Transnational Migration and Sociocultural Practices: Mapping the Use of ICTs

The following paper intends to present the first results of the research Migration and Intercultural Communication: transnational flows, local interferences and the use of ICTs. One of the aims of this research is to study the transnational sociocultural practices through the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) of the migrants in the Federal District of Brazil. This research is based on the following questions: can we qualify the recent migration flows to Brazil as a transnational phenomenon? If yes, what is the role of the ICTs in the information exchange between migrants ? How do these technologies interfere and re-create sociocultural practices during the migrant's process of belonging ? We wish to understand how is it that ICTs make it possible for a twofold local experience: that of the daily life of those who stayed and that of the living experience of those who moved. his article presents the first results of the research Migration and Intercultural Communication: transnational flows, local interferences and the use of ICTs. One of the aims of this research is to study the sociocultural transnational practices through the uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by the migrants living in the Federal District (DF) of Brazil. The research observes how the ICTs affect the recent migration flows, that is, how it affects the planning, the trajectory and the negotiations for local belonging, without forgetting how they help maintaining identitary, affectionate, cultural and political ties with their country of origin. This research is based on the following questions: can we qualify the recent migration flows to Brazil as a transnational phenomenon? If yes, what is the role of ICTs in the exchange of information among migrants? How do these technologies interfere and recreate sociocultural practices during the process of the migrant's belonging?


The Research: ICTs and Contemporary Migrations
The studies that relate migrations to ICTs have already brought many theoretical contributions to the understanding of the characteristics of contemporary migrations and have complexified the understanding of the possibilities and practices surrounding ICTs. According to these studies Castells (2009), Vertovec (2004), Castles, Hass & Miller (2009), Cohen (2008), Portes (1999), Appadurai (2004;, the Internet, especially the use of social networks, would have enabled the communication between those who are in different and disseminated migratory contexts. By social networks, we understand, primarily, the contents produced by users, not necessarily limited by the websites specifically designed for that end, such as Facebook or Orkut, but including forums, blogs and Twitter, for instance. The fact is that while many of these websites are organized around people, others are built for interested communities (Paiva, 2007). Thus, they enable the creation of a public sphere in which any information concerning a subject of interest may be obtained. These informations may be conceived as a "form of resistance against the international policies that are more and more restrictive of migrations" (Dekker and Engbersen, 2012), since they end up giving out information on how to travel and, once they get to their destination, on which paths to follow in order to obtain legalization, work and housing. These channels of exchange and information openned by the social media can raise the real possibility of migrating as well as feed the hopes of those who are wishful of change.
In Brazil, we emphasize the theoretical contributions of Denise Cogo and Mohammed Elhajji on how the ICTs participate in the migratory process from the point of view of the exchange of information as well as of the subjective ties. For Cogo (2012), the importance that these technologies acquire in the whole migratory process, from planning the trip to building ties in the chosen destination, is outstanding: "In the constitution of migratory networks, the increasing presence of technologies of communication, such as the Internet and the cellular phone, have been the increasing cause of a territorial reshaping of the experiences of migrants in a global scope and, as a consequence, of a re-shaping of the ways transnationalism is configured in the migratory sphere".
For Elhajji (2012), globalisation and its' « techno-media correlate » would cause the uprising of actually transnational identitary spaces. For him, the geographical distance and the slowness of communication in the pre-global era still allowed for a deeper re-elaboration of the original minoritary identity in the local environement of the destination. Today, however, with a new ethno-cultural transnational sphere, the detachment from the migrant's original symbolic universe or from his "sister" communities spread throughout the world becomes more and more problematic.

Migrants Participating in the Research
In the context of the aforementioned researchfrom which this paper was born, we were interested in the migrants who are at the edge of the so-called qualified migration. The groups selected to compose the corpus constituted a recent migratory flow that could be labelled as economic migrationin the cases of the Bangladeshi, the Pakistani and the Ghanaian. These migrants often arrived in the Brazilian territory by illegal means, thus developping routes that encourage new flows of fellow-countrymen, as well as of migrants from other nationalities.
