Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on recent transnational migrations between Argentina and Europe as a consequence of past migrations, integration strategies and identity politics in an Argentinean inclusive multicultural context. Argentines migrate as European citizens and are invisible despite their foreign origin.

Paper long abstract:

The author will address some implications of relatively large scale and invisible recent and ongoing transnational migrations between Argentina and Europe through the perspective of European multiculturalism. Recent economic migrations between Argentina and Europe are essentially connected to migration flows in the first half of the 20th century and the contemporary relationship between Europe and Argentina is therefore strongly characterized by an inversion of roles. When migrating to Europe, many Argentines are entitled to a citizenship of a European country, since they are descendants from European emigrants, who left Europe because of poverty and political instability, and sought prospective opportunities in 'the new world'. This is for example apparent in the recent transnational migrations between Argentina and Slovenia. Argentines of Slovene descent, whose parents left their homes in Slovenia for political reasons directly after the Second World War and settled in Argentina have been migrating (back) to Slovenia. After migrating to Argentina, Slovenes lived in a highly organized (ghettoized) translocal community with a formal central association, local community centres and schools, allowed by an Argentinean multicultural context that enabled the persistence of numerous different immigrant or national groups and recently fuelled the process of 'national revival'.

The inclusive multicultural context in Argentina differs immensely from an exclusive (multi)culturalism found in Slovenia or Spain for example, where there is an apparent distinction between Argentines, many of them formally Europeans, and other groups of immigrants. In Spain, immigration is most often connected to an ideology of (multi)culturalism, which enables exclusion or hidden discrimination in the name of cultural persistence of distinctive national or ethnic immigrant groups and as such represents a continuity of nationalism, ethnocentrism and even racism. Argentines are normally not even considered real immigrants nor perceived as cultural foreigners. In this sense, by comparing the situation of Argentinean transnational migrants to other immigrants in Spain, we can explore the mechanisms of constructing significant differences and identities in the dialectical relations between European societies and their cultural foreigners.