Does resident diplomacy influence international outcomes? Theoretically, I argue that resident diplomats tend to adopt uniquely cooperative stances toward their hosts. I test this expectation using a natural experiment involving British visa issuance. Starting in 2007, the UK transferred visa decision making from local diplomatic posts to centralized hubs, located either at third country diplomatic posts or domestically. I study this rollout to credibly estimate the causal effects of visa adjudication by local posts. I find that resident diplomats implement a much more lenient visa policy—transferring adjudication to an outside hub reduces issuance by about fifteen percent. There is a robust difference between the behavior of local and third-country posts, showing that this cooperative effect of diplomacy is relationship-specific.

This study analyzes how migrants affect their host country's foreign policy toward their home country by measuring their influence on bilateral emergency aid. I develop the argument that besides political lobbying and the targeting of aid by the donor country, migrants affect emergency aid by providing a linkage between the countries and increasing the salience of a disaster abroad. The empirical analysis shows that the location and size of a country's diaspora is an important predictor of emergency aid flows after natural disasters. Interaction effects provide support for the linkage argument: while the diaspora effect does not increase with the host country's level of democracy, it is strongest with the least severe and most distant disasters.