Political and Civic Participation of Immigrants in Host Countries. An Interpretative Framework from the Perspective of the Origin Countries and Societies

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is the role of origin countries in influencing immigrants’ political and civic participation in their host societies. It is our aim to understand how these processes can affect immigrant integration in destination countries. More specifically, our objective is to explore the following questions: first, whether and how emigration countries can influence immigrants’ political and civic participation in destination countries; and second, whether links between origin countries, civil societies and migrants have an impact on the political and civic participation of the latter in the receiving countries. We also propose to analyse origin countries’ possible influence on political and civic participation through a very specific approach based on the identification of different actors intervening in these processes. In this framework, we distinguish between state and non-state (or civil society) actors and we look at how they can play a role in the political and civic participation of immigrants at destination. The rationale behind this differentiation is that these two categories of actors do not generally use the same tools, and often they may not share the same goals (Gabrielli and Zapata-Barrero 2015).