Migrants’ transnational political engagement

Human migration and lives lived across borders challenge conventional notions of citizenship and social, economic and political belonging. In this article, Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, University of California at Davis; Ali R. Chaudhary, Rutgers University, and Ninna Nyberg Sørensen, DIIS, compare the political participation of Latin American migrants in Europe. Special emphasis is placed on how contexts in countries of origin (Colombia and the Dominican Republic) and in countries of destination (Spain and Italy), as well as migrants’ cross-border social networks, interact and influence migrant’s political participation in different ways. The authors find that transnational political engagement is a highly selective process, influenced by social status and gender. Other factors such as the home countries’ political culture and institutional context also play a significant role in transnational political activism. However, even small incidences of transnational political engagement can have a significant impact on the countries of origin, meaning that the quantity of people engaged cannot be equated with an action’s quality and the scope of its effects.

The article is an output of the research project ‘New Landscapes og Transnational Migration’, for which Ninna Nyberg Sørensen and Luis E. Guarnizo conducted field work in Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Colombia and the Dominican Republic. The Danish Research Council for the Social Sciences generously funded the project.