Ethnic return migration and the nation-state: encouraging the diaspora to return ‘home’

Abstract

Countries of immigration are generally faced with a dilemma: they wish to accept immigrants for economic purposes, but also to restrict immigration for ethnonational reasons. This is especially true in ethnic nation-states, where immigration is seen as a threat to ethnonational unity more than in civic nation-states. However, in recent decades, various ethnic nation-states have adopted immigration policies that have encouraged their diasporic descendants born and raised abroad to return to their ethnic homeland. Ethnic return migration apparently solves the immigration dilemma by providing ethnic nation-states with a much-needed unskilled labour force without causing ethnonational disruption because the immigrants are coethnic descendants. After comparing ethnic return migration policies in European and East Asian countries, this article analyses the development of such policies in Japan and their eventual failure to solve the country's immigration dilemma. As a result, Japan (and other ethnic nation-states) have imposed restrictions on ethnic return migration.

Second-language literacy, immigration, and globalization

“…In contrast, when schools in Norway grapple with applying 'the principle of distributional justice and equality in the basic school' to immigrant students (Holm 2002, 57), they create blurred social boundaries. The current global economic meltdown has even transformed blurred boundaries to bright boundaries as in the case of the Brazilian immigration to Japan followed by the Japanese expatriation of Brazilian-Japanese immigrants in response to the global economic crisis (Tsuda 2010). Further, despite 80 years of US legal precedent aiming to establish rights for immigrant populations, Castles and Miller (1998) pronounced that prevailing laws and social practices classify the USA as an ethnic model of nationhood where membership is established by citizenship, common roots, destiny, and language.…”

Return migration, entrepreneurship and development: Contrasting the economic growth perspective of Senegal’s diaspora policy through a migrant-centred approach

“…'diaspora policies' devise various tools through which migrants' linkages with the homeland may be upheld, for instance through overseas voting rights, facilitating remittances and investment, or cultural initiatives for second generation migrants abroad to cultivate their roots. Openly promoting the return of overseas nationals is often a key element in these diaspora policies (Cohen 2009;Tsuda 2010;Boccagni 2011;Ho 2011;Åkesson & Eriksson-Baaz 2015). Most of the scholarly literature analysing return through state-driven diaspora policies takes a critical stance, suggesting that these are highly instrumental, dominated by state interest and targeting the return of selected migrant resources and skills, often in the hope of attracting entrepreneurial investment (Murphy 2002;Cohen 2009;Boccagni 2011;Sinatti 2015a).…”

Secularization of immigration policy vs. religion's influence on integration: Israel's non‐Jewish Jews' immigration in a comparative perspective

“…Hence, Jewish immigrants are privileged with automatic citizenship while immigration of non‐Jews with no connection to the Jewish people is restricted (Orgad : 78–4; Raijman and Kemp ). In many ways, the Israeli immigration policy expresses an ethnic‐national perception of jus sanguinis which prevails in many countries (Tsuda ), though Israel is unique in its blending of religious considerations into its immigration policy, as well as in its differentiation between religious and secular‐ethnic parameters.…”