These migrants often make use of non-conventional ways in their trajectories, submitting themselves to the action of others who get paid for their services. These 'others'make the promise of facilitating their entry into the country without going through the official border-control. Once in Brazil, the migrants apply for a refugee status, not because they fit into the conditions recommended by the Genebra Conventions to acquire such a status, but rather because the refugee status is sought by migrants as a possibility to enter the country, since the legalization of one's permanence in a country is facilitated 6 Sofía Cavalcanti Zanforlin -Transnational Migration under these conditions rather than the bureaucratics and obstacles that the socalled "economic" migrants have to go through. It is necessary to point out that, in Brazil, as refugee claimants, the migrants have access to the necessary documentation in order to look for work and even for the financial aid of organizations that help them while their claim is processed. For these reasons, the migration flows chosen for this research have the Federal District of Brazil as a destination as well as a crossing point for administrative needs. Most of the migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Ghana have settled in Samambaia Norte.
The focal point of this research is therefore that of the South-South migration flow, that is, from poor countries to developing countries, rather than the historical South-North flow, from countries in the south hemisphere to the European and North-American continents. This new tendency has been pointed out as one of the most interesting changes in the contemporary migration flows. The 2013 report by the International Organization for Migration 1 (IOM) estimates that the South-South migration tends to be the most important direction of the next decades, overcoming or reaching the same level as the South-North migration, which counts around 95 millions of migrants. The report also points out the fact that the South-South migration flows tend to be informal, which makes it difficult to fully apprehend their scope. Data estimates that it varies between 87 millions (according to the data collected by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)) and 75 millions (according to the studies by the World Bank Group).
Our original research project defined it's framework as that of two groups of migrants that recently arrived in Brazil, that of the haitians and that of the bangladeshi, both established in the Federal District. This choice was explained according to the data obtained by the Conare 2 up to October 18th 2013 that demonstrated that the amount of refugee claimants in the DF was of 950 claims, higher than that of the city of São Paulo, with 922 claims, which is historically the most sought after in the country. It is worth pointing out that, since the Brazilian migration legislation is not up to date, claiming for a refugee status works as a temporary solution for migrants that get to the country without authorization and would be otherwise prevented to get into the country. There are two possibilities for getting into Brazil today: with a tourist visa or with a work visa having to be issued prior to one's arrival in the country.
Thus, the two groups of migrants we had selected have significantly and rapidly grown in the last two years. The Bangladeshi already constitutes one of the main refugee claimants in Conare's list, overcoming nationalities that have remained at the top of the statistics for years, such as the Colombians.
Haitians have started to arrive in Brazil in 2010, after the earthquake that hit the country in January of that same year.
Most of the Haitian migrants have established in the aministrative area of Varjão and most of the Bangladeshi have done so in Samambaia Norte. Knowledge of the two groups has been established in the research "Media, Migration, Interculturality -speech and imaginary", started in 2011 and financed by the CNPq/CAPES, completed by a field work with the migrants and with institutions that work with them, including the Institute for Migrations and Human Rights (IMDH) 3 , for instance, a civil society institution linked to the Catholic Church and responsible for most of the work done with migrants in the DF and in other brazilian states.

The Methodology Chosen
According to Portes (1999), a study that aims to investigate transnational migration must start by apprehending the stories and activities of individuals: that is, data collection and individual interviews. This would allow the researcher to draw the networks that make the transnational migration possible, as well as to identify the elements that constitute it, such as the means of communication chosen, whether through the internet or through the telephone, the means to exchange goods or money, and the trajectories and trips involved. We would like to point out that by transnational trajectories; we mean a constant exchange of information and experiences between the country of origin and the place to which the migrant moves. This exchange is done, most often, through ICTs, which makes for a twice local experience: that of the day-to-day lives of those who stayed, and that of the experience of those who moved. The investigation involves four types of correlated information: 1. First step: Investigation of documents and bibliographies, governmental notes and databases.
