Using a local Yoruba-Nigerian transnational community in Toronto, Canada as a case study, this paper first re-examines the political economy explanation of international migration, and argues that there are salient extra-economic factors that are also responsible for migration. Then, it is argued that the migration phenomenon, from the perspective of this local Yoruba-Nigerian community, should be seen as a process in which the agency of immigrants’ action and the structures that channel their decisions to migrate conflate over time and space. On the basis of these two points, the paper suggests transnationalism as a conceptual framework option for understanding international migration in a fast changing world for two reasons. First, transnationalism elaborates on factors motivating migration, especially the complex articulation of diverse motives, which render the classic ‘push-pull’ model as ‘over-socializing’ and inadequate in understanding the human condition. As empirical evidence of the study shows, five different factors motivated Yoruba-Nigerians’ transnational migration. Second, transnationalism broadens our knowledge of migration by addressing the ‘agentic’ role of immigrants, in the form of ‘resistance’ and ‘challenge’ to racially-motivated inequality prevalent in modern ethnically-racially diverse societies. While transnational migration provides avenues for immigrants to contest for and valorize status in ‘host’ and ‘home’ countries, the politics of ‘re-ethnicization’ by Yoruba-Nigerians reinforces existing racial, gender, and class inequalities in their social fields.