Although they differ greatly in their focus and approach, the books of Alexandra Délano Alonso and Nadejda K. Marinova offer important insights into emerging and underexplored aspects of diaspora politics. Délano Alonso presents an empirically rich and compellingly written exploration of the ways in which home states, such as Mexico, are increasingly using consulates to provide social rights to diaspora members as part of a project to facilitate integration into their host society. Marinova focuses on the foreign policy implications of diasporas, and does so through an original analysis of how and why host states utilize diaspora groups to support foreign policy objectives relating to the diaspora’s home state. Taken together, the two books provide a more complete picture of the complex ways in which diasporas interact with states at both the local and national levels.

Délano Alonso argues in From Here and There that Mexico has shifted the focus of its diaspora policies to promote the long-term integration of diaspora members into their host state societies, a development she describes as “one of the clearest manifestations of the reconceptualization of the boundaries of citizenship . . . beyond the territorial limits of the state” (p. 4). The first substantive chapter outlines the combination of variables that explain this shift in Mexican diaspora policy, and subsequent chapters detail Mexico’s use of consulates as the primary vehicle for providing migrants with social services that could facilitate integration, such as access to health-care screenings and education programs.

A novel and important aspect of these services is that they target and were created partly in response to the needs of the most precarious members of the diaspora, those with ambiguous or undocumented legal status. Délano Alonso utilizes ethnographic observation of consular activities and interviews with consular representatives and their clients in the diaspora community to document how consulates provided a safe space for precarious Latin American migrants in the United States to find various kinds of social assistance. By doing so, the author provides a much-needed expansion of our understanding of diaspora policies beyond the experiences of more settled, high-skilled, or politically connected diaspora actors. She also highlights the ways in which both host-state and home-state context matter in shaping the content and the reach of diaspora policies through a comparison of Mexican consular activity in Canada with a partially successful diffusion of Mexico’s social rights model to other Latin American countries. Due to a less hostile political environment for Latin American migrants and a more active network of advocacy groups in Canada, the Mexican consulates there were less trusted by precarious migrants and less supported by the Mexican state. States such as Ecuador and Colombia were unable to provide the same level of support through their consulates as Mexico due to a lack of funding and state capacity.

Despite the novelty of Délano Alonso’s subject matter, the major question driving her investigation is a long-standing one in the literature on migration and diasporas: Can the diaspora policies of active home states significantly impact the integration of migrants into their host societies? Délano Alonso cautiously makes the case that Mexico’s policies have in fact contributed to migrant integration in the United States by connecting Mexican migrants “to institutions and organizations that provide education, health, and financial services, as well as tools for empowerment and protection of rights” (p. 83). Délano Alonso then tempers this argument by showing that the success of the social-rights model has been limited by the relatively small number of migrants that the consulates serve, and by the reproduction of racial and class disparities within the home state in the services they provide (p. 106).

As the author suggests briefly in the conclusion, we can also assume that increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the United States may impact both the possibilities for integration and the scope of consular services, which depend in large part on coordination with local and state actors and organizations. In addition, Délano Alonso highlights the disconnect between the promises of these policies and the real barriers that exist to their implementation in her fourth chapter, which focuses on the experiences of visiting “Dreamers” and deported Mexican migrants when they return to Mexico. On the other side of the border, it is difficult to escape the question of why Mexico is working to provide a menu of social services to its migrants in the United States, when the lack of such services in Mexico helps drive emigration in the first place.

In contrast to Délano Alonso’s book, Marinova's Ask What You Can Do for Your (New) Country focuses on the policies and actions of the host, not home, state and the experiences of a much more elite subset of diaspora communities: groups and individuals from within the diaspora that become the target of utilization by foreign policy actors within the host state. Marinova makes a compelling case that the literature on diasporas’ roles in host-state foreign policymaking has overemphasized the extent to which state actors become captured or persuaded by well-connected ethnic lobby members. She demonstrates instead through her careful research that host-state actors often seek out and utilize diaspora representatives who will help support and further the foreign policy objectives of the host state. She emphasizes that this utilization is not a coercive or manipulative process, but an interactive and mutually beneficial meeting of interests between diaspora and host-state actors. As a result of being targeted for utilization by host-state actors, these privileged diaspora members get access to a number of benefits, including organizational resources, increased visibility, and access to host-state policymakers. Access to these resources, in turn, allows a small group of diaspora members to further their own goals related to their home state and to be seen, at least temporarily, as the primary representatives of a diverse, heterogeneous diaspora community.

Marinova’s analytical framework offers four conditions that are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain why and under what conditions a host state may target a particular diaspora group (p. 61). The first two factors explain the host state’s decision to utilize a particular diaspora community. They include the degree to which the diaspora’s home state “is an area of interest” (p. 61) for the host state, and whether there are diaspora members that support the host state’s position regarding the home state. The other two factors explain which diaspora organizations or members become the vehicles for this utilization, and reflect the degree of connectedness and social capital that diaspora actors can bring to the table. Diaspora actors that have few connections to the home state and are unable to sustain an organization within the diaspora community will be of little use to host-state actors.

Marinova then tests this framework with an extensive exploration of the interaction between various Lebanese diaspora organizations and the George W. Bush administration. In the three chapters devoted to the Lebanese case, she shows how different groups from within the same diaspora can be courted and even created as the needs of the host state and the situation on the ground in the home state change over time. Though less extensive, she also explores similar shifts and dynamics in the U.S. relationship with Cuban exile groups (during both the Carter and the Reagan administrations), and in the Bush administration’s complex interactions with Iraqi exiles in the period prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Later chapters expand the analysis to two non-U.S. cases—Iran’s use of Iraqi Shiite exile groups, and the partnership between the military dictatorship in Brazil and members of the Syro-Lebanese diaspora—which serve to highlight the framework’s broader applicability to other regions and types of regimes. An additional empirical chapter, which seems somewhat out of place, describes the IdEA (International Diaspora Engagement Alliance) partnership, an initiative launched by the U.S. State Department in 2011 to facilitate coordination with a wide variety of diaspora actors.

These two authors contribute to the literature on diaspora politics by providing either a new look at a long-standing issue (Marinova) or a deep exploration of an emerging area of diaspora policy (Délano Alonso). Both help us see that diaspora politics happens when state actors and diaspora actors intersect, whether this is at the more local level of consular services or at the elite level of foreign policymaking. This suggests that the field of diaspora politics has moved beyond earlier conceptual debates about whether the study of diasporas should primarily be about state or nonstate actors. The clear message from these two books is that it is necessary to study both types of actors in order to understand how diasporas impact and are impacted by politics.

The two books differ, however, in their analytical scope and broader implications. Délano Alonso’s central questions have more urgency and immediate real-world implications, as From Here and There attempts to make sense of recent diaspora policy shifts and their impact on the integration of precarious migrants in an increasingly hostile political environment. If there is any drawback to her approach, it is that both the policy and political environment she explores is in flux, which means that her book sometimes offers more questions than it can answer. Ask What You Can Do for Your (New) Country, in contrast, frames its stakes more from within the literature as it helps correct and systematize our understanding of diasporas in host-state foreign policymaking. However, the more immediate impacts of Marinova’s argument are less easily discernible. I was left wanting to know more about how and whether the utilization of diasporas has shaped foreign policy outcomes, and about how this experience of utilization impacted the broader dynamics within the diaspora community over time.