Civic Participation and Integration: A country of origin perspective

Gsir, Sonia (2014) Civic Participation and Integration: A country of origin perspective. [Conference Proceedings] (Submitted)

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Abstract

This paper offers an insight into how emigration countries influence immigrants in their host society. Our main objective is to explore the following questions: first, whether and how emigration countries can influence the civic participation of immigrants in immigration countries and second, whether transnational links, in particular political transnational activities, have an impact on civic participation in receiving countries. Civic participation is approached as a form of political participation outside of traditional political institutions. As an active and collective dimension of engagement in society, one form of civic participation consists in being active in organizations. This paper addresses three forms of involvement: in local politics (mainstream organizations focused on mainstream issues), immigrant and homeland politics (migrant organizations focused on ethnic or country of origin issues) and finally a combination of mainstream and other issues with bi-national associations. The paper also raises the issue of maintaining links with the country of origin and simultaneously integrating into the immigration country. It questions, in particularly, the impact of transnational civic engagement on civic participation in destination countries. Several case studies are presented and, in the case of Mexico/U.S., some show that the Mexican migrant experience in hometown associations help maintain civic ties with Mexico and positively affect civic participation with U.S. issues. Other cases indicate that civic participation can, indeed, be influenced by transnational links, but also that it relies on the institutional context of the receiving country: for example questions such as access to citizenship). Possible conflicts of interests with countries of origin and countries of destination are also raised in relation to the civic participation of emigrants here and there. Finally, different diaspora policy mechanisms are put forward and in particular, the paper hypothesizes the existence of diaspora empowering mechanism. In order to highlight this mechanism, we map country of origin actors also chart the different kind of actions that can affect civic participation.

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