Connecting more than the origin and destination: Multinational migrations and transnational ties

The focus of the vast majority of transnational migration scholars is on connections between a single origin and a single destination country, ignoring ties which migrants might develop between multiple destinations and an origin. I put forward the idea of ‘multinational migrations’ as a form of migration that lends itself to the development of transnational ties connecting not only the origin and a single destination country. I distinguish between three types of transnational ties that go beyond the traditional origin-destination pairing: (1) Transnational dyads that connect two destination countries together, (2) Transnational triangles that connect two destinations and the origin country, and (3) Transnational webs that connect multiple members of a single family or other tightly-knit social unit to three or more countries, even if they have not all lived in all of the countries in the web.