2. Second step: Analysis and observation of the instrumental practices of the social actors through the ethnographical exploration of the selected instances. 3. Third step: Study of the normative and axiological dimension of the subject, focusing on qualitative interviews. 4. Fourth step: Study of the possibilities of using virtual platforms and registration with technological tools of network cyber-sociology. During the first step of the research, we have started by defining the groups of Bangladeshi and Haitian migrants in the Federal District of Brazil. From there on, it was possible to choose subjects among those migrants that are willing to participate in interviews with the research group. The mapping was done through a partner-institution of this research: the Institute for Migrations and Human Rights (IMDH). However, after being confronted to the dynamics and constant renovation of the migration flows, we have decided to amplify the scope of the groups of migrants chosen for the research: instead of focusing only in two groups of migrants, haitians and bangladeshi, we have decided to include all migrants living in the Federal District for at least a year and, thus, we would be able to register different experiences and practices surrounding the use of ICTs by migrants as a whole. This change is explained by our weekly experience with the IMDH, given that we have detected a local increase of the presence of Ghanaian, Syrians and Pakistani in Brasilia: these groups were therefore included in our research. After this decision and the redefining of our research initial focal point, we have prepared the script for an interview that started being used in August 2014.
The questions proposed by our script included: what motivated the choice for a destination and which were the sources of information for such a choice, from where or from whom did the migrant obtain informations concerning Brazil and Brasilia?; which means have fed their aspiration to migrate?: TV, movies, the press, migrant media, forums on migration.
Concerning the use of ICTs, we asked which communication means were used, whether it was the e-mail, the telephone, social networks. We had also included questions surrounding the transnational ties: information about the person interviewed; how do they communicate with their family members and other people from their country of origin and how did this communication become affected by their migration? Which means do they use to maintain contact with their relatives? E-mail, telephone, letters, social networks, or Skype. There were questions that would give out clues on the intercultural practices of the migrants, that is, the way they get information about their country of origin as well as how do they negotiate their belonging in Brazil, if they listen to the radio, read newspapers, if they have created groups on the internet, such as Haïtiens au Brésil, a group started by haitians migrants established in Brazil in the social network Facebook.
Thus, having included new formulations and broader questions, we have finally reached the final stage of the questionnaire. The interviews were done by the researcher and the students of her Scientific Initiation class, at first in the IMDH's head office, and afterwards, by the researcher, during field work in Samambaia Norte, in November 2014, December 2014 and March 2015. In this article, we will discuss the subject of that research, motivated by the practice that involved the second and third steps of the aforementioned programme, that is, the field experience and the interviewing.
To this paper, we have decided to focus on the use of ICTs as mediators of sociocultural practices among the migrants interviewed during the research. By sociocultural practices we understand the migrants' involvement in social activities and their cultural consumption. Those are seen as data that reveals the way that those migrants have chosen to build their belonging in the Brazilian society. In order to guide ourselves through the possibilities of analysis offered by the interviews, we have pointed out two specific aspects that can be observed after a first look at the questionnaires used: how have ICTs influenced the migrants' sociocultural practices and how do the migrants perceive the build-up of their belonging in Brasilia. As for this last point, we will try to realize whether or not and how ICTs participate of this build-up. Thus, we will examine two different points: how is it that the ICTs make it possible for them to maintain and establish social ties and how is it that they perceive their contacts with brazilians as well as how they perceive themselves in this society.

Sociocultural Practices and the Use of ICTs
Mamadou's telephone rings, he politely tells us to wait while he answers, and then he comes back with the following question: it is my wife, do you wish to speak with her? His wife was calling from Accra, capital of Ghana, using the « Viber » mobile app (field experience report, March 2015). Saïd receives neverending phone calls, and when we ask him who is calling so much, he answers that it was his friends in Pakistan. Saïd also uses the same mobile app which allows him to make international phone calls using the data roaming offered by the cellphone operator or the wi-fi at home (field experience report, November 2014).
