MIGRANT MOBILIZATION: HOMELAND ADVOCACY OR MIGRANT RIGHTS?

Because migrant political participation can take on many forms and is affected by structural factors in both the country of residence and the country of origin, it is difficult to pin down a generic picture of migrant political participation. Our primary focus is on migrants’ motivation to mobilize and the comparative advantage in their available resources to predict the level of migrant political association as well as the target of mobilization. These activities are moderated by the density and accessibility of the host country’s civil society. Thus, we model migrant associational mobilization and focus on three specific components: precarity as a primary determinant of the motivation to mobilize; relative precarity and the comparative advantage of migrant resources that determine the primary target of mobilization; and the permeability of civil society organizations in the host country to understand the level of mobilization. We employ two case studies as a plausibility probe.