Even as economic and military walls have come down in the post-Cold War era, states have rapidly built new barriers to prevent a perceived invasion of 'undesirables.' Nowhere is this more dramatically evident than along the geographic fault lines dividing rich from poor countries: especially the southern border of the United States, and the southern and eastern borders of the European Union. This volume examines the practice, politics, and consequences of building these new walls in North America and Europe. At the same time, it challenges dominant accounts of globalization, in which state borders will be irrelevant to the human experience. In short, the volume brings borders back in to the study of international politics.

Increasing international migration, the information revolution and democratization have propelled a globalization of the domestic politics of many states and, although diasporic politics is not new, emigrant political participation in homeland politics has grown as well as adapted to the new methods of the information revolution. This book examines the participation of emigrants in their home country politics. It considers the consequences of such participation for domestic and foreign policies in both host and home country, and explores the theoretical implications for democracy, nationalism, the state and the shape of world politics in the future. It includes detailed case studies of Turkish emigrants in Europe, the US and Saudi Arabia, Kurds in Europe, Israeli emigrants and the American Jewish community, Mexicans in the US, Chinese throughout the Pacific Rim, Indians in the US and Russians who found themselves outside Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. By providing extensive documentation of emigrant political activity with significant impact on homeland politics and foreign policies, this work provides ammunition to the argument that international migration, globalization and transnational phenomena pose serious challenges to the state and the international system of states. It will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists and area studies specialists as well as political science and international relations scholars.

This book considers the impact of migrant communities on the politics of their home nations. This important and previously under-researched subject is examined through a number of case studies including Israel, Turkey, Kurdistan, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Sri Lanka

Even as economic and military walls have come down in the post-Cold War era, states have rapidly built new barriers to prevent a perceived invasion of 'undesirables.' Nowhere is this more dramatically evident than along the geographic fault lines dividing rich from poor countries: especially the southern border of the United States, and the southern and eastern borders of the European Union. This volume examines the practice, politics, and consequences of building these new walls in North America and Europe. At the same time, it challenges dominant accounts of globalization, in which state borders will be irrelevant to the human experience. In short, the volume brings borders back in to the study of international politics.

The Berlin Wall falls as thousands of East Germans move to the West; after the Iron Curtain lifts, West Europeans brace for mass migrations from Eastern Europe; millions of refugees flee Iraq, Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, and other strife-torn nations. The shifting tides of international migration have had a profound effect on our world, from the transformation of nationality laws and European cooperation on border control to NATO intervention in Kosovo. In Migrants and Citizens, Rey Koslowski examines the impact of migration on international politics. He focuses on two related avenues of inquiry: the immediate political problems faced by the European Union, and the general issues that confront us as we try to understand the modern international system.Migration has become politically salient so quickly, Koslowski argues, because the nation-state and the political institutions associated with it developed in the centuries during which Western Europe was a net exporter of people. With the reversal of that trend less than a generation ago, many of these institutions have been ill-suited to deal with the political and policy demands brought on by the arrival of large numbers of foreigners.Koslowski discusses how restrictive citizenship laws exclude migrants and their children from political participation in some West European states, leading observers to question the legitimacy of those states as democracies. Yet when these states try to increase immigrant participation with local voting rights, European Union citizenship, and dual nationality, the principle of a singular nationality underlying the nation-state is challenged. In this way, the practical policy responses to migration gradually transform the political institutions of states as well as the international system they collectively constitute.