Among the different possibilities of technological communication devices, the telephone, especially the multi-function cell-phonesthe so-called « smartphones »appear as the main medium used by the migrants interviewed in this research. Most of them possess "smartphones", and those who had a simple cell-phone, that is, without Internet connection, used payphone phonecards to make international calls, or used their friends' smartphones (and only one migrant, age of 21, among all those interviewed has so-far mentioned the use of a public access computer). The use of smartphones, however, point out multiple functions, from the most basic one, that is to call their country of origin in order to maintain contact with their family and friends, to staying informed, especially about what is going on in their birthplace, or saving contacts for eventual job offers, this time in the destination country, and, above all else, for entertainment. Manuel Castells, in the opening ceremony of the IAMCR2014, has argued that the cell-phones are the most important communication technology among poor families, and points out that around 7 billion people in the world make use of this device. With this argument, the author has created the term « myself communication » to refer to the encrypted exchanges and communication flows through a cell-phone, as well as the term « soul to soul » communication. Indeed, as explained above, we realize that cell-phones play a central role in the day-to-day lives of the migrants. Through them, they are able to participate in their family's daily routine and to soften the difficulties implied by the distance. It would not be plausible for us to actually argue how long these ties would resist the distance while the migrant is not present in his home-country, however, the daily and instantaneous contact feeds the hopes of a family reunion with the migrant. Vertovec (2009) argues: "the times have changed, they [the migrants] are still physically distant, but now they can feel and function as a family" (p. 58).
Amin is sitting in the balcony of his appartment in the North Wing of Brasilia. While he smokes a cigarette, he follows the Syrian news and talks to a cousin about reconquering part of a family land menaced by a lawsuit. From that point on, his cousin is no longer afraid of losing the goats that he possesses on that land. His daughters are in the bedroom, where, through the laptop and the Youtube channel, they watch a TV show produced in Turkey which, according to them, "shows everything that happens in Syria nowadays". The family, including Amin's wife, is involved in the production of Arabic pastries, and maintains a page in the social network Facebook as well as a website under construction. The logo and the aesthetics of the website and of the Facebook page were built by the brother-in-law, who lives in Beirut, Lebanon. For the texts in Portuguese, he used Google Translate. This procedure is an example of how transnational practices are developped through the use of ICTs and facilitated by the Internet.
Besides re-enforcing social and affective ties, another aspect of the use of ICTs mapped during the research is information and entertainment. Staying informed of what happens in one's country of origin and even more importantly in one's previous social medium is a way of maintaining those ties, but also of attesting one's social capital among the members of a family or another group, such as friends or colleagues, for instance. As explained by Vertovec (2009); Networks connect migrants through time and space. Once started, the flows become almost self-sustainable, reflecting the establishment of information, assistance and obligation links developped among migrants and the society that hosts them, as well as friends and family members in the other ends of those networks. These networks link populations in the countries of origin and destination and secure movements that are not necessarily limited by time, unidirectional and permanent (p. 38).
Furthermore, according to the author, migration itself can be observed through the process of building networks: "migration is a process that creates and re-enforces the creation of networks" (Vertovec, 2009, p. 39). What we can point out as new in all of this, since the networks are another side of the phenomenon, is that with the use of ICTs, both time and space are relativized, which affects structural changes and consolidates transnational practices. The constitution of networks is fundamental to maintaining ties with one's origins, but also to find jobs, accomodations, means to send goods and psychological support as well as continuous social and economic information: "Networks constantly transform migrants to or through specific places and occupations: local job markets can be linked through organizational and interpersonal relations that act side by side with the migrants" (Vertovec, 2009, p. 38). Thus, networks build the bridge between the migrant, his past and his future.
