Coming to America:
The Transnational Lives of Ghanaian Migrants
On a recent visit back home to Ghana, my father discovered a box filled with his late father’s writings. Unbeknownst to any of us, my grandfather had kept every letter he received from four of his children who traveled abroad.
There are letters from one daughter who emigrated to New Zealand and then to Australia, from a daughter who went to Liberia and then to the U.S., from a son who left for England and then to the U.S., and some from another son, my father, who followed his older sister to Liberia before coming to American. In addition to each original letter, my grandfather attached to it a carbon copy of his response. In these letters are my family’s immigration stories.
The object of my next major research project is to build and train a team of undergraduate students who will work with me to take my family’s story as the starting point and tell a comprehensive story about African migrants in the United States.
I consider this topic within a transnational framework
Transnationalism views migration not merely as the unidirectional movement of people from one nation to another, but as an ongoing exchange between places. I center the research around Ghanaian immigrants because they, along with other African immigrants, are among the fastest-growing immigrant groups in the U.S. To build on and confront some of the limitations of the transnationalism literature on migration, this project focuses on the motivations, processes, and consequences of migration.
