Acercamiento al derecho de la migración y la ciudadanía transnacional. El caso de los emigrantes mexicanos y sus derechos políticos

Abstract

The traditional concept of citizenship (linked to the nation-State) expressed in the theoretical works of T. H. Marshall and defined as an array of rights (civil, political and social) is not enough to help us understand the migration and political rights phenomenon. Several works have surpassed the theoretical understandings of Marshall, as a result, concepts such as «cosmopolitan citizenship», «differentied citizenship», «democratic citizenship», multicultural citizenship » and «postnational citizenship», have emerged to help us understand in liberal perspectivs citizenship in a context of globalization (migration being an important part of it). At the same time, the latter concepts have been translated into public policies of inclusion, however, both the concepts and the policies were built in terms of only the migration-receiving countries. In an effort to fill this theoretical vacuum, the concept of «transnational citizenship» has recently emerged in the works of some authors. This new approach to citizenship, which stresses cultural and economic links to justify why emigrants living in a country different to their own still retain their right to be a citizen in their countries of origin, can help us understand cases as Mexico and its 8,5 million nationals who currently live outside its boundaries: Mexico has denied political citizenship to these people for they have no Mexican political rights, for example, they can not vote abroad. The purpose of this paper is to try to explain how the transnationalism help us to understand why the Mexican State (partisan and political elites), promotes or limits the rights of mexican migrants depending either on restrictic notion of citizenship or on particular political calculations.