Why do people migrate? We review existing answers that focus on the role of economics and social networks. This work fails to appreciate that, all else equal, far more people remain at home than express an interest in moving abroad.Focusing on political conditions, we argue that political conditions and institutions are just as important to understand human mobility. Analyzing a wealth of globally representative, individual-level data on the emigration process, we find that factors such as the quality of public goods, confidence in political institutions, and perceptions of physical safety drive migration decisions. The importance of political conditions grows with an emigrant’s level of education, and quality governance can mitigate the impact of other “push” factors such as declining economic conditions and social networks. We emphasize that any understanding of the decision to migrate must grapple with political conditions in migrant-sending countries.

After establishing why people migrate, in this chapter we turn to an investigation of how migrants economically re-engage with their homeland. Specifically, we explore how migrants facilitate flows of international financial capital. We argue that migrants, because they possess critical knowledge about investment opportunities in their homelands, help international investors overcome information asymmetries which drives both portfolio and foreign direct investment into their homelands. Our empirical analyses leverage a wide range of data on migrant stocks and portfolio and foreign direct investment to test our argument. We find that migrants are key to explaining international capital flows, especially in environments where formal political institutions that protect property rights are absent or weak.

We conclude by placing our arguments and findings into the current context of rising political opposition to international migration. One of our central claims – substantiated by a range of empirical evidence – is that migration economically benefits both migrant-sending and -receiving countries. Migrants foster new international capital flows to both their home and host economies, and the remittances they send shield family and friends from negative shocks and help them invest in new assets. Yet in the US and Western Europe, anti-immigration politicians and parties threaten these potential gains. If nativist movements continue to enjoy electoral success and begin restricting immigration, the benefits of global human mobility will be increasingly in jeopardy. Just like every other stage of the migration process, harnessing the opportunity that mobility presents is a politically contingent proposition.

It is no secret that migrant destination countries have become increasingly interested in regulating migrant inflows. We discuss in this chapter some potential tools of migration management suggested by other scholars – notably, border restrictions and fortification, foreign aid, and bilateral trade agreements. We turn the conversation toward a different area of policy: labor market access. We argue that migrant-receiving countries interested in regulating migration can do so by creating temporary labor market access for people from sending countries. Allowing some migrants formal employment opportunities significantly increases the amount of remittances they send home, a financial resource that family members can use to finance their immobility rather than sending additional family members abroad. We use an array of data and empirical specifications to make the case that labor market access increases remittances, and that this increase in remittances reduces subsequent authorized and unauthorized migration to the United States. Our findings suggest that countries interested in managing migration pressures have an incentive to open up more temporary pathways to the formal labor market for migrants.

Migrants not only foster investment capital flows toward their home countries; they also invest in their families by sending remittances back to their households. We begin this chapter with a review of the literature on the reasons why migrants remit, as well as the economic and political benefits of their remittances. Our primary contribution focuses on how migrant-sending countries can encourage greater remittance inflows. Over the past several decades, countries have increasingly built political institutions, such as dual citizenship and diaspora-specific government ministries, that attempt to engage their diasporas. We argue, and empirically find, that some of these institutions do incentivize greater remittance inflows, suggesting that origin countries have a significant opportunity to attract this form of external capital. This chapter also includes a new theoretical and empirical perspective on the origin of these institutions – why some countries have quickly adopted diaspora-centric institutions, while others have been slow to do so. We argue and find that countries are quicker to adopt these institutions when their diaspora holds political rights in economically and politically powerful destination countries.

This chapter defines the scope of the book's inquiry – understanding the causes and consequences of international labor migration for the global political economy. We summarize existing contributions to understanding the role of migrants in the global economy, illustrating the challenges to be taken up in the manuscript. Importantly, we discuss scope conditions, clarifying that our work, unlike much existing scholarship, does not examine political, economic, or social effects of migration on host countries.Rather, we discuss the importance of migration for sending/home countries.We provide a summary of our overarching argument – that politics matters for understanding patterns of global human mobility. Finally, we provide a plan for the rest of the book.