Migration diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa

Power, mobility, and the state

Gerasimos Tsourapas

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526132093
• eBook ISBN: 9781526132116
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

1
Analysing mobility in the Middle East from the perspective of migration diplomacy

‘International migration has traditionally been visualized as under the control (in both legal and practical terms) of the receiving country, with the role of the sending country a passive one. It now appears, however, that sending countries may have more control over outmigration than was previously thought and indeed may visualize it as a kind of “national resource,” to be managed like any other.’

Myron Weiner (quoted in Teitelbaum 1984, 447)

International relations scholars of the politics of migration outside the Global North are arguably confronted with three main challenges in terms of further study on the topic of migration diplomacy. Firstly, there exists a need to systematically unpack the types of mobility that are encompassed within the terminology employed, and to attempt more nuanced explanations of the variables under study. In many ways, this refers to a broader issue that scholars of migration politics are faced with, regarding commonly acceptable definitions of phenomena under study, from ‘diasporas’ or ‘emigration’, to ‘sending-states’. Secondly, a key challenge concerns the need to move beyond the study of archetypical cases in the field of emigration politics, and to shift our attention to non-traditional cases or, more ambitiously, engage in comparative work – either via within-case analysis across time periods or via cross-case research. Finally, scholars need to pay more attention to the adoption of data collection methods and methodological approaches that take the empirical realities of emigration politics into account – conducting fieldwork in many sending- or host-states of the Global South is extremely difficult, for instance, while accurate data on migration flows and stocks is either impossible to retrieve or unavailable.¹

The analytical confusion on the concepts employed constitutes a main issue that affects political science research into questions of population mobility and, in particular, emigration states. From an international relations perspective, there exists a considerable degree of difficulty in the proper classification and theorisation of states’ rationale behind emigration and diaspora policies, which translates into the need to unpack core concepts into their key parameters. Within the emerging literature in political science, the term ‘diaspora’ has developed from one rarely used to one currently suffering from conceptual stretching and conflation – often encompassing not merely a state's citizens who have emigrated, but also those emigrants’ descendants, as well as other co-ethnics. As Brubaker argued in his critique, ‘emigrant groups have been conceptualised as diasporas, even when they have been largely assimilated. The Italian diaspora is a case in point’ (Brubaker 2005, 3). Gamlen's key study of the ‘emigration state’, for instance, equates diasporas with ‘extra-territorial populations’, including:

temporary or transnational migrants who spread their time between their sending state and elsewhere and fall more or less arbitrarily into one or other policy category of the origin state. They also include longer-term but still first-generation emigrants settled in another country, and descendants of emigrants who – in certain places at certain times – identify as diasporic or even as members of a fully fledged diaspora ‘community’. (Gamlen 2008, 842–3)

Over the past few years, a growing literature has successfully eschewed such problems of conflation by explicitly centring on states’ emigration, rather than diaspora, policies. By avoiding discussion of co-ethnics, this body of research focuses exclusively on policies towards those who have emigrated with the intention of living abroad. The reasons behind states’ engagement with emigrants correspond to the findings of the state–diaspora relations literature, traditionally viewing ‘emigrants as a resource that can be mobilised in support of the political or economic interests of the sending state’ (Collyer 2013, 5; cf. Østergaard-Nielsen 2003a). However, while accurately differentiating between states’ emigration and diaspora policies, this strand of literature assumes migration is unidirectional, and does not take into account the importance of emigrants’ potential return as a shaping factor of state policy. As states develop new institutional mechanisms that target emigrant populations (Fitzgerald 2009; Naujoks 2013), they frequently build ties not solely with emigrants, but also with prospective emigrants (Rodriguez and Schwenken 2013) as well as with return migrants (Markowitz and Stefansson 2004; Tsuda 2009). This points to an important, albeit un-problematised, aspect of states’ policies towards its emigrants, namely the interconnectedness of emigration and return (Tsourapas 2015b). ‘Return movements across time and space have largely been ignored in anthropology and migration research’, Markowitz and Stefansson (2004, 3) argued. While sociologists and historians have addressed this gap (Levitt 1998; Khater 2001), Stefansson's argument remains true within political science. The literature on diaspora acknowledges that diaspora policies often aim to attract groups of co-ethnics back to the homeland, but the research on states’ emigration policy has not taken that into account. Put differently, a state's policy of encouraging or discouraging its citizens’ emigration is connected to its respective discouragement, or encouragement, of its citizens’ return migration.

