Polities beyond Borders. The New Dynamics of Emigrant Politics and Policies in Latin America

We presented papers on panels – and organised panels and workshops ourselves- in international conferences to showcase our conceptualisation and operationalisation work, as well as our index. These participations all demonstrate the importance that emigrant policies have acquired for sending states, as well as the variety of approaches taken by these policies. Our research confirmed that transnational migration has challenged core concepts of the nation state such as citizenship, nationality, and belonging, and given new depth to concepts such as "external citizenship".

While migration debates are often framed in terms of social issues, marginalisation, discrimination, integration, and assimilation, our findings highlight the role of state–migrant relations as a key factor in the success of certain communities to organise themselves politically beyond the borders of their country of origin. Furthermore, the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX) confirms that the LAC region has made crucial advances to assist their diaspora in the states of reception and to integrate their non-resident citizens into the political, economic and social fabric of the state of origin. The EMIX shows that the most extended emigrant policies dimensions are those related to the recognition of dual-citizenship, the adoption of programs that aim to incorporate non-residents into the economy of the state of origin (i.e. return schemes or remittances) and, surprisingly, policies that extended social protection beyond borders (i.e. healthcare or pension schemes for non-residents). The EMIX, however, also shows that there is great variation in the degree of extension of emigrant policies across LAC countries. While some countries, such as Brazil, Mexico or Ecuador have adopted almost all of the emigrant policies covered in our study, other countries focus only on certain policies notably within the electoral or economic dimension. The qualitative part of our research, based in the study of four cases (Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Uruguay), has helped us to understand cross-country variations in the design and implementation of emigrant policies. As they reach out to migrants living abroad, emigrant policies are shaped by complex political debates and involve conflicting interests. Our field research gave us the opportunity to corroborate the role of the interplay of social and political actors at the national and subnational policymaking levels and within particular institutional constellations (e.g. pertaining to different administrative structures of states and to different possibilities for political participation and representation within each) in propelling extensions of emigrant policies and giving them specific contents.

More concretely, our published work has made substantive contributions to the comparative literature on emigrant policies:
- A conceptual contribution to the definition of emigrant policies that has been useful for operationalising these policies within our project but which will also be useful in comparisons beyond our region of study.
- A data collection tool that can be used by other researchers and other projects to enlarge the data set we have produced, to replicate our study or as the basis for future projects with a larger geographic or analytical scope.
- An original dataset available to the academic community and which codifies the principal emigrant policies of all Latin American and major Caribbean countries at the large-N level.
- We have shown that in the best studied of all emigrant policy dimensions, the electoral one, there is general convergence about an extension of active voting rights across countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, yet this convergence dilutes when we look at the government bodies that can be elected by emigrants, as well as at the rights of emigrants to be themselves candidates.
- We have shown exactly which rights and obligations are substantially covered by states of origin when they allow citizens abroad to maintain and exercise citizenship (i.e. electoral rights).
- We have published a book that presents the results of our data collection phase in narrative yet comparable form in collaboration with FLACSO-Chile, both on paper and online.