1 Introduction: The Problem Stated

While political demography may be “under-represented in political science” (Weiner & Teitelbaum in Kaufmann & Toft, 2012: 3), population has been a highly politicized topic for over two hundred years, certainly since the times of Robert Malthus. Whether there are too many people in the world, and what should be done about it, has exercised minds of various political persuasions for many decades and particularly since the Second World War. This was a time in which two issues relevant to the theme emerged: first, the very real rapid population growth in what was termed the ‘developing world’, today the ‘global south’, and second, the emergence of a number of international organizations that could address the issue in the context of ‘development’. Today, however, it is population decrease in certain parts of the world and its consequences for, among other things, increased migration that is exerting politicians and public alike. That is, fertility decline, which has led to decreasing growth in labour force and, ultimately, towards population decline in many parts of the developed world, has increased pressure to import labour. Hence, politics has reacted both to the fear of growing numbers of “the other” and to the need for “the other”. The policy challenges of stagnating and declining populations will be as great in the future as those of expanding populations in a previous age.

In contrast to these lofty ideas, political demography has a much more focused remit, which is to study “the size, composition, and distribution of population in relation to both government and politics” (Kaufmann & Duffy Toft, 2012: 3). The same writers go on to view migration studies as occupying “an academic archipelago isolated from associated questions on the political impact of migration on sending and receiving societies” (Kaufmann & Toft, 2012: 4). One need not necessarily agree with this statement to accept that some disconnect exists between migration studies and other major branches of the social sciences. However, one might add that a disconnect also exists within political demography itself, between its primary focus on the impact of age structures on the one hand and an adequate consideration of migration issues on the other. To these disconnects must be added one of the two major schisms in migration studies: that between refugees against all other forms of migration.Footnote 1 This division is so marked that, for many, refugees are not migrants and cannot be considered within the same category (e.g. UNHCR, 2016). Yet, refugees do add to or subtract from, populations of destination and origin, respectively. As such they must be considered, demographically at least, to be ‘migrants’ even if, from the points of view of international legal definitions and of managing migration, they might best be considered as separate entities. The division clearly reflects a distinction that is often not as clear: that between forced and voluntary population movements. It is the purpose of this chapter to work towards a framework that can try to encompass these various disconnects and divisions in order to link migration more securely to the political demography mainland.

The chapter begins by introducing broad historical, geographical and political themes that provide a context for the more specific and contemporary case material to be presented later. Population size, the role of migration in the creation of political units and differences in these units will all be raised. The focus, however, is on that basic building block of our world, the state, and how migration has contributed to both its construction and its transformation. The role of migration in nation and state building will be considered from two points of view, exclusionary and inclusionary, to cover both refugee and ‘voluntary’ movements. Given that more established literature linking population movement and political change exists on the former, greater attention in this chapter will be given to the latter, with just a cursory discussion on refugees. The transformation of the state will be considered in terms of immigration, and its impact on compositional and political changes, and in the context of emigration and the impact of the diaspora or transnational-induced political change. Thus, state building and state transformation illustrate a two-way interactive process, with political change giving rise to migration and migration giving rise to political change. Some of these movements may involve large numbers of people but it must also be emphasized that the migration of very small numbers, perhaps even of individuals, can also generate political change. The focus in this chapter will be on the relatively recent past, between about 2000 and 2018, in both the developed and the developing worlds.

2 Populations, Migrations and Political Development: Broad Perspectives

At the simplest level, the sheer size of a population in the envelope of a powerful state can project power to dominate any rivals. China, Russia (and the former Soviet Union) and the United States of America (USA) are the obvious examples. Less obvious, perhaps, is why relatively small populations such as Ancient Greece, Portugal, England and Wales or the Netherlands came to dominate significant parts of the world at particular times. How important was demography in explaining the rise to power of these particular countries? While the role of numbers and political power may not always be clear, one can say that migration was central to this process of the creation of empire.

As will be seen below, migration is central to the creation of all states irrespective of size, not just physically, but also in terms of national mythology. Implicitly or explicitly, migration is an integral part of the narrative of state creation irrespective of what might have been occurring with the other two demographic variables, fertility and mortality. The “frontier”, the “great trek” and the “long march” are all examples of participatory experiences, narratives that bring a sense of unity to previously disparate groups that became foundation myths of nation and state. Long before the emergence of the modern state, circuits of mobility in the form of pilgrimage brought widely dispersed peoples into common belief systems around the experience of travelling to Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, Varanasi, Haridwar, Bodhgaya, Ise or Mount T’ai that underlay the great world religions. Yet, migrations not only provided the basis for the identification of separate belief, imperial or state territories and populations, they also linked them together through trade and the exchange of ideas. Civilizations were rarely hermetically sealed units but learnt from each other through traders and travellers, as well as through military expansion.

