FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
Migration seminar: What does it mean to pay legal immigrants to leave liberal democracies?

This paper examines state remigration policies or “pay to go schemes” for select legally resident unemployed immigrant communities and their families in the Netherlands, Japan, and Spain. They follow institutional patterns of historic emigration that legitimize boundaries of national belonging and shift with economic and societal pressures. The “symbolic politics” and rhetoric surrounding remigration policies provide a litmus test for comparing reethnicization (reinforcing ties with emigrants across foreign born generations), deethnicization (easing access for all immigrants) (Joppke, 2005), and combined iterations thereof in the Netherland, Japan, and Spain.

While Dutch citizenship has become easier to obtain for overseas former Dutch citizens, a remigration program has been instituted for unemployed and ageing “ethnic minorities” and asylum seekers providing dual nationals renounce their Dutch nationality. Spain and Japan established remigration programs to cope with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. (Sharpe 2010; Milly 2014) Although Spain recruited immigrants in the 2000s, particularly from Latin America, based on the ideation that there are closer to an idealized notion of an Iberoamerican nation with liberal citizenship policies, (Hazan 2014:373,381) it facilitates the paid voluntary return of nationals (non-EU citizens) and their families from 20 countries (mainly Latin American countries) with which they have social security agreements while simultaneously providing overseas Spanish citizens financial incentive to repatriate. (Schurr and Stoltz, 2010:63)

The overseas Latin American Nikkeijin (Japanese descendants) that were since 1990 called “back” to Japan to work as guest workers were being paid to repatriate. These remigration schemes are a symbolic attempt to control unwanted immigration and demonstrate address of critical “ethnic” social and economic problems, protection of national identity, and respect for international law.

Michael Orlando Sharpe’s areas of expertise are comparative politics and international relations, and his research interests concern the politics of migration, immigrant political incorporation, and political transnationalism in the Dutch Kingdom, Japan, and around the world. His first book, Postcolonial Citizens and Ethnic Migration: The Netherlands and Japan in the Age of Globalization was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2014. Dr. Sharpe recently completed his second book manuscript, The Politics of Racism and Antiracism in Japan, under contract with Cambridge University Press.

His other research concerns include the politics of remigration or the paid voluntary return of migrants and their families (“pay to go schemes”) and implicit boundary making in liberal democracies. Additionally, Dr. Sharpe has another project on questions of non-sovereignty, freedom of movement, and diaspora in the Dutch Caribbean and the European Union. He is very intrigued by the intersections of the politics of migration and racism around the world. Dr. Sharpe’s Visiting Fellow or Visiting Scholar appointments include the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) Leiden University, the University of Aruba, the University of Amsterdam, Sophia University, and Keio University.