Emigrants Get Political

Migrants who live abroad or who return home after many years have become an important constituency throughout the world. This book examines Mexican migrant engagement in origin communities and finds that at times migrants powerfully impact political dynamics there, both from abroad and upon their return. Migrant hometown engagement, the subject of the book, can result in a range of different political outcomes in migrant-sending municipalities. However, these do not uniformly enhance local democracy. This is the central contention of the book and explaining what causes variation in migrant impact is the principle goal. The findings challenge the arguments of scholars, policy makers, and migrant politicians themselves who expect migrants to learn democracy in the United States and bring it back with them when they return home. Not only do migrants remit dollars, the argument goes, they remit democracy. The book employs a multi-method approach to answer these questions, providing two statistical chapters—including analysis of an original survey of more than 400 mayors from the state of Oaxaca—with two qualitative chapters based on field research in 12 Mexican municipalities and their satellite communities in the United States. The project began with an expectation that the engagement of millions of Mexican migrants in their home towns would result in thousands of political earthquakes. Instead, what may be most noteworthy is the ability of the Mexican political system to incorporate these new actors without instituting fundamental changes to the way that politics are done.