Conflict was central to the expansion of these separate civilizations and to competition among them. Conflict that displaced populations and the history of violence and forced migration runs throughout history, yet, it is a violence that has not just fluctuated over time but has undergone a long-term secular decline (Morris, 2014; Pinker, 2011). Violent deaths appear to be endemic in pre-modern societies but are punctuated by periods of more organized warfare that paradoxically lead to lower levels of violence. Warfare might make a wasteland but the victors make the peace in which recalcitrant populations can be stabilized and new techniques and populations introduced. Agricultural production is then increased, leading in turn, to expanding populations that can be taxed (Morris, 2014). Groups that were once shifting, nomadic or migratory become more sedentary and one might argue that migration, in the sense of a shift in usual place of residence, only takes meaning once a population becomes more sedentary, paradoxical though this might seem. Why these periods of warfare to extend the peace should erupt have been attributed in various ways to ‘epochal wars’ as political systems, in one interpretation, moved progressively through constitutional orders from princely states to kingly states, territorial states, state-nations, nation states to market states (Bobbitt, 2002). The shifts in constitutional orders may have been underpinned by successive cycles of growing inequalities that eventually exposed populations to shocks that brought about demographic and economic collapse that would give rise to a new cycle of accumulation (Scheidel, 2017), which included the development of new political orders.

The role of demography in conflict, with the exception of increasing mortality, is unclear. That is, whether growing population numbers by bringing pressure upon local resources, result in conflict in a classical Malthusian interpretation might seem intuitive but is almost certainly overly simplistic. Robust evidence is scarce but must come from more recent times to test ideas about the role of population growth in political change. Political demography has tended to focus more on the changing population structures in terms of age and the implications for political change. Certainly, the incidence of civil conflict appears greater among youthful populations while democracy is more likely to emerge in ageing, more “mature” populations (Madsen, 2012: 82). Whether a youth bulge provides fertile ground for revolution and demand for radical change has also been examined, particularly in the context of parts of the Islamic world today, as part of explaining and predicting political change (Cincotta, 2009; Urdal, 2012). However, any role for migration in this process is largely invisible. Nevertheless, as implied above, migration was an integral part of all of these developments. The movement of ‘surplus’ agrarian populations to towns and cities, the dispersal of peoples due to conquest or fleeing epidemics, the movement of armies and their camp followers and the excursions of pilgrims suggest societies in constant movement. However, just how these movements in response to changes in those same societies may have contributed to those political changes remains unclear. Certainly, one of the few generalizations that can be made about migration is that the majority of those who move are young adults. Hence, one might assume that youth bulges might generate greater incidence of human movement (Biira & Hartmann, this volume). This chapter seeks to illustrate the ways in which migration and migrants can contribute to this process of political change, albeit still in a tentative and speculative way.

3 Migration and the Creation of the State: The Exclusionary Dimension

The most explicit linkage between migration and political change, or perhaps more exactly between refugee studies and political change, has been in the work on forced migrants. That political conflict gives rise to forced migration is perhaps the closest we come to a simple cause and effect relationship in political demography. The emergence of new states upon the dissolution of empires and decolonization has been considered to be central to the creation of refugees as the new leaders pursued ideas of nationhood and who should and should not be members (Zolberg, 1983, with a more recent review in Maley, 2016). Those who did not fit the image of a more homogeneous state were expelled, re-educated or otherwise dealt with.

Those expelled include two main groups: those “forced to flee for a well-founded fear of persecution”—refugees according to the 1951 United Nations Refugee ConventionFootnote 2—and asylum seekers , or those who flee across an international border and seek recognition as refugees. The former are de jure forced migrants recognized by the international community and the latter are de facto but not yet recognized forced migrants. At worst, they are considered ‘irregular migrants’ whose right to remain in a destination has to be determined. Irrespective of these legal differences, their migration has been driven by policies of the state of origin to exclude groups from their territory . The majority of refugees are both generated and found in just a few locations in the world today: around Afghanistan, in the horn of Africa, in Central and Eastern Africa and, most recently, around Iraq and Syria.

While the emergence of countries from years of direct external control as a driver of major political change leading to forced population movements seems well-taken, any easy association with the other population trends in fertility and growth is more problematic. Certainly, refugees tend not to be generated among more developed, low fertility, slow growth populations with the majority emerging in areas of high fertility, although exceptions certainly exist. For example, Myanmar has a total fertility rate around the replacement level but has been engaged in the expulsion of the Rohingya, who have a much higher fertility of around 3.8, a difference that is but one driver in the conflict (Blomquist & Cincotta, 2016). While refugees also flee to be registered in areas of high fertility, too, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan, they are also found in areas of low fertility, in West Asia in the Lebanon and Turkey.

However, any high fertility/high population growth/conflict/forced migration nexus would provide an all too simple interpretation of the causes of political conflict and refugee production, which lie as much in the involvement of low fertility outside powers becoming involved in real or perceived threats and rivalries. Low fertility Iran, for example, uses Afghan proxies in the conflict in Syria in which low fertility Russia also participates. Parallels in this geopolitical game can be found in the USA and its European allies becoming involved in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, while the association between conflict and migration can be well established through the creation of refugees, links with other dimensions of demography appear more tenuous. Yet, a focus on conflict and forced migration downplays the role of migration in political change, drawing attention away from arguably more significant issues.

4 Migration and the Creation of the State: The Inclusionary Dimension

While states seek to create their citizens through expelling some, they also seek to include other groups, as well as consolidate control over designated territory. Thus, the state uses institutions to establish control over previously disparate groups and marginal territories, the most important of which are security, through conscription, and education, through the construction of schools to which youth must move to embark upon, or to continue, their training to be members of the larger polity. Military recruitment, which may involve some degree of coercion, and participation in post-primary schooling both generally involve movement to barracks or schools that are only to be found beyond the village. In essence, circuits of migration, or more accurately of mobility, come to define the state. These allow the control of territory, the penetration of centralized administration, as well as the denial of entry to outsiders at border points. The creation of national armies and a civil service brought unified ideas that could be diffused rapidly across territory. This idea was well captured by Arlacchi (1983: 200) displayed with the Italian case. More recently, in the introduction to a collection of essays on states in Africa, Quirk and Vigneswaran aver that “[a]ll states – historical and contemporary - have consistently made sustained efforts to legitimize, condition, discipline and profit from human mobility […] that it is necessary to treat mobility as a central factor when it comes to both the constitution and everyday operation of state authority” (2015: 6).

Migrations around urban and religious centres of soldiers and administrators are used to bring unity to a territory through the extension of the area under effective control. In the post-colonial period, when borders previously imposed or negotiated among external powers were bestowed on newly independent governments, marginal territories were often only notionally under control. These areas, and particularly in mountainous or desert regions, were populated by groups that were culturally distinct from urban and settled agricultural peoples. Political boundaries in these regions held little meaning for long-established shifting cultivators or nomadic herders whose way of life transcended the borders. The central state often viewed the inhabitants of these marginal areas as ‘tribals’, ‘hill tribes’ or ‘minorities’. Modern states find the incorporation and stabilization of such populations problematic. While specific differences in approach have varied, the common theme of land colonization emerged across the developing world. These programmes were given strongly developmental objectives to extend agricultural production and to give land to the landless, while downplaying the fact that members of the dominant groups were being settled among, or close to, groups of more questionable loyalty or of separate identities. Apparently vacant lands, too, were settled on the perhaps not unreasonable assumption that if they were not settled, an ambitious neighbour might claim them instead.

Perhaps the largest example, in terms of numbers, has been the transmigrasi programme in Indonesia, a programme that dated from Dutch colonial times but reached its apogee after independence from the Netherlands. Some 941,000 families were moved between 1969 and 1986, primarily from the densely populated island of Java into more sparsely populated outer islands in Sumatra, Sulawesi, Kalimantan and Irian Jaya (Hugo et al., 1987: 179). A second case in Asia relates to the post-reunification of Vietnam in April 1975. The government in Hanoi began moving people from the densely populated parts of the north into more sparsely populated lands in the central highlands, an area where considerable conflict had occurred during the war and where sympathies towards the northern government might have been ambivalent. Between 1976 and 1997, over 740,000 individuals were moved into just one province, Dak Lak, in central Vietnam (Hardy, 2003: 313). A third example is virtually all the South American republics with borders in the Amazon basin that have pursued land colonization at one time or another as they sought to consolidate their territories in sparsely populated areas open to dispute. As a final example: the Chinese government has pursued a consistent ‘civilizing’ policy of moving Han populations into Muslim and Tibetan areas. In many of these areas, land is given to retired soldiers, to those who have served their country and will presumably promote national values in the areas allocated to them. In all these projects, spontaneous migrants also move into the designated zones to take advantage of established support programmes and infrastructure and are often more committed than the sponsored settlers to the physical hardships of settlement. Whether these migrants have the same ideological views as the retired soldiers is not so clear.

Thus, the circuits of mobility that created Italy, cited earlier, are promoted by governments to make people into ‘modern’ Indonesians, Vietnamese or Peruvians and to consolidate national territory. Political considerations lie behind the emphasized developmental objectives. In fact, the results of land colonization programmes are often negative for development, with environmental damage being common following deforestation and the discovery that logical environmental reasons existed to explain the sparse populations of these areas in the first place. Nevertheless, these rural-to-rural and urban-to-rural migrations, while representing a minority of those who moved internally, do illustrate an important example of migration being used to promote state building.

Nevertheless, not all groups living in these marginal areas wish to be incorporated into the state and the interesting ideas of the “art of not being governed” and “regions of refuge” have emerged from studies of these areas (Aguirre Beltrán, 1967; Scott, 2009; Skeldon, 1985). In these cases, groups native to the margins migrate further into the mountain fastness to escape from the intruding lowland groups in a strategy to avoid sedentarization and incorporation into the expanding state. In this way, they preserve their identity, which in itself is predicated upon their continued migration. However, detailed analyses of minorities in this situation in Southeast Asia have suggested that the real situation is much more complicated, with the minorities seeking shifting alliances not just with the immigrants from the lowlands but also with other minority groups being so affected (Mazard, 2014). Nevertheless, irrespective of the variations found, the longer-term endpoint does appear to be some kind of incorporation into the state in a process of gradual sedentarization. Thus, migration and the control of migration have been a central component of the creation and consolidation of the state itself. Migration is a key narrative and the political demography of the state is essentially one revolving around migration and mobility, a theme central to the arguments in Vigneswaran and Quirk (2015) for states in Africa.

5 Migration and the Transformation of the State

The discussion in the previous section looked primarily at internal migration and centrifugal forces of incorporation. This section deals mainly with international migration and centripetal forces of inclusion that may lead to the social transformation of society and the state itself. Two perspectives will be adopted. The first is the political impact of immigration on destinations and the second focuses on the impact on the places of origin of the migration.

  1. a.

    Immigration and political change—Destinations

The immigration of large numbers of migrants into a country has captured the attention of the public, policymakers and academics alike. It is perhaps the issue in much of the more developed parts of the world and an issue so toxic that it has led to the downfall of governments. As fertility has decreased and societies are well on their way through the second demographic transition towards declining and ageing populations, it is migration that has come to be a significant component of overall growth. While migration cannot necessarily compensate for cohorts lost to fertility decline, it can contribute to a slowing in the process and to filling specific gaps in the labour market (UN, 2001, also Naumann & Hess, this volume).

Nevertheless, a fear has arisen in the host populations that control over the borders has been lost and that national identity is being eroded through the arrival of so many different cultural groups. However, the contribution that migrants make to the economies and societies of destination is highly contested. They do provide skills that local populations lack or undertake the types of jobs that local populations are unwilling to do. Their very presence increases demand that can generate new jobs across a broad spectrum of activities from house building, through retailing, to employment within small companies established by the migrants themselves. On the other hand, migrants are seen to compete with local workers and depress wages. They bring pressure to bear on local education, health and housing services and on the provision of welfare. While the real costs and benefits of migrant labour are difficult to define and to calculate accurately, the consensus appears to be that their overall impact, in one direction or the other, is quite small. Migrants, however, do appear to generate more income than they consume. Variations exist by host country and by the country of origin of migrants but in the United Kingdom (UK), for example, a country that politically and popularly became hostile to immigrants in the lead-up to the referendum on continued membership of the EU (‘Brexit’), their contribution to the economy has consistently been positive (Dustmann & Frattini, 2014).

Yet, the impact of the migration to most parts of the developed world is more than just about economics and the possible positive or negative costs and benefits. Certainly, the most common refrains in the popular press are economic: the migrants are stealing the jobs that should go to locals and that they are coming in order to live off the welfare systems that are characteristic of European economies. These underlying views are reinforced by identity politics, by a fear of the outsider and whether “Europe can be the same with different people in it” (Caldwell, 2009). Immigrants coming from areas of different cultures and beliefs result in a growing feeling among the domestic population that they have ‘lost control’ over their own lives. This fear of migrants, driven by a right-wing press but rooted in communities that have been marginalized by the forces of globalization, fed a xenophobia that was a factor in two of the most profound shifts in political direction in recent history: the results of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the 2016 election of Donald Trump in the USA. The resurgent political right self-identifies as the saviour of Western liberal values. Whether this trend towards populism remains sustainable over more than just the short term in the face of the demographic transformation of their societies through low fertility, as well as by immigration, will determine the fate of western-style democracy and provide one of the most intriguing questions for political demography (Polakow-Suransky, 2017).

These questions are addressed in a major study by Kaufmann (2018) who envisages four possible scenarios: first, that the dominant group will fight their declining numbers through right-wing conservative and nationalist movements and resist entry of newcomers and encourage their exclusion. Second, that the dominant group will repress its feelings and eventually accept ongoing transition to a more varied community; third, to flee the increasing diversity to maintain its distinctive nature elsewhere; four, to join the incoming groups eventually through intermarriage to produce a mixed identity. One could possibly imagine all of these scenarios operating concurrently and/or sequentially because none are mutually exclusive. What is more difficult to imagine is the idea of homogeneous white majorities acting as single entities. These are highly factionalized, not the least by class, including the emergence of transnational capitalist classes that transcend the more visible ethnic or racial groupings. Classes that are created by the migration of elites through the expansion of multinational corporations (see Sklair, 2001), but also through globalization more generally by means of international migration for education. The political role played by this mobile transnational class is not so clear, although it may act as a safety valve for dissidents rather than presenting an active challenge to national governments. Nevertheless, within states, dominant groups, no matter how factionalized, that perceive they are being marginalized or even threatened by immigration are likely to react in negative ways.

In such a highly-charged environment, it is challenging to have a rational debate. Too many myths about migration and migrants exist. However, accepting a neutral to positive economic interpretation of the impact of migration on the main destinations does little to counteract the popular image that migrants are transforming destination countries: the rise of ethnic neighbourhoods, the construction of mosques or Hindu temples, languages unintelligible to locals being heard on the street and shops specializing in foreign foods and goods emerging on the high streets. Such change might also be interpreted as enriching the mainly urban landscapes because it is in the largest cities in any country that the vast majority of immigrants concentrate.

It is in these urban areas that the idea of super-diversity is most manifest, and a diversity, not just by place of birth or ethnicity but also within each group based upon education, nature of employment and wealth, too (Vertovec, 2007). This fracturing across and within groups has to be built into the scenarios envisaged by Kaufmann (2018) above, with, for example, only part of the host population leaving the cities because of the diversity created by immigration. Most of the local population that leaves the city will have specific demographics. First, young families, or those about to have children, will be escaping inflated property prices and the costs of childcare in the global cities more than any perceived diversity. Second, retirees, who may also see economic incentives in the move but who may indeed have more conservative views and consider the urban environments to have changed dramatically from their heyday. Hence, economic fundamentals will drive any migration from metropolitan areas, not just increasing diversity or perceived declining political influence.

Paradoxically, the anti-immigrant rhetoric appears to be strongest in areas away from the metropolitan areas. Much of the political reaction in democracies has been driven by opinion either in small towns and rural areas dominated by fairly homogeneous, middle-income and older populations or by those older working-class populations in areas that have been left behind by the rise of the finance and technology industries central to what is known as ‘globalization’. This debate takes us far beyond the central concerns of political demography, but migration, or the lack of it, is again an important component of the debate. Younger, educated and highly mobile residents of metropolitan areas and smaller university cities, or those who belong to the “transnational capitalist class” (Sklair, 2001), the people from “anywhere”, are in opposition to those rooted in particular places with a clear sense of identity from “somewhere” (Goodhart, 2017). This great divide in the politics of the anglophone world has its parallels in the divergence between the metropolitan classes in their citadels and those in the periphery in modern France: a divergence that may bring about the “twilight of the elites” of neoliberalism through flight from resurgent populism (Guilluy, 2019). Whatever the outcome, the evolving tensions between metropolitan and national governments will be one of the key global challenges of the twenty-first century.

This divide essentially reflects a rural-urban distribution of population and should surely be an important dimension of political demography as both mobility and migration policy are central to a full understanding of the issue. The progressive upward concentration of the young and educated through “escalators” of internal migration gave rise to high rates of social mobility (Fielding, 1992) in metropolitan regions that, in turn, have acted as nodes in transnational migration systems. This mix created cosmopolitan populations with very different political values from those in the rural hinterlands and is presenting searching questions for the future of national systems of democracy in the western world.

The impact of migration on destination areas has one other and more obviously demographic implication. Given the sharp decline in fertility across much of the developed world and the tendency for the majority of migrants to be young adults, an increasing proportion of the total number of births is to migrant women. In the UK, for example, about one quarter of all births are to foreign-born mothers, and this proportion is considerably higher in London. The frequency of intermarriage among groups is also increasing (Kaufmann’s fourth scenario) both between native and immigrant populations and among members of the immigrant groups themselves, even if this intermarriage is variable by group. The prospect of states becoming multi-ethnic through a combination of immigration and the reproduction of immigrants have led to the idea of a “third demographic transition” in these societies of sustained low fertility (Coleman, 2006). Nevertheless, subsequent modelling has suggested that any trend towards a totally “mixed” population and a modification of the dominant European identity is likely to be a very long process indeed (Coleman, 2012).

Perhaps as important as the immigration are cohort effects among both migrants and locals. Immigration produces change and the younger generation is more responsive to change and the acceptance of new ideas and values. Hence, later generations of migrants arrive into a very different type of society compared with that of their predecessors. Assimilation takes on a more nuanced meaning. Both, the host and immigrant populations assimilate to the new realities. Through their adjustment to the arrival city, the previous generation of migrants set up new ideas of what it means to be an “American” (or British, or German), to which the later generations of migrants have to adjust. Nevertheless, these relatively short-term cultural shifts, termed “relational assimilation” (Jiménez, 2017: 10–12), may ultimately be of lesser importance to institutional change. It is the institutions of liberalism and democracy and the shared experience that brought these about that determine the values and ultimately the identity of peoples. It is the protection of these values, which will be the ultimate responsibility of governments, that is fundamental if the identities of Europe or America are to persist. If this can be achieved, and it is an ‘if’, the idea of ‘a Europe’ will be able to remain, even with different people in it. The way host populations and immigrants are identified and classified by governments, and the way that they see themselves, are constantly changing and being re-negotiated as they create new populations or “shifting boundaries of belonging” (Pries, 2013).

