This paper discusses empirical examples of Bosnian Croats and their children who settled in Sweden due to the 1990s war in their country. Their local economic and social incorporations have been relatively successful and not hindered by their transnational practices, which involve three countries (Sweden, Bosnia and Croatia). The paper focuses on the attempts to create employment and to gain education that make use of transnational spaces. My research participants did not use transnational options out of necessity, but out of perceived unproblematic possibilities of personal choice. Still, transnational options did not necessarily bring about satisfactory results: efforts were not necessarily rewarded in the expected ways. This invokes theoretical considerations of why this might be the case. The main theoretical point made in the paper pertains to the concept of community. It is deconstructed in line with the research participants’ expectations and disappointments that make clear the imagined character of ‘ethnic communities’ as well as the dynamics of local inclusions, which prove to be equally complex in any location within a transnational space.