Emigration Nations

Policies and Ideologies of Emigrant Engagement

M. Collyer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781349446964
  9781137277091
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137277107
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Some states have a long history of reaching out to citizens living in other countries but since 2000 it has become much more common for states to encourage loyalty from current or former citizens living abroad. Using detailed case studies, this book sets out to explain this significant development, with an innovative new theoretical framework.

1

Introduction: Locating and Narrating Emigration Nations

Michael Collyer

But do you know what a nation means? Says John

Wyse.

Yes, says Bloom.

What is it? Says John Wyse.

A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.

So of course everyone had a laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it: Or also living in different places.

( James Joyce, Ulysses: 331)

It is almost 40 years since Abdelmalek Sayad first emphasized that every immigrant is always initially an emigrant (Sayad, 1977), yet when migration is discussed it is still typically in the context of immigration rather than emigration. Sayad’s insistence on the enduring connection between the two, exemplified by his continued use of the label émigré–immigré (Sayad, 1991), marks one of the first detailed examinations of the distinct context of emigration, yet it has only gradually filtered into anglophone approaches to migration. Writing in appreciation of his career, Bourdieu and Wacquant argued that highlighting the emigration–immigration connection was one of his central contributions, ‘the implications of which remain to be fully drawn out by scholars and policy makers alike’ (2000: 174). This is beginning to change and the importance and particularities of emigration have become much more widely appreciated in recent years (Bauböck, 2003; Ragazzi, 2009).

The most obvious link between Sayad’s work and contemporary research is the now vast literature on the transnational activities of migrants (Vertovec, 2009). The transnational approach developed largely independently of Sayad’s related analysis of emigration–immigration, initially from empirical observation of the enduring connections that migrants maintained with places of origin. One of the key theoretical contributions of transnationalism in the early 1990s was to focus attention away from the state as the principal international actor in the regulation of international migration. The state was becoming ‘deterritorialized’ in the words of one of the most influential books of the time (Basch et al., 1994). In contrast, transnationalism was ‘the social space of post-modernism’ (Rouse, 1991). Resulting transnational research has emphasized the significance of non-state actors and particularly the role of migrants themselves in the reproduction of international migration.

Yet transnationalism was only one manifestation of the rejection of the state in the early 1990s social sciences. Another approach, which has also influenced a substantial current of contemporary critical enquiry, arose from concerns at the theoretical inadequacy of the state paradigm. Troubled by the reification of the state as a virtually autonomous actor, which emerged particularly from mainstream international relations at the time, an image of the state was advanced as simply an ‘effect’ of certain policy alignments (Mitchell, 1991). The geographer John Agnew cautioned international relations practitioners to avoid the ‘territorial trap’ of assuming that state borders effectively framed discrete categories of enquiry (Agnew, 1994) and sought to recognize non-territorial forms of state sovereignty (Agnew, 2005).

This constructivist approach focused on the state as a territorial institution, though it has much in common with analysis of the nation as a constructed entity (Anderson, 1986). More recent analysis has focused explicitly on the ‘hyphenation’ of the nation-state, investigating the ways in which groups of people have come to be associated with particular territories and how through continual practice such claims have come to be seen as perfectly natural and go largely unquestioned (Sparke, 2005). The emigration context presents a further challenge to the hyphenation of the nation-state; state institutions must work harder to maintain a claim to represent a nation ‘living in different places’, in the words of the Ulysses quote cited above. The variety of ways in which state institutions do this and the range of motivations for doing so are the subject of this book.

The chapters which follow are situated in this theoretical context. They focus explicitly on the nation-state, exploring one state each. Although this is in contrast to the typical transnational concerns with non-state actors, it builds on transnational approaches by viewing the institutions of the state as transnational actors competing and cajoling international migrants in the same ways as any non-state organization; the state is not seen as a privileged international actor. This in turn contributes to the critical analysis of the territorial state as a constructed institution. The concerns of this book are with emigrants: citizens defined by their absence from state territory. The increasing enthusiasm with which the institutions of the state engage with these absent individuals further underlines the limitations of territorial definitions of the state in a way that is not true of the more common focus on immigration.

