5.
What are the political consequences of international migration on the migrants country of origin?
Answers
Answer:In today’s world of ever increasing cross-border mobility, there seems to be no lack of interest in the
political consequences of international migration. In the United States, pundits are busy trying to predict
the effect of a larger Hispanic vote on future elections; and observers of many European countries are
wondering how today’s ethnically homogeneous societies will be changed by an ever larger proportion
of children with immigrant parents. Yet, with all the attention focused on host countries, the impact of
international migration on the politics in sending countries has, until recently, received relatively little
attention.
Given the relative novelty of this research agenda, the aim of this short piece is not so much to present
any clear cut solutions, but rather to give the reader a general idea of the different theories that are
currently being proposed. It will also point to the difficulties in empirically testing the different causal
mechanisms suggested by these theories.
I will illustrate this discussion by focusing on the particular case of Mexico, which for good reasons is the
probably most studied country in migration literature. Mexico is not only the sending country in the
world’s biggest migration corridor, but it also offers a large amount of high quality data which one would
not be able to find in most other middle income countries. More to the point, Mexico’s recent (and by
many accounts still unfinished) democratic transition and the persistence of autocratic practices at the
state and local levels make it an ideal setting to study the effects of emigration on political institutions.
Most of the academic literature on the subject has traditionally focused on particular case studies, such
as the financial support of the emigrant community for certain political actors (e.g. the Kosovo
Liberation Army), without the attempt to construct a broader theoretical framework. For the case of
Mexico, this literature has mostly dealt with the role of home town associations (HTAs). As the name
suggests, HTAs are (mostly informal) clubs formed by migrants who hail from the same town in Mexico.
Their primary aim is to pool donations from their members in order to finance public goods back home
(everything from town fairs to sewage systems). In the process they gain a lot of clout, as their collective
remittances often surpass the official budget, which converts them into important political players (de la
Garza and Hazan (2003), Smith (2001), Smith (2005)). But, while most researchers agree that HTA
members themselves become politically more involved, there is no consistent evidence as to the
direction in which they influence politics, nor whether as a result local politics becomes more
participatory for non-migrants as well.
Only recently have political scientists started to chart these waters in a more systematic fashion.
Generally speaking, one can distinguish between three different lines of thought. The first one, which
could be called the “alienation hypothesis”, conceives that international migration is largely detrimental
to the functioning of democratic institutions. It makes the argument that citizens in high migration
communities become increasingly estranged from the political process for two reasons. Firstly, as they
will always have the option to migrate themselves with relative ease at some point, they are holding less
of a stake in their home polity’s future. Secondly, and partly pertaining to the literature discussed above,
as migrant organizations such as HTAs step in to provide most of the goods and services traditionally
supplied by the public sector, citizens will disengage from the state and switch their allegiance to the
migrant community. The empirical evidence presented in favor of this hypothesis shows that high levels
of migration are systematically associated with lower voter turnout at elections (after adjusting for the
number of migrants who left), as well as lower levels of political engagement, such as participation in
political events (Bravo (2007), Goodman and Hiskey (2008)). The principal drawback of this analysis is
that as it relies only on cross-sectional data (no longitudinal data is available), clear causal channels are
not identified. It could, for example, perfectly be the case that communities with lower levels of political
participation are more prone to sending migrants. Furthermore, in the Mexican political context it is also
possible that lower levels of political participation point to a weakening of the formerly dominant state
party PRI, and that a higher level of migration is associated with a lower degree of autocratic control.