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Drawing on recent studies of diaspora and its members' transnational engagements, which treat the former as fuzzy-boundary, context-dependent groupings and the latter as multifaceted (rather than two-pronged) relationships, I explore in this article the notion of diasporans' polymorphous and multidirectional transnational commitments; identify different types of such involvements; and propose a preliminary list of macro- and micro-level circumstances contributing to multifarious transnationalism. In conclusion, I consider the implications of the notion of diaspora members' multifarious transnational engagements for the study of (im)migrant transnationalism in general and suggest some questions for future research on this phenomenon.

International audience ; This essay attempts to make more pliable three overly rigid claims persistent in the diaspora literature: that diaspora members' imaginations of the homeland are either beautifying/idealizing or unequivocally inimical; that their relations with the host country are inherently distant--they are in it but not of it; and that diasporism and (im)migrant transnationalism constitute two dictinct phenomena. It also aims at genderizing the stubbornly genderless study of diasporas. The empirical analysis compares representations of the homeland among turn-of-the-twentieth-century and present-day lower-class Polish émigrés in the United States and the United Kingdom, first-wave (1959-61) Cuban refugees in Miami and 1956 Hungarian political refugees dispersed into different West European countries, and contemporary Mexican men and women migrants in the American Southwest. On the basis of these comparative assessments the author identifies the major circumstances that shape diaspora members' portrayals of the homeland.

This report on a study in progress examines some thus far uninvestigated aspects of Europe's post-1989 transformation and, specifically, developments related to greatly increased Westbound work-related migration of East Europeans. It is informed by three arguments. First, that East European, especially low-skilled, migrants' income-seeking sojourns in the West sustain or even reenergize some of the entrenched mindsets and coping practices formed under the previous regime and known as the homo sovieticus or beat-the-system/ bend-the-law syndrome as the effective strategy of economic action in the new situation. Second, that as East European (im)migrants negotiate the circumstances they encounter abroad in the pursuit of the purposes by engaging receiver-society native residents and institutions, their old-regime practices and orientations become integrated over time into the local cultural and social relational patterns in the West European countries where they settle. And third, that as East European income-seeking migrants travelling to the West return to their home-country localities, they transplant there their hands-on experience of the daily operation of capitalism acquired through its everyday "participant observation" during their Western sojourns. As they do this, they re-implant in their home-country local societies the old-regime homo sovieticus coping strategy now enhanced as effective tools in negotiating the capitalist system.

This article investigates different patterns of coexistence of assimilation and transnational engagements (A/T) among recent Polish and Jewish Russian immigrants in Philadelphia and the particular constellations of circumstances that generate these outcomes. It then integrates this analysis into a broader comparative examination of the simultaneity of A/T among residentially dispersed Asian Indians, first-wave Cubans in Miami, and Jamaicans, undocumented Chinese, and Dominicans in New York. The main factors shaping the most common A/T patterns in these seven immigrant groups at the global, sending and receiving society national, and local levels are identified.