Product Description
by Isabel Rosales Sandoval (Author)
The study of migration in political science, and particularly in international relations, has tended to focus on the study of immigration. However, sending states are increasingly institutionalizing their policies and programs to include emigrants living outside the national territory.
In her monograph, Isabel Rosales Sandoval focuses on the factors that influence the implementation of the policies that sending states have adopted to reach out to their citizens abroad. Specifically, she investigates why and how sending states implement transnational emigrant policies. Her comparative study of three Central American sending states--El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras--identifies four policy categories that these states have developed: 1) recognizing the emigrant community through the creation of institutions; 2) cultivating loyalties in the emigrant community through symbolic policies; 3) extending emigrant rights; and 4) extracting resources by incorporating migrants into the national economy. However, the motivation for the policies does not exactly correspond to the assumptions and typologies of existing theories on the subject, which tend to focus on international factors. The argument the author presents is that the characteristics of these three cases are better explained by domestic political factors. These are: 1) the importance of the size and potential impact of the emigrant communities; 2) party system competitiveness; and 3) the sending states' institutional capacity to implement policies.Author Biography
Isabel Rosales Sandoval studied Political Science in Guatemala and Hamburg. Since 2022, she is an Associate of the Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS) at the GIGA (German Institute of Global and Area Studies) in Hamburg, Germany. Previously, Rosales Sandoval held the position of Director of Master Studies at the Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala. Rosales Sandoval is a member of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Her previous book contributions include Human Security, Borders and Migration (Edward Elgar Publishing 2021) and The Migration Industry and the Commercialization of International Migration (Routledge 2013).
