Emigration policy for soft power and political influence

Recently I read the article by Gerasimos Tsourapas “Authoritarian emigration states: Soft power and cross-border mobility in the Middle East”. In my view, since I have never read something similar before when it comes to policy-making, it represents an interesting case of how an authoritarian government can make and use migration policy to conduct its interests in other countries.

Tsourapas article is about Egypt during the Cold War period -Nasser’s administration (1954-1970). He writes that Nasser’s government developed an emigration policy that subsidized the short-term emigration of high-skilled professionals, who were also loyal supporters of the ruling regime, across the Arab world and Africa. As Tsourapas writes, emigration is often researched in economic terms as regarding remittances or in political terms as regarding dissidents. The case of Nasser’s government emigration policy represents other aspects as foreign policy, geopolitics, ideological interests, soft power.

The case is interesting since Nasser’s administration developed a policy where high-skilled Egyptian professionals as teachers and doctors were used, as Tsourapas writes, as “a tool of cultural diplomacy to disseminate ideas of anti-colonialism, anti-Zionism, and Egyptian-led pan-Arabism across the Arab world”.

More information about the article you can find here.