Another important factor identified by the research was the use of devices, especially the smartphone, for personal entertainment. This observation can be explained by the life conditions of the migrants, be it because they have no money, or because of the barrier established between them and the Brazilian population due to the fact that they do not speak Portuguese. The fact remains that technological devices end up substituting a stroll through town, going to the movies or to the theater, meeting friends during the weekends, or visitting one's family. The personal computer and the smartphones, connected to the broadband or the wi-fi, make it possible to watch movies, listen to music, to stay informed of what happens in one's country, besides maintaining long distance relationships. Seeing as most of the migrants are unemployed, underemployed or employed and having to send most of their revenue to other countries, aside from maintaining themselves, the Internet connection substitutes and meets more subjective needs.
These observations are further confirmed by the Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants, who maybe have the most difficulty learning Portuguese and who keep the most to themselves. The same difficulty with the language would be attributed to the group of Ghanaians. The migrants from Ghana, however, who started to come to Brazil in the period of the World Cup, in June 2014, show the highest capacity of building up their own space in the region of Samambaia, where they live, even more than the group of haitians, that has been in Brazil for the longest periodmore than three years. The Ghanaian speaks English, but they are still able to communicate with their Brazilian neighbours. While we visited their group, on a Saturday afternoon in March 2015, we observed several nods and greetings between the many migrants with whom we spoke and the Brazilian passers-by. We were, then visiting the house in which more than ten migrants live together and that they chose to call "Samaghana", a mix of Samambaia and Ghana.
It is also during the Saturdays afternoon, always around 4 p.m., that the ghanaian soccer game happens, in which the migrants, wearing the brazilian uniform and football boots, occupy the football pitch close to Samaghana and play soccer, mixing the african team with the brazilians, who also play or just watch. The Ghanaian are also responsible for organizing collective prayers every Friday evening in which the Pakistani and the Bangladeshi migrants also participate, invited by the Ghanaian, since they also share the Muslim faith. Without a doubt, the presence of Ghanaian migrants seems to point out a unifying, creative and pulsating force, since they are able to establish their space and mark their presences wherever they choose to live.

Final Considerations
Globalization must be seen simultaneously as a technological and a political process. The technological revolutions made possible by globalization had a significant impact in the migratory process: they decreased the cost of traveling and communication, which allowed for people to travel to increasingly farther places (Castells, 2009). Studies investigating the subject of transnational migrations have in common the idea that technological changes made easier the migration to increasingly diverse destinations.
First of all, technological change reduced the resource restrictions on mobilitythe amounts of richness required to move from a point to another lowering the cost of travelling and communication. Second, it has strengthened migrant networks and transnational bounds, making it easier to maintain contact with family and friends, to send money and travel between the countries of destination and origin (Czaika & Haas, 2013). Third, the better access to "global" information through television, mobile phones and internet seems to have caused awareness of opportunities in countries that were so far unknown. All of these factors combined increased aspirations to migrate. The main idea is that increasing social, economic and cultural interdependence, synthetized by the concept of "globalization", has made migration easier in increasing numbers on a range more and more diversified and geographically distant between the countries of origin and destination.
14 Sofía Cavalcanti Zanforlin -Transnational Migration As a political process, we must understand globalization from its intertwining with economy and from the consequences it has on work categories. As national and international inequalities increase, so do work related demands and exigencies of high and low qualification. These changes have a direct consequence on migrant workers, especially to the poor, who deal with the lack of opportunities, with oppression and with violent conflicts in their home countries. Besides that, they are more and more seen as intruders in segmented labour markets from rich societies, which then tighten migratory controls. Many of these factors, such as the increasing segmentation of the labour market and the national inequality, are affected by the political tendencies to trade liberalization and economic deregulation, which also push globalization.
For some authors (Castles, Hass and Miller, 2009;Czaika & Haas, 2013), there was a "migration globalization", which is "the tendency for more and more countries to be crucially affected by migratory movements at the same time". This would coincide with the diversification of immigrant populations, that is, "most immigration countries have participants from a large spectre of economic, social and cultural contexts" (Castles, Hass and Miller, 2009;Czaika & Haas, 2013). The acceleration of worldly migration would have occurred at the same time as the diversification of migration in terms of composition of immigrant populations, not just in terms of countries of origin, but also in terms of migration category, in which the labour, students, family and refugees migration, as well as temporary and permanent migration, increasingly coexist.
