Overview

Migrants have become an important social and political constituency throughout the world. In addition to sending remittances to their home countries, many migrants maintain political ties with their nations of origin through the expansion of dual citizenship and voting rights. Some even return home to participate in local and national-level politics. But to what extent do migrants influence their home communities and governments? Mexican migrants fought for and won the right to dual nationality in 1997 and the right to vote from abroad in presidential elections in 2005. As the country with the world's second largest emigrant population, many expected that the enfranchisement of the Mexican diaspora would powerfully shape the direction of Mexican politics. Scholars, policy makers, and migrant politicians have argued that migrants who exercise these rights will, through contact with the U.S. political system and culture, develop more democratic attitudes and behaviors, and in turn, help to democratize their home states. However, only a tiny share of the Mexican diaspora community exercised their voting rights in the 2006 and 2012 elections. And, as this book shows, though migrants do engage socially and politically in their communities of origin and at times powerfully impact political dynamics there, the outcomes don't uniformly enhance local democracy. For example, while this research finds that migrants from non-elite backgrounds were able to parlay their migrant experience into a path to power in their home states, non-migrant politicians have been more successful at maintaining stability after election, due to their ties to the dominant governing parties. Even when migrant political actors intend to open up the political systems of their home towns, bring about needed reforms, or improve governance, the impact of their engagement at the aggregate level of municipal politics depends on a range of intervening factors, most importantly the nature of their interactions with non-migrant political actors in their home states and municipalities. Here, Michael S. Danielson develops a theory of and methodological model for studying migrant impact on the communities and countries they leave behind, examining a largely underexplored area of research in the migration literature.

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9780190680008

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"""This is an impressive work of social science. The collection of data is close to heroic, the arguments are nuanced and carefully laid out, and the contribution is significant and original. It dampens some of the scholarly hopes that migrants are agents of democratization, but more importantly, it illuminates various configurations and pathways that can explain why migrant political activity may reinforce existing power structures rather than challenge them."" --Jos� Antonio Lucero, University of Washington ""This book makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature on migrant engagement in politics back home. Danielson uses original data and mixed methods to shed new light on the questions of why migrants engage, how they compare to non-migrants, and what impact they are having on Mexico's democracy, especially at the local level. Among his most interesting although discouraging findings, is that the Mexican political system has been remarkably adept at incorporating migrants without fundamentally changing the rules of the game."" --Katrina Burgess, Tufts University ""Migrants' political impacts in their hometowns follow multiple pathways. This study convincingly shows that cross-border migrant engagement can either democratize from below-or can reinforce local elite domination. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods through the lens of subnational comparison, this study reveals diverse patterns that would be obscured by attempts to find homogenized generalizations."" --Jonathan Fox, American University ""Through an imaginative use of mixed-methods, Danielson's work challenges conventional wisdom of how and why emigrants engage in home-town politics. His in-depth case studies reveal the mechanisms by which migrants get political, and their contradictory effects on democratization."" --Willibald Sonnleitner, El Colegio de M�xico"

This is an impressive work of social science. The collection of data is close to heroic, the arguments are nuanced and carefully laid out, and the contribution is significant and original. It dampens some of the scholarly hopes that migrants are agents of democratization, but more importantly, it illuminates various configurations and pathways that can explain why migrant political activity may reinforce existing power structures rather than challenge them. --Jos Antonio Lucero, University of Washington This book makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature on migrant engagement in politics back home. Danielson uses original data and mixed methods to shed new light on the questions of why migrants engage, how they compare to non-migrants, and what impact they are having on Mexico's democracy, especially at the local level. Among his most interesting although discouraging findings, is that the Mexican political system has been remarkably adept at incorporating migrants without fundamentally changing the rules of the game. --Katrina Burgess, Tufts University Migrants' political impacts in their hometowns follow multiple pathways. This study convincingly shows that cross-border migrant engagement can either democratize from below-or can reinforce local elite domination. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods through the lens of subnational comparison, this study reveals diverse patterns that would be obscured by attempts to find homogenized generalizations. --Jonathan Fox, American University Through an imaginative use of mixed-methods, Danielson's work challenges conventional wisdom of how and why emigrants engage in home-town politics. His in-depth case studies reveal the mechanisms by which migrants get political, and their contradictory effects on democratization. --Willibald Sonnleitner, El Colegio de M xico

Author Information

Michael S. Danielson is Visiting Professor at the University of California Washingston DC Program and Research Fellow at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at the American University. He is the co-editor of Latin America's Multicultural Movements: The Struggle Between Communitarianism, Autonomy, and Human Rights.

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