Similarly, as I have shown elsewhere (Tsourapas 2015b), the question of how and why states target different external populations has not been sufficiently problematised. This is not to say that researchers have disregarded differentiated state policies – see, for instance, Naujok's (2013) work on India or Nyíri's (2013) work on China. Yet they have yet to theorise their political rationale and purposes. Schmitter Heisler's work on sending-state policies, for instance, acknowledges that states differentiate between ‘long-term-temporary’, ‘short-term-temporary’, and ‘permanent’ migration, but employs this to argue that a state ‘benefits [from migration] only if emigrants remain abroad for an extended period without settling permanently’ (Heisler 1985, 475). Levitt and de la Dehesa provide an extensive analysis of sending-states’ various engagement policies but do not account for within-state variation (Levitt and De la Dehesa 2003), an argument that can be made with regard to Collyer's edited volume on the subject (Collyer 2013). Koinova's work on diaspora ‘positionality’ and Gamlen's research on ‘tapping’, ‘embracing’, and ‘governing’ further enhance our understanding of sending-states’ strategies, yet without explicitly theorising on the rationale behind multiple engagement policies (Koinova 2012; Gamlen 2014). Despite the fact that the line between ‘temporary’ or ‘short-term’ and ‘long-term’ or ‘permanent’ (or, indeed, between ‘voluntary’ and ‘forced’ migration) is necessarily blurred, research on emigration politics needs to critically reflect on these categorisations, as well as make a renewed effort towards unpacking these core concepts.

The second challenge facing international relations scholars’ work on emigration politics is the need to move beyond a small universe of archetypical cases that have attracted the bulk of researchers’ attention in the last few decades. These cases primarily include Mexico (Fitzgerald 2006; Délano 2011) and India (Kapur 2010, Varadarajan 2010; Naujoks 2013), as well as the Philippines (Guevarra 2009; Rodriguez 2010). As Burgess and Meseguer recognise in an edited issue of Studies of Comparative International Development on ‘International Migration and Home Country Politics’, there exists an ‘over-representation of Mexico in current research’ (Meseguer and Burgess 2014, 7). While these three cases feature a wealth of empirical observations that may undeniably shed light on emigration politics across the Global South, there exists a number of analytical risks in extrapolating solely based on findings from these cases. For one, the study of emigration politics outside democratic contexts continues to constitute a major gap in the literature (cf. Dalmasso et al. 2017), save from notable exceptions in the state-diaspora literature (Brand 2006; Moss 2016b). Autocracies are examined either in terms of their immigration policies (Cooley and Heathershaw 2017; Shin 2017), or, with regard to emigration and diasporas, in terms of transitions to democracy (Koinova 2009; Brand 2014b).

In particular, emigration scholars’ focus on democratic contexts has side-lined two distinct aspects of autocracies’ migration politics. Firstly, autocracies aim to exert, by definition, a greater degree of control throughout citizens’ migration trajectory, and are better equipped at managing short-term versus long-term migration. ‘Inclusive’ policies developed by democracies do not travel as easily in autocratic contexts that do not share liberal understandings of citizenship, membership, or rights. Article 13b of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’) has been challenged by many non-democracies that do not regard cross-border mobility as a right (cf. Dowty 1989). Beyond policies that exclusively target those citizens and co-ethnics already residing outside its borders, non-democracies devel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Analysing mobility in the Middle East from the perspective of migration diplomacy
• 2 Migration and the state in the modern Middle East: a history
• 3 Constructing the migrant as a subject of power in Egypt
• 4 State–diaspora relations and regime security in North Africa
• 5 Inter-state cooperation and labour migration to the Gulf
• 6 Managing mobility as a host-state issue-linkage strategy
• Conclusion
• References
• Index