Diasporas don’t always reflect the politics back home

By Michael Paarlberg, Virginia Commonwealth University

As protest and military action raised the prospect of regime change in Iran and Venezuela, the voices of both countries’ diasporas were heard loud and clear through the media of their host nations.

Venezuelan exiles in the US were, according to the popular narrative, broadly behind President Donald Trump and his plan to “run Venezuela,” as the nickname “MAGAzuelans” suggests. Meanwhile, the Iranