Afterword: States of Emigration

Abstract

This book has been structured by four key arguments, which are intended as a contribution to the growing literature on emigrant engagement. First, emigration policy is practiced to a degree by all states — it is not the preserve of poorer, or wealthier, states, or of a particular type of ‘emigrant nation’ that, as Bauböck argues in the foreword, cannot exist. Second, there is a degree to which clear similarities are apparent in policy approaches of very different states with diverse histories of emigration. This is partly to do with new opportunities for international exchange on these issues but also supports the argument that emigrant engagement is driven by a normative change in state practice. Third, the developments in institutional design and policy traced in the 12 empirical case studies reflect an underlying change in understandings of ‘the people’ to include those absent from state territory in ways that have not usually been the case. Finally, these developments mark a further change in the spatiality of state authority, in the way states ‘think of themselves’ in Sayad’s term, as territorially bound entities.