Explore the relationship between states and transnational movements of people through the trope of diplomacy. National borders erode into porous perimeters and national economies become fictions in the wake of the host of forces from multinational corporations and trade agreements to large-scale international migration. Incursions of various types of foreign visitors, whether as migrants or tourists, may spur states to reinforce demographic and territorial sovereignty. Perhaps transnational flows of people serve the interests of nation-states as much or more that they undermine them.
There is much evidence than transnational actors actually construct and affect the relations between states. It is critical to distinguish between international and transnational. Whereas “international” acknowledges linkages between states, “transnational” connotes far more. Transnational migrants live their lives across international borders and therefore only a subset of all people who migrate can be classified as transnational migrants.
There are numerous ways to examine the contributions of non states transnational actors to international relations; my approach is to divide them into levels of agency, macro, meso and micro. At the macro level, state works to foster the loyalties of emigrants in other to achieve larger nationalist and neocolonial goals. At the middle level, migrants themselves play a mayor role in claming citizens’ rights to their homeland and therefore becoming potential actors in state to state relations. The activities of individual migrants can be seen as promoting diplomatic interests.
Diplomacy merits expansion along two dimensions (1) inclusion of a broader array of actors than state leaders and their representatives of diplomats; and (2) recognition of agencies as inclusive of unintentional as well as intentional efforts and their effects.
For decades Mexicans have been migrating to the US and overt that time have developed many voluntary and ethnic organizations as well as hometown associations.
In 1990 the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad (PCME) was invented as a strategy to extend the influence of the Mexican state across the border into migrants’ communities in the US and to win their favor, thus quelling their potential and actualized protests.
Transnational migrant organizations such as hometown associations and human rights organizations create political spaces that spam borders and take the advantage of uneven citizenship rights in constituent spaces as they pursue a range of objectives.
Migrant transmission is also less likely to stimulate resistance. Migrants materially, symbolically, and discursively promote change, and that the flows are largely unidirectional: from “host” country to “sending” country and from “developed” to “less developed” societies. “Trickle-up” refers to the fact that as more and more people migrate across borders they are likely to be noticed by the affected countries and to stimulate higher level of diplomatic efforts to address migration.
Transnational movements, transnational flows, transnational actors, transnational migrants, transnational and transnational migrant organizations.
Diplomatic actions enacted through migrants, tourists, students, and on a variety of levels from the state to individuals, can foster global power asymmetries that undermine the nation-state system. States attempt to mobilize disperse populations, whether they are tourists, students, or emigrants, in order to achieve diplomatic ends; some migrants reach across borders to intervene politically in their homelands. Migrant activities, whatever their intentions, often achieve objectives on personal, familial, and community levels that also contribute to the inequality of nations.
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