The territorial state is clearly not a homogenous political category, but it at least retains some theoretical purchase. As an analytical category, the nation is genuinely all over the place as the Ulysses quote suggests. What is clear is that nations are eminently constructed, resulting from conscious processes of nationalism (Hobsbawm, 1983) or efforts at state building (Anderson, 1986). The relation between nations and states is also inevitably more complex than we can explore fully here: there are multinational states, multi-state nations and nations with no widely recognized state (Kymlicka, 1995). Sub-state entities such as Scotland, the Navajo nation or Zacatecas as well as supra-state institutions like the European Union, the Catholic Church or the Amazigh World Congress all have elements in common with the central concerns of this volume. Yet our inevitably more limited focus here is exclusively on nation-states; the nations of our ‘emigration nations’ should be understood in the sense of the United Nations, of internationally recognized, sovereign, territorial polities. It is in the context of emigration that the stability of the hyphen linking the ‘same people’ to the ‘same place’ is most obviously destabilized.

There is of course a danger that in using the nation-state as our fundamental unit of analysis we fall into Agnew’s ‘territorial trap’, that we ‘naturalize’ the state in a way migration research often finds hard to avoid (Gill, 2010; Bauder, 2012). Our intention here is exactly the opposite. Although international migration is often cited as one of the features of globalization that has come to undermine the state, this typically means immigration. In the case of immigration, it is only the state’s ability to control territory which is questioned, not the territorial nature of the state itself. Continued engagement with emigrants, on the other hand, re-emphasizes not only the necessary link between state and nation, highlighting the ways in which sovereign power is exercised beyond the territorial but also the fragility of that link. This is not a repeat of the deterritorialization debates common in the 1990s but an attempt to chart the recent evolution of the spatalization of state authority. Sayad argued that migration was one of the ways in which the state ‘thought of itself’ (Sayad, 1999). The central argument of this book is that, although state engagement with emigrants has a long history, the recent expansion and development of these activities marks a change in the way at least some states think of themselves. It is increasingly common for the narratives that bind our ‘imagined communities’ together to incorporate emigrants in more positive ways. This is a significant development, a way of coming to terms with the reality of nations living in different places.

This introduction sets the theoretical framework for the book. It begins with a review of recent explanations of emigrant engagement, followed by a review of the choice of case studies in the book. The third section turns to a more geographical analysis, emphasizing the significance of location and the durability of the inside/outside dichotomy that structures nation-states and defines emigration. The final section explores narrations of statehood, or ‘stories of peoplehood’ in Rogers M. Smith’s (2003) term, with a particular attention to how emigrants and emigration are incorporated into narratives that justify some collective sense of belonging. Each of the following chapters takes a common approach. Each chapter falls into three sections examining, first, the history and geography of emigration from the country in question; second, the development of policies designed to engage with emigrants; and third, discussions and debates which reveal how emigration has been incorporated into the ideology of the nation.

Explaining engagement with emigrants

The literature on state engagement with emigrants falls into three partially overlapping approaches: migration and development, transnationalism and the state, and extra-territorial citizenship. These three approaches reflect different conceptual understandings, substantially different terminology and different geographies of research. Very recent research has drawn on all three approaches with an interest in combining elements of each. This is a trend to which this book aims to contribute with a broad selection of countries that is explained in the following section.

The first and oldest approach dates back to concerns about the impact of emigration on countries of origin, particularly research into the ‘brain drain’ in the 1960s and 1970s (Bhagwati and Hamada, 1973). This approach broadened to include general impacts of international migration on the development of migrants’ countries of origin and encouraged some to question the dominance of immigration in the migration literature (Schmitter Heisler, 1985).

Since the late 1990s a much more positive view of the impact of migration on development has become institutionalized (de Haas, 2006). Emigrant groups have attracted considerable attention from state institutions for their work in poverty alleviation or development projects, and certain sending states have sought to ‘mobilize’ emigrants in order to support or encourage such activities (IOM, 2012). This approach is largely an applied one. Governments and NGOs have done much to popularize the notion of ‘diaspora’ for its broadly inclusive appeal, often without much concern for precise or consistent usage. Over the past decade international events such as the Global Forum on Migration and Development have given tremendous publicity to successful models of ‘diaspora engagement’, and large development NGOs and donor states have begun to advocate for the incorporation of emigrant groups into mainstream development policy (Migration DRC, 2009). The concern of this literature has typically been with poorer, marginalized states. At its simplest, this approach views emigrants as a resource that can be mobilized in support of the political or economic interests of the sending state.