  1. b.

    Emigration, diaspora, democratization and change—Origins

The diaspora, or the transnational community of migrants outside their country of origin, is seen as a source of both money and skills that can aid development at home in the form of remittances and returned skills (Kuznetsov & Sabel, 2006; Lucas, 2014). Much less examined is the role of the diaspora in political development and particularly whether these migrants can play a role in the spread of democratic or more participatory systems. This consideration is part of the broader debate in migration and development that covers both remittances, in this case social or rather political remittances, and diaspora and the return of the skilled. Essentially, this section examines, in a speculative way, the impact that the ideas migrants have gained either in the city, nationally or internationally, have had on the politics of their home areas upon their return. Do they use these ideas to change their societies, either violently through revolution, or progressively through bureaucratic or political process? The data needed to answer this question remain elusive but are sufficient to be indicative.

Whether migrants in the diaspora can influence the direction of political transformation will largely depend upon the nature of both the origin and the destinations of the migration. Where migrants come from relatively poor groups in origin areas and are recruited as labourers to countries with authoritarian systems, their political impact on home areas is likely to be low, as in the case of South Asians in Gulf states. However, in cases where groups in the origin areas are more highly educated, perhaps even more so than in destination areas, they can play a major role. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated in cases of internal migration as in examples in the more developed world, such as the Scot in the UK (Stenhouse, 2005) or Georgians in the former Soviet Union (Scott, 2016).

The evidence from the developing world of elites going overseas for education and experience is suggestive, if contradictory. Evidence from a large panel data set of students from a diversity of origins indicates that they can promote democratic reforms on their return home but only in those cases where they received their training in open democratic countries (Spilimbergo, 2009). Another large-scale study of leaders from more authoritarian regimes who have subsequently returned seems to associate this with a trend towards more open and democratic systems of government during their leadership (Mercier, 2016). In these cases, however, institutional political change could have begun to emerge in the origin countries that encouraged the migrants to return in the first place and consequently provided more fertile ground on which their political ideas could flourish. In the specific case of Mali, those who returned from France and Côte d’Ivoire had different political perceptions, both one from the other, and from those who had never migrated (Chauvet et al., 2016). In this case, the institutions in destination areas were clearly significant in producing different political aspirations: those from more advanced economies with longer residence were more likely to promote effective change than those from neighbouring countries. The return migration to Mali was associated with increasing participation in elections, not just because of the increasing number of returnees themselves but also because of the diffusion of the ideas brought by the returnees and their adoption by those who had not migrated (Chauvet & Mercier, 2014).

As the demographic giant and second largest economy in the world, the example of China provides a useful perspective. In 2012–2013, it was estimated that there was a stock of 712,157 Chinese students overseas, a sharp increase from 417,351 in 2005–2006, with a flow of 523,700 leaving China in 2015 alone (IIE, 2021). The principal destination by far was the USA, followed by the UK and Australia. The majority do return and, taking a longer-term perspective, it is estimated that since the reforms that were initiated from late 1978 on, over 4.5 million Chinese students had studied abroad, with some 82% returning to China, with the incidence of return increasing over time (Fan, 2017). While students are not the only return migrants who could be involved in political change, they are among the largest and, as educated citizens, among the most influential. A study published in 2006 (He, 2006) argued that, although the returned students did not advocate radical political change, they would play a significant role in transforming China. Yet the situation appears to have changed since then. Economically, so many have returned that an overseas degree, unless from one of the best universities in the most applied subjects, no longer has the earning power it once had (Fan, 2017). However, politically China seems to have embarked upon a transition very different from that of the West. It would be too easy to fall back on an argument of Chinese exceptionalism but it also gives pause to drawing equally easy conclusions about returning migrants from developed economies and the promotion of democratic values.

Despite these contradictory findings, the diaspora is increasingly seen as a means to extend the state transnationally through incorporating citizens living abroad as part of the electorate. The initiative may originally have emerged in the diaspora itself when exiles abroad actively sought to support the liberation of their homelands and/or facilitate the building of independent nations. However, more recently, origin states themselves have created institutional frameworks to allow their citizens overseas to be stakeholders in their countries of birth even though they no longer live there. The most comprehensive examination of this evolution of diaspora organizations and their political role to date is by Gamlen (2019), although see also the essays in Délano Alonso and Mylonas (2019). Perhaps the most striking factor to emerge from this literature is the recency of the establishment of these institutions, not just as a means towards the management of migration, but as political models of transnational citizenship that transcend the borders of the traditional state.

