International migration is increasingly recognized as posing a host of challenges to traditional understandings of political life. Both of these books provide solid information, as well as insightful analysis, on partially overlapping aspects of this complex and multifaceted subject. Both are well worth reading, even though both books do operate within the constraints of an ethnographic approach to social science, which limits our ability to gauge the wider significance of the research subjects' experiences.
The focus of Michael Peter Smith and Matt Bakker's Citizenship Across Borders is on the emerging phenomenon of “transnational citizenship” among Mexican emigrants living in the United States. The narrative and analysis are based on in-depth case studies—drawn from transnational ethnographic fieldwork in both California and several Mexican states—of five Mexican emigrants living in California (and, sometimes, back in Mexico) who have developed active political roles in both countries and in relation to both countries' political institutions.
The analysis is both deeply thoughtful and rich with insight, in part because of the complex and nuanced—yet tightly integrated—theoretical and empirical frames that structure the work. The book also benefits from a mature and extensive understanding of the histories and politics of both countries, as well as of the neoliberal project of globalization that has played such an important role in both countries (separately and in relationship) in recent decades. The result is an unusually valuable work that weaves together, and articulates clearly, the micropolitics and macropolitics in an evolving and dynamic transnational setting. The book's complexity, however, makes any effort to summarize it in the space available here seem deeply problematic.
In brief, nevertheless, Smith and Bakker situate their subjects' political lives in relation to four distinct but overlapping contexts—political-economic, historical, sociocultural, and institutional—that inform and constrain their exercises of citizenship in both the United States and Mexico. The titles of the book's four parts convey some sense of the subject matters explored. Part I (“Setting the Stage”) contains chapters situating the book in relation to the scholarly discourse on transnational citizenship and the Mexican state's evolving policy discourse on emigrants (from oppositional and disparaging to solicitous and supportive). Part II (“The Politics of Transnational Community Development”) contains two chapters focused on the case study subjects' efforts to provide material help (via remittances) to their communities of origin through hometown associations (HTAs) based in several parts of California, and working in conjunction with the policies of two Mexican states (Guanajuato and Jalisco) that aim to channel these remittances away from family-centered support and traditional community development toward neoliberal investment projects aimed at integrating these communities into the global economy. This part of the analysis contains nuanced discussions of the evolving party competition emerging in Mexico at both the state and federal levels, and its interactions with the micropolitics of transnational citizenship in a context of neoliberal globalization.
Part III (“El Migrante as Transnational Citizen”) begins with an in-depth case study of the convoluted but ultimately successful efforts of a northern California rancher and entrepreneur—a naturalized U.S. citizen—to gain election as the municipal president in his hometown of Jerez, Zacatecas, and later to higher office. Another chapter contains several in-depth case studies examining and interpreting the legal and political struggles to create “institutional spaces” for transnational citizenship in both the United States and Mexico. Part IV (“Two Faces of Transnational Citizenship: Migrant Activists Recross the Border”) finally contains a chapter exploring the participation of these transnational citizens in U.S. politics, and a concluding chapter that deftly summarizes and interprets the meaning of the complex and multifaceted stories that make up the book, as well as their implications for the future of politics in both countries.
The primary finding of the book, I think, is that both nationalists (U.S. and Mexican) and “postnationalists” are wrong in their assessments of transnational citizenship. Rather than undermining national loyalties or moving “beyond” national loyalties, the subjects studied in this book have found ways to be engaged political agents in two countries, caring enough about the countries' politics and collective well-being to devote considerable resources to them through political action. As noted, this book is very well done, and makes an important contribution to the literatures of U.S. immigrant incorporation and transnational citizenship studies. My one criticism here is that the book would have benefited from a more developed concept of citizenship. The phrase at the heart of this work is transnational citizenship, and the first word in this phrase receives considerable conceptual development and theoretical attention, while the latter word—citizenship—is underdeveloped conceptually and contextually.
