, taking as case study the Latin-Americans, as from a survey on their daily practices and on their judicial processes that are running in the North-American courts. Our aim is to raise economic, political, cultural or social individual motivations, as well as those imprinted as macro-structural, such as economic and political stability in the native countries and in the United States. With that, we have the intention to problematize such micro and macro-structural motivations, analyzing how they cross the Latin-American immigrants’ paths and conform their social practices. The article tries to reflect upon the recent theoretical and methodological proposals that deal with the migratory issue taking as an empirical dimension the case study of the Latin-Americans who took refuge in the USA. The research will present the paths taken by Latin refugees in the United States who have been adopting transnational practices which involve crossing the borders of the country that receives them, of their native countries and of the countries on the frontiers. From a legal point of view, the entrance in the refugees’ native country is denied to them. Those who perform transnational practices, however, keep in touch with people and enter their native countries through national borders, returning to the United States afterwards. These empirical elements have us reflecting upon the political asylum artifice and upon fundamental topics concerning social sciences, such as Nation-State, citizenship and the methodological nationalism that this article proposes to question and discuss from the point of view of the contemporary economic sociology and of the migrations’ transnational perspective.