Emigrants Get Political
Mexican Migrants Engage Their Home Towns
Michael S. Danielson
Reviews and Awards
"This is an impressive work of social science. The collection of data is close to heroic, the arguments are nuanced and carefully laid out, and the contribution is significant and original. It dampens some of the scholarly hopes that migrants are agents of democratization, but more importantly, it illuminates various configurations and pathways that can explain why migrant political activity may reinforce existing power structures rather than challenge them." --José Antonio Lucero, University of Washington
"This book makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature on migrant engagement in politics back home. Danielson uses original data and mixed methods to shed new light on the questions of why migrants engage, how they compare to non-migrants, and what impact they are having on Mexico's democracy, especially at the local level. Among his most interesting although discouraging findings, is that the Mexican political system has been remarkably adept at incorporating migrants without fundamentally changing the rules of the game." --Katrina Burgess, Tufts University
"Migrants' political impacts in their hometowns follow multiple pathways. This study convincingly shows that cross-border migrant engagement can either democratize from below-or can reinforce local elite domination. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods through the lens of subnational comparison, this study reveals diverse patterns that would be obscured by attempts to find homogenized generalizations." --Jonathan Fox, American University
"Through an imaginative use of mixed-methods, Danielson's work challenges conventional wisdom of how and why emigrants engage in home-town politics. His in-depth case studies reveal the mechanisms by which migrants get political, and their contradictory effects on democratization." --Willibald Sonnleitner, El Colegio de México