In the article "How social media transform migrant networks and facilitate migration" (2012), Dekker and Engbersen reveal four ways of ICTs use in the migratory process: 1) social media help the migrants to maintain strong links to family and friends; 2) social media may become a way of communication with the people relevant in the organization of the migratory and belonging processes; 3) using social media, a new structure of latent links is established; 4) social media are a rich source of internal non-official knowledge on migration. The document concludes that social media are transforming the immigration networks and contributing to decrease the limitations to migrate.
The contemporary context is already disconnected from the fall of the empires, the so-called post-colonial period, but it is linked to the globalizing logics of redistribution of life resources. The contemporary Diasporas are scattered and diffused, extended in a diversity of territories and uninterested by the discussions concerning loyalty and legal obligations that this theme involved until then: the new migration puts an interrogation on the links between identity and citizenship, individual and place, neighbourhood and belonging. Thus, the important change of conception in this context is exactly related to the notions of belonging and transnationalism emergency, in which multiple belonging becomes an inevitable reality to be discussed. In a context in which the many forms of communication, cell phones, social networks and e-mails add up to a greater ease of circulation through travelling, the necessary context for the outbreak of transnationalism in a large scale is made possible.
Studying the ways of living and the sedimentation of transnational migration in the Brazilian context by accompanying new groups of migrants who get to Brazil, be it with the intention of staying and rebuilding their lives, or of leaving to another destination, is one of the goals of this research. Up to this moment, we focused on mapping the use of ICTs in the migratory course, generally done in parallel to the official trajectories, up to the arrival in Brazil. If internet is the essential medium to exchange information and to consolidate the migratory project, cell phones and smartphones are the technology used by crossers to make sure that their demands, that is, the payments made by the migrants to complete the course, are carried out. We believe that mapping these uses and finding out ways of enlightening the migrants through ICTs is the necessary alternative to retain the extortion that they are victims of, besides refining the debate concerning the reformulation of the legislation on foreigners, a debate which is now strong in Brazil.
As stated at the beginning of this paper, we have so far been discussing the first conclusions brought by the research, which is still ongoing. Even though most of the interviews is already done, we would still like to work during the first semester of 2015 in order to map our experiences with Haitian migrants. According to the research's schedule, we should start processing the data resulting from the analysis of the interviews in August. Thus, we still have one semester to finish the data collection and head on to the final phase of the research.
From the first results mentioned earlier in this paper, we can assert that ICTs are an important part of the transnational migration process. Furthermore, we can also point out that from all of the devices, the cell-phone, especially the smartphone, is the most used device. Let it be known that the price of these smartphones has become more and more accessible, just like the means to acquire them, as well as the practicity and mobility that this technology offers. The telephone connected to the Internet makes it possible for the migrant to stay close to his or her family members, even though he or she is not physically present, and allows for the possibility of making contact with the new society he or she integrates, besides becoming a mean to escape from reality for those who do not possess the conditions to invest in distractions and culture.
To Vertovec, the combination of the telephone/smartphone and of the decreasing price of international calls, to which we add the use of mobile applications that allow for instantaneous exchange of messages and calls, would be the "social glue of transnational migrations", and he points out that; According to this phenomenon and the impact of cheaper calls, we can catch a glimpse of the transnational life: it includes family and gender structures and roles, habitus or world views shaped by having lived here or there, and what we can call an intercultural behaviourdescribed as cosmopolitanism (Vertovec, 2009, p. 54).
Furthermore, we would like to conclude this paper by laying as a possibility for the continuity of this research the following question, asked by Castells, Fernández-Ardévol, Oui and Sey (2007): "Are cell-phones and expression of identity, an object of fashion, a vital toolor all of this together? (...) Are space and time being transcended by the social practice as a consequence of the possibility for ubiquitous and perpetual contact?" (p. 14).