David Fitzgerald's A Nation of Emigrants is organized around a different central question: How has the Mexican state attempted to “manage” its migration, most of which has involved a long-term pattern of emigration to the United States? The theoretical focus of the book is state building, and the author wants to contribute to the contemporary discourse on whether the Westphalian nation-state system is in decline. His answer to this question is a resounding “No!”—a response to which I return later.
Organized into seven chapters, Fitzgerald's book provides the theoretical orientation noted: a history of the evolution of Mexico's policies toward emigrants, an institutional analysis of the (substantial) impact of Mexico's federal system on its efforts to manage migration, an analysis of both domestic and U.S.-based HTAs in Mexico's efforts to manage its emigrants, and a thoughtful discussion of the ambivalence of Mexico's elites toward its emigrants. The conclusion provides a useful summary of the various policy instruments that Mexican leaders have used in their efforts to manage emigration. The fieldwork was centered mainly in the Arandas area of the state of Jalisco.
The book makes two important contributions for U.S. scholars interested in the political implications of Mexican migration. First, its Mexican point of view provides a useful counterbalance to the massive literature on immigration that treats this subject only from the viewpoint of the United States. And second, Fitzgerald includes an interesting chapter on the Mexican Roman Catholic Church's efforts to manage Mexican emigration to the United States, claiming that Mexican political elites have come to emulate these efforts in recent decades. The key insight here is that the church discovered earlier than did state agents that it is impossible to stop Mexican migration to the North, and that they would do better by trying to minister to emigrants living in the United States through the development of organizational, financial, and ideological ties designed to maintain their loyalty and commitment to Mexico, despite their physical absence. Politically, this leads Fitzgerald to suggest that Mexico has subsequently developed a kind of “citizenship a la carte” for its U.S.-based emigrants, as a way of trying to encourage and manage their ongoing relationship with their home country.
Despite the wealth of good information and insight, this book does have some weaknesses. Most important, its analysis of the larger theoretical question in respect to which the book is framed is both weak and unconvincing. As noted, Fitzgerald wants it to contribute to the discussion of the viability of the Westphalian nation-state in an era of globalization and massive migration. His conclusion claims that “the Westphalian system of nation-states is not in decline. In fact, it is so robust even when confronted by mass international migration that it has shaped a new social contract between emigrants and their home country that I call citizenship a la carte” (p. 154).
The central problem with the analysis purporting to support this assertion is that Fitzgerald seems to describe as an empirical model what is, in fact, a Weberian ideal-type. The “Westphalian system of nation-states,” describing a world divided into separate territories controlled by sovereign states that exercise independent national wills in relation to each other, has never existed in the real world. Thus, to say that this system continues to be “robust” is to claim to answer the wrong question. The book provides a great deal of good information in response to a better question, which is about how political elites attempt to build such (Westphalian) states by trying to maintain control of their territories and the people who “belong” to them, in part by trying to construct and maintain a sense of national identity in a population that will view those elites as best suited to lead them. Fitzgerald provides countless examples of the challenges to Mexico's political elites as they have tried—mostly unsuccessfully—to manage emigration in the face of incomplete domestic control over their own territory (via, e.g., rebellion, the operation of the country's federal system), but even more so in the face of the hegemonic power of the United States. The book would have been more nuanced, and accurate, had the author framed his state-building theoretical analysis in this constructivist way, rather than in terms of whether the actions of a given (relatively weak) state in fact demonstrate the robustness of the Westphalian system of nation-states.
Even this revision would leave an unduly narrow focus, however, in that it views political agency as primarily belonging to state agents, while the rest of the population is a “mass” to be managed. In part, this may derive from Fitzgerald's Weberian assumption that politics can be understood exclusively in terms of domination. This unstated assumption leaves him free to focus on elites' efforts to control and manage their populations, both domestic and emigrant. But, with few exceptions, it also leads him to mostly ignore the perspectives, and the real voices, of those who are on the receiving end of these managerial efforts. What is lost in such a narrow perspective is made evident by a reading of the Smith and Bakker book.
