As the number of international migrants has surged over the past 80 years, migrants have found new and transformative ways in which to maintain family, cultural, business, and political ties to their communities and countries of origin. This transnational engagement is not a new phenomenon by any means, but the growth in the overall volume of international migration, new technologies that ease the costs of communication and travel, and growing interest by immigrant-sending countries in sustaining their connections to the émigrés for longer periods of time have facilitated the establishment of new forms of transnational engagement by migrants and, in some cases, their children born in the countries of migration. In From Here and There: Diaspora Policies, Integration, and Social Rights Beyond Borders, Alexandra Délano Alonso analyzes efforts by Mexico and other Latin American countries to empower their émigrés, particularly émigrés in the United States, by improving their access to education, health care, labor rights, language rights, and civic participation and—as a consequence of these capacity-building efforts—to sustain their connections to their émigré community so that émigrés can also contribute to the national development of the country of origin.
There has been extensive scholarly analysis of the ways in which immigrants build transnationalism from below. Délano Alonso instead tells a story of institutional change, making important contributions to the study of transnationalism from above. From Here and There examines two shifts in traditional consular services. The first step was to design programs to allow émigrés to access political and economic rights in their country of origin. The second was to ensure that émigrés had access to institutions and programs related to education, health, banking, labor rights, language acquisition, and civic participation in the country of destination, in this case the United States. The second expansion in consular programs was designed to overcome the laissez-faire approach of the United States toward immigrant integration and was often conducted in alliances with state and local governments and nonprofit community-based organizations in areas with high concentrations of immigrants. Délano Alonso offers the most detailed analysis of two Mexican government capacity-building initiatives: Ventanilla de Salud, to provide access to health care, and Plazas Comunitarias Windows for Educational Opportunities, which initially focused on adult education but later expanded to provide some services for migrants who arrived in the United States as children (the 1.5 generation).
From Here and There treads a fine line in describing the roles of immigrant-sending Latin American countries. The primary focus throughout the book is on Mexican government-led efforts and initiatives. Considering the volume of Mexican migration to the United States and the durability of that migration over the past 130 years, this focus makes sense. As Délano Alonso demonstrates, Mexico also moved into this top-down immigrant capacity-building transnationalism in the 1990s before other immigrant-sending countries did; it has also continually expanded its efforts in the years since. Consequently, Mexico has served as a model for other Latin American immigrant-sending country efforts to connect to their émigrés. From Here and There discusses, in a more scattershot manner, efforts by other countries that model the Mexican efforts. It is not possible, for example, to say when other countries did not follow the Mexican example or experimented with other strategies. I would have liked to have gotten more of a sense of the frequency of countries not following the Mexican model, so I could better understand how well the programs that are the book’s main focus worked on the ground. Délano Alonso does offer some measurement of the effectiveness of these programs, but the metric for this program evaluation is the assessment of participants, often with very small samples. The book does not offer an assessment of how widely these programs are known in the émigré community and how likely émigrés are to participate in them. There is also no sense of whether émigrés want services from the Mexican government that it is not providing.
Délano Alonso does offer some useful comparative analysis of the context of this new form of capacity-building transnationalism. It is not necessarily universal in immigrant-receiving societies. Using Canada as comparison, Délano Alonso demonstrates that the absence of national immigrant integration policies in the United States and its federalist system of social service delivery makes the United States a particularly receptive environment to émigré capacity-building policies designed to ensure that émigrés have access to social service programs, such as those designed by Mexico and other Latin American countries.
From Here and There also explores the limits of transnationalism, one that the new initiatives by Mexico and other Latin American countries to their émigrés have not overcome. When Mexico reached out to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) beneficiaries in the United States, it was surprised and disappointed to find that it had less of a connection to these émigrés, ones who migrated as children or young teens, than with the older migrants, who participated in programs to facilitate health care and education access. Migrants who had left Mexico at a younger age and had weaker ties to Mexico reported an “institutional and social rejection” (p. 145) from Mexico. Transnational connections have long been found to diminish among the descendants of migrants, but this finding suggests that transnational connections may weaken even more rapidly. Délano Alonso indicates that Mexico is trying to develop programming that targets DACA beneficiaries and the DREAMer community more broadly, but these programs were in their infancy, so she does not offer an assessment of their effectiveness.
Most of the project’s fieldwork was conducted before the 2016 US presidential campaign and the election of President Trump. Although there are some references in the final chapter to his increasingly vitriolic attacks on immigrants, there is little assessment of how the Trump era has changed the transnational policies of Mexico or other Latin American countries. I would be particularly interested in a discussion of the effect of Trump-era policies on the abilities of Mexican and other Latin American consulates to develop alliances with state and local governments in the United States, particularly in the new areas of migrant destination, which are more likely to be led by Republican governors and legislatures.
From Here and There: Diaspora Policies, Integration, and Social Rights Beyond Borders offers a thoughtful study of national efforts to expand the substantive meanings of transnational engagement among émigrés by building their capacities in the country of destination. It is also careful to show the potential limits of these efforts by immigrant-sending countries that target the descendants of the émigrés, including children who emigrated when they were young and experienced most of their education and political socialization in the receiving country. Alexandra Délano Alonso demonstrates conclusively that Mexico has creatively developed an institutional support network to empower its émigrés in the United States and to potentially sustain their engagement with Mexico.
