Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Migrants not only foster investment capital flows toward their home countries; they also invest in their families by sending remittances back to their households. We begin this chapter with a review of the literature on the reasons why migrants remit, as well as the economic and political benefits of their remittances. Our primary contribution focuses on how migrant-sending countries can encourage greater remittance inflows. Over the past several decades, countries have increasingly built political institutions, such as dual citizenship and diaspora-specific government ministries, that attempt to engage their diasporas. We argue, and empirically find, that some of these institutions do incentivize greater remittance inflows, suggesting that origin countries have a significant opportunity to attract this form of external capital. This chapter also includes a new theoretical and empirical perspective on the origin of these institutions – why some countries have quickly adopted diaspora-centric institutions, while others have been slow to do so. We argue and find that countries are quicker to adopt these institutions when their diaspora holds political rights in economically and politically powerful destination countries.

In the same way that dual citizenship signifies a central topic of twenty-first century public discourse, Liberia’s official seal is subject to constant scrutiny because it reflects the exclusion that permeated the first 100 years of the country’s existence as a nation-state. Having never been formally colonised and more recently emerging from a protracted armed conflict, Liberia represents a stark case study in African citizenship construction because of its idiosyncratic history of black settler state formation and historical trajectory as a country of both immigration and emigration. In outlining the book’s rationale, unique contributions, scope, and organisation, this introductory chapter establishes how Liberian citizenship—and, by extension, the political economy of belonging to Liberia—has evolved since the founding of the nation-state in 1847 because of qualitative factors such as conflict, migration, and post-war recovery, with proposed dual citizenship legislation in 2008 serving as a contemporary manifestation of that reconfiguration across space and time.

This concluding chapter maintains that Liberia’s battle to eradicate Ebola from 2014 to 2016 represented an interface wherein state-, nation-, and peace-building objectives converged. Whereas counterparts across Africa had waged nationalist struggles decades before against European colonialism, Liberian domestic and diasporic actors for the first time collaborated to fight a common enemy, Ebola, outside of themselves. As a direct response to deeply embedded inequalities in primary care, non-government Liberian actors at home and abroad embodied active citizenship by engaging in public health measures that reshaped how we envisage public authority in conflict-affected states. Their relatively successful struggles against an existential threat illuminated how the political economy of belonging to Liberia could be made manifest. This chapter demonstrates further that the 2020 referendum proposition based on Liberia’s Dual Citizen and Nationality Act of 2019 would be moot without reconciling disputes over the meaning and practice of Liberian citizenship amongst actors of divergent social locations and life-worlds. It contends that a Liberian citizenship triad—which frames citizenship as identity (passive), practice (active), and a set of relations (interactive)—could be used as a model for theorising citizenship generally since it moves citizenship from the abstract and Eurocentric to the concrete and Afrocentric.

Chapter 9 deals specifically with the way in which the war affected the notions and practices of citizenship. It does so by switching the attention from enemy aliens to citizens of enemy origins. The chapter concentrates firstly on an analysis and discussion of the naturalization policies adopted by the various belligerent countries during the First World War. It then examines the spread of denaturalization statutes across Europe and the emergence of statelessness, concentrating both on state attitudes and public opinion and on the impact of naturalization and denaturalization policies on people of enemy origin. It also looks past the end of the war at the impact of those policies on interwar developments in inclusion and exclusion. The war played a crucial role in stabilizing differences between citizens and aliens and making them starker. It also imposed markers of identity (nationality, language, religion, ethnicity, “race”) on people, often regardless of their will or choice. In the name of military necessity and national security, authorities were willing to investigate origins and parentage or kinship, religion, language and all the markers that could indicate disloyalty to the nation in arms, thus implementing rigid notions of citizenship/subjecthood.

This chapter examines official attitudes toward aliens in peacetime during the nineteenth century by focusing first of all on their rights in a period characterized by sovereignty, nation-building, solidification of borders and the issue and reform of citizenship laws on the one hand, and on the emergence of globalization, migration and the construction of an international society on the other. The chapter delves into the debates on the right of asylum, expulsion, expatriation, and examines early policies of migration control and the dilemma of reconciling rights and freedom of movement with emerging anti-alienism that precipitated into violence. The second part of the chapter concentrates on citizenship as a legal device, exploring first of all practices of collective acquisition of citizenship triggered by annexations of territories, creation of new nation-states, plebiscites and option regimes incorporated in international treaties. It then deals with individual acquisition and loss of citizenship (naturalization and denaturalization), paying particular attention to the gender dimension of citizenship, conscription, dual citizenship and the ethnic shift in citizenship practices and notions that began to emerge at the turn of the century.