Diaspora Policies, Consular Services and Social Protection for German Citizens Abroad

This chapter presents an overview of German policies vis-à-vis German nationals living abroad. For the most part, the German Government does not reach out to or encourage engagement from or with German nationals living abroad. This is in contrast to a concerted cultural outreach to ethno-national German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. Rights in Germany are largely residence-based, and access to rights is thus associated with (legal) residence in Germany, rather than with holding German citizenship. There are two clear exceptions: one is a robust system that enables voting from abroad for German citizens, and the other is facilitated access from abroad to pensions for years worked in Germany. With respect to other measures of social protections, no clear policy can be said to exist. Access to other forms of social protection is on the basis of exception, with consular officials exercising discretion in such cases

‘Gotta go visit family’: reconsidering the relationship between tourism and transnationalism

A comparative examination of two groups of highly skilled Global North migrants – US citizens (Americans) in London, Berlin, and Paris and French citizens in London – this paper explores the nature of these migrants’ visits home, situating these visits between tourism and transnationalism. We question whether there has been a tendency to conceptualise visits home by migrants from the Global North as tourism and those from the Global South as transnational engagement. We found that our study participants’ visits home often incorporated visits to family, relaxation, tourism, and cultural transmission to children, suggesting there is not a clear distinction between tourism and transnationalism. At the same time, we noted a certain tension between transnationalism, here primarily familial obligations, and tourism, as migrants sought to balance a felt need to visit family and a desire to have some aspect of relaxation or tourism. Visits home also often necessitated negotiations of social relations – often in both home and host countries. Finally, we noted a bidirectionality in visits: migrants visited home, but family and friends visited them as well, which also serves to maintain social connections with home, suggesting that the implications of this bidirectionality for the nature of transnationalism are an area for future research

Do Diaspora Engagement Policies Endure? An Update of the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX) to 2017

How states of origin regulate the rights, obligations, and services they extend to their emigrants has remained mostly in the shadows of migration policy research. We have tackled this gap in the literature by advancing the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX), which was designed for comparing the degree of adoption of emigrant policies - also called 'diaspora-engagement policies' - across countries in a whole region and, with the update provided in this paper, for the first time in a longitudinal direction. Having previously introduced the EMIX in a synchronic frame, this article presents its scores for 14 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean in 2015 and 2017. This effort already shows that some emigrant policies (e.g. citizenship policies) endure more than others (e.g. social policies). These suggestive findings support the need to compile not only cross-national, but also longitudinal datasets on these policies