Thus, the diaspora contributes to a more developmental view in harnessing the potential offered by managing migration through remittances and leveraging talent. On the other hand, its political involvement in conflict in home countries has also attracted attention. Conflict itself can add to, or even create, a diaspora by generating numbers who flee overseas to create groups that do not have the interests of home governments at heart and which will actively seek to undermine them. The uses of remittances to promote conflict at home through the purchase of arms and the training of armed groups appear logical consequences for which researchers have sought explanations in terms of diaspora size or length of establishment in destination country (Collier & Hoeffler, 2004). Subsequent research, however, has produced contradictory results that suggest that remittances, through sustaining livelihoods, can “better prepare populations for peace” (Brinkerhoff, 2011: 135). Thus, diasporas can act as both a peace-wrecking and a peace-building institution, depending upon a number of factors among which the degree of fragmentation of the diaspora, as well as its various capabilities to seek support from wider political interests, are important.

Wide-ranging global, more statistical approaches to the association of the volume of emigration with political change in origin countries, although without the association with transnational interaction, can be found in Docquier et al. (2016) and Moses (2011). The results showed that the emigration of nationals was associated with shifts to more open societies at home, although, like the students studied by Spilimbergo (2009) above, those emigrants had to go to more open OECD countries in order for that association to be significant. Hence, the so-called South-South migration, which according to World Bank estimates was larger at 93.1 million in 2013 than South-North migration at 84.3 million, may not be such a major factor in promoting political change across the developing world.Footnote 3

The importance of the nature of the specific destinations for the emigrants was also shown in a detailed micro-study in Moldova where the migration to European destinations was clearly associated with voting behaviour against the communist party in the villages of origin, which ultimately led to the fall of the last communist government in Europe, whereas no such association could be seen in those villages where migrants had gone to Russia (Barsbai et al., 2017). However, the important examples of China and some other countries must always give pause. Moses is perhaps the more ambivalent, noting that even if a role in the past for emigration leading to political change can be identified, because of the relatively small proportions of populations emigrating, the “likelihood of emigration playing a subsequent role in political development is limited” (Moses, 2011: 232).

Returning to the inclusion of transnational interactions through diaspora involvement, a wide-ranging review of evidence has led to the mathematical formulation of a model that appears to be consistent with the various outcomes of diaspora involvement in conflict in origin countries as either peace-wrecking or peace-building (Mariani et al., 2018). The relative sizes of diaspora promote conflict but, in so doing, cause the other side to invest more in men and material, thus increasing the cost of the war that may ultimately lead to a negotiated settlement. However, much more research is required, particularly on the degree of factionalism within diasporas and how these groups vary not just in terms of education and identity with the home area, but also in how they seek support from outside powers and in destination countries, but also multilaterally, in order to prosecute their interests. Nevertheless, it is the ideas circulating within the diaspora that are important for both economic and political change and, as these may not be best measured through the aggregate number of emigrants or the size of diasporas, it is to the role of individuals that we must now turn.

  1. c.

    Individuals in a matrix of institutions

Within these broad diaspora institutions, the agency of individual and small groups of migrants have had a profound impact on political change in areas of origin, particularly in radical or revolutionary change. Among the majority of migrants who move short-term or circulate between village and city are a few who seek to enter more long-term into the urban environment. Some fail, perhaps rejected by urban society, others simply return later to try to apply their new knowledge in their villages of origin in order to recreate a new society. Perhaps the most famous example of the rejected migrant was Hong Xiu-quan, who became the leader of the Taiping rebellion that devastated much of south-central China between 1840 and 1864, but many smaller examples of such messianic movements exist, and particularly in the small islands of the Pacific. Certain common features appear to apply: the leaders are charismatic; they come from the middle-upper echelons of their respective societies, they are perhaps better educated and aspiring; they have grievances that they attribute to immigrant groups but they also feel that they can use their understanding of these same groups to overturn the established order to create the new heaven and new earth. The movements are almost always destructive rather than constructive. In Hong’s case, he was also from a minority group, the Hakka. A particular combination of factors is thus required and the movements appear to occur at relatively early phases in the evolution of a migration system and shortly after initial contact with external groups. The role of the circular migrant as a catalyst in this process is discussed in more detail elsewhere (Skeldon, 1987).