Transnationalism has given rise to a second, distinct set of concerns. Although the transnational approach focused attention on migrants themselves as international actors, the impact of this development on states was always a related issue, and one strand of the literature has explored this in more detail (Østergaard-Nielsen, 2003a; Martiniello and Lafleur, 2008; Tintori, 2011). There is some overlap with migration and development in investigations of state attempts to incite or support productive investments from migrants though the focus is much less applied. Iskander (2010) entirely rejects the notion of ‘best practice’ that is prominent in the migration and development approach, arguing from a detailed study of Morocco and Mexico that success has been the product of creative response to circumstance. Equally, research has drawn attention to state efforts to coerce, control or isolate external criticism where emigrants have engaged in direct political campaigns against their own governments (Østergaard-Nielsen, 2003b; Collyer, 2006).

The innovation of this approach is to explore how state responses to the transnational activities of migrants contribute to the ‘redefinition of the state’ (Levitt and Dehesa, 2003). Levitt and Dehesa identify five areas in which legislative or administrative reform has specifically targeted emigrants: ministerial-level representation, investment policies, expansion of political rights, protections beyond traditional consular activities and symbolic approaches, such as the characterization of new extra-territorial regions. Through such developments state institutions become transnational actors like any others, abandoning the privileged role granted to states in the international sphere in classic international relations theory. ‘Transnationalism’ is a more common term than ‘diaspora’ in this literature, though the focus is still typically on more peripheral states.

Finally, a largely separate literature has considered emigration in terms of citizenship. This perspective moves further from the pragmatic policy concerns of the migration and development approach to a much more theoretical set of concerns. Conceptually, the focus on state interests that explains emigrant engagement in development terms is replaced with a more normative perspective. Rainer Bauböck has shaped this approach through a concern with the normative principles of liberal democracy that he argues are not fully aligned with the practice of citizenship (1994). Bauböck links the rights of non-resident citizens and the rights of non-citizen residents into a broadly inclusive ‘expansive’ or ‘stakeholder’ view of citizenship (2007).

In contrast with empirical work in more marginalized parts of the world, this approach is characterized by a focus on wealthy liberal democracies. Green (2005) traces state responses to emigration through 19th-century Western Europe as the right to emigrate became accepted as an essential liberal democratic norm. Barry argues that the development of this emigration norm is central in explaining the ongoing engagement with emigrants; ‘the citizenship discourse will remain incomplete until it analyzes emigrant citizenship as a tool of nation-building and identity construction in emigration states’ (2006: 19). The particular citizenship rights retained by emigrants are increasingly considered to form a distinct status, that of extra-territorial citizenship (Fitzgerald, 2000; M.P. Smith, 2003) incorporating certain economic and political rights (land ownership, investments, voting) but also obligations (ta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Rainer Bauböck
• 1 Introduction: Locating and Narrating Emigration Nations
• 2 ‘Albania: €1’ or the Story of ‘Big Policies, Small Outcomes’:How Albania Constructs and Engages Its Diaspora
• 3 Diaspora Engagement and Policy in Ethiopia
• 4 Diaspora Engagement in India: From Non-Required Indians to Angels of Development
• 5 Towards the Neo-Institutionalization of Irish State–Diaspora Relations in the Twenty-First Century
• 6 Italy: The Continuing History of Emigrant Relations
• 7 Regime Change in Mexico and the Transformation of State–Diaspora Relations
• 8 The Moroccan State and Moroccan Citizens Abroad
• 9 Creative Destruction in the New Zealand ‘Diaspora Strategy’
• 10 Nigeria @ 50: Policies and Practices for Diaspora Engagement
• 11 Portuguese Emigrants and the State: An Ambivalent Relationship
• 12 From Economic to Political Engagement: Analysing the Changing Role of the Turkish Diaspora
• 13 An Emigrant Nation without an Emigrant Policy: The Curious Case of Britain
• Afterword: States of Emigration
• Index