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  • The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and Their Homelands by Roger Waldinger
  • Diana M. Orcés
The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and Their Homelands By Roger Waldinger Harvard University Press. 2015. 240 pp. $29.95 hardcover.

This book begins with the puzzle of conditions under which emigration and immigration from developing to developed democratic states intersect and the significance of cross-border connections. Roger Waldinger asks: Why and how might political, economic, or cultural cross-border connections continue, diminish, or dissolve? And what does it all mean for migrants?

In answering these questions, Waldinger makes two significant contributions. First, he expands the understanding of migration from the political standpoint not only of sending or receiving states' perspectives, but rather adopts a sophisticated theoretical framework in which he focuses on both. He emphasizes the dualities of migration: "immigrants are also emigrants, aliens are also citizens, foreigners are also nationals, nonmembers are also members, the politically excluded are also political participants" (107). Second, he goes beyond examining only cross-border activities, a main focus of the transnationalism literature, and centers instead on the processes that connect migrants to their new homes while keeping them tied back home.

The core of Waldinger's argument is that migrants are both immigrants and emigrants, as they keep their connections to their families and friends in their home countries while they concurrently become embedded in their new foreign residencies, a process he calls intersocietal convergence. Conversely, intersocietal divergence follows when migrants and their families become increasingly disconnected from their home country by pledging their commitment to their new home rather than the one they used to live in. In other words, Waldinger suggests that when migrants cross borders, they "find that their own lives, just like the resources that lured them to a foreign land, get confined to the territory on which they have converged" (6). At the same time, "the migrants increasingly find themselves not just in the receiving state but increasingly of it, leading intersocietal convergence to give way to intersocietal divergence" (7).

Waldinger is correct in his assessment that international migration is not only economic and cultural, but a political phenomenon. In chapter 6, Waldinger argues that when emigrants move abroad, they retain home-country citizenship but are most [End Page 1] likely to lose options for political participation, "because territorial presence is the default condition for citizens' formal membership in the polity" (111). Immigrants, on the other hand, once they enter a new polity have usually limited political rights, lacking the full capacity to protect themselves. As Waldinger rightly points out, migrants' presence "on the territory of a democratic state yields protections, but far fewer than those enjoyed by citizens" (111). Yet, migrants moving from less to more democratic societies become more cognizant of their political rights and freedoms previously unavailable to them. Moreover, migrants gain home-country influence by participating in hometown associations.

Examples of these ideas come from chapters 7 and 8, where Waldinger analyzes the specific case of Mexico and Mexican emigrants in the United States, in addition to the role of migrants in the development, maintenance, and impact of hometown associations. In chapter 7, he juxtaposes two migration policies: expatriate voting and issuance of an emigrant identity card. Despite the long historical interest in expatriate voting in Mexico, it did not materialize until the 2006 presidential elections. Because Mexican migrants were required to register before participating in the elections, it was difficult for many undocumented Mexicans to take advantage of the opportunity to vote abroad. The issuance of an emigrant identity card (matricula consular) proved particularly helpful for this purpose. The Mexican government pushed for the recognition of the matricula as a form of identification that also served to protect and extend certain rights to its citizens in the United States while giving them the ability to politically participate in elections back home, once they registered. In chapter 8, he explores cross-border connections through migrants' involvement in hometown associations. Waldinger suggests that hometown activities are dependent on location rather than widespread participation, which weakens the notion of transnational ties and rather highlights the importance of localities and inequalities. Migrants' contributions from abroad may only...

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