The migrant as a driver of political change can also be seen at the international level and here the resultant movements can be as much constructive as destructive. These movements can also be conceptualized as being part of the diaspora from any group and are often linked to the colonial policy of educating the elites of the time. For example, Ho Chi Minh was only one of the more prominent returnees to embark upon, initially a nationalist and then a communist, struggle, but he was only one of many Vietnamese in France at the time among the “revolutionaries they could not break” (Ngo, 1995). Others from countries that were never under direct colonial rule such as Deng Xiao Ping, Zhou Enlai and the earlier Sun Yat-sen all spent time overseas, the former in the Paris commune, Zhou in the UK, France and Germany, and the latter in London as well as Japan. The leaders of the Thai revolution of 1932, Pridi, Phibun and Prayoon had also been in France and Lee Kwan Yew, Jinnah Gandhi and Nehru had been in London. It was not just the elites who were important in the establishment of revolutionary and independence movements. Ordinary Chinese who had gone to France as coolies during the First World War “returned to China, literate and wise in the ways of the world, often with a decent balance of cash stored up safely with their families […] would be in a position to play a new kind of active role in Chinese politics” (Spence, 1990: 292–293). One of the few scholars to have considered the importance of migratory experience for revolutionary leaders has been Moses (2011: 197–219), who, building initially upon the earlier record of Goldstone (1999), showed that virtually two-thirds of two separate samples of 73 and 115 leaders, widely separated in both time and space, had been migrants before embarking upon their exploits. This indeed seems to indicate the past and continuing role of the return migrant in political change.

While the impact of migrants in these movements is clear, it is not just a return into roles in revolutionary and independence movements that migrants can play. They also move into ‘normal’ parliamentary life. For example, in 2006, 25 of the 45 members of the cabinet in Taiwan had completed advanced degrees outside Taiwan, mainly in the USA but also in Japan, France and the UK. It is known, although numbers are largely unavailable and certainly vary over time, that migrants return to play a role in the administration of countries, in the civil service and also in civil society. While specific impacts are difficult to measure, migration, as a component of political demography, is an integral part of the political development of both developing and developed countries and the role of what some would term “political remittances” have yet to be fully understood.Footnote 4

6 Conclusion: Towards More Systematic Approaches to Migration in Political Demography

This chapter has attempted to sketch an approach to bring migration, both internal and international, into political demography through an examination of the literature on how the state both creates, and is created by, migration. It has not examined the literature on the more specific topic of migration policy through which states attempt to manage migration and which has emerged as a significant sub-field within migration studies.Footnote 5 In looking at the role of the state, this chapter has considered both exclusionary, essentially the expulsion of refugees and asylum seekers , and inclusionary dimensions . Within the latter, it examined how migrants make the state through circuits of mobility and through the incorporation of new populations. It also considered the other side of the coin, how migrants can modify and transform the state by impacting upon race , ethnicity and class, as well as ideas. The role of the diaspora in promoting political change at home was examined within the context of transnational citizenship. Finally, case studies of individual return migrants to states of origin are briefly described to provide examples of their various roles in revolutionary political change.

Research into migration shows that it changes over time: destinations and origins change associated with development. Over the longue durée, and at the highest level of generalization, Europe evolved from a region of net outmigration to one of net immigration, for example. However, specific shifts over shorter time periods for specific areas have also been identified, with these shifts diffusing across space through time (Skeldon, 1990, 1997, 2012). As patterns of migration evolve over time and across space, can these then be associated with the shifting patterns of mortality and fertility that make up the demographic transition in a way first hypothesized by Zelinsky (1971)? In turn, can these demographic shifts then be associated with political change in any systematic way?

We are probably some way from satisfactorily answering these questions, but political demography is surely well placed to attempt to address them. Although still strongly focused on the impact of shifting patterns of fertility and resulting changes in age structures, migration is an integral part of the work of those who study political demography (see Kaufmann, 2018 and the essays in Goldstone, 2012, for example). However, this integration is associated primarily with immigration in the context of ageing populations and the potential for conflict among migrant and ethnic groups rather than a broader search for linkages among the three demographic variables and how these might be related to changes in political systems. Given that most migrants are young adults, the role of migration or mobility in youth bulges, for example, needs much further examination. The political implications of declining internal migration seen across much of the developed world (Champion et al., 2018) and the increasing tensions between national and urban governance described above provide other pressing questions for states in these areas.

Political demography, as its name implies, accords primacy to examining demographic change in all three of its components, fertility, mortality and migration, and political change. The other side of the coin, that political change can impact upon all three variables in terms of the types of policies implemented by governments and their consequences at national, local and multilateral levels, is well studied. However, so too can demographic change have impact upon political change. This chapter has attempted to review the main ways in which migration can impact upon that political change, with other chapters in this book outlining how all three variables interact with political systems in other parts of the world. Using demographic change as a lens through which to view political change not only brings political systems more fully into debates that so often accord priority to economic and social change but also provides a different perspective in the whole population and development debate. Optimistically, this book and this chapter may contribute towards improving the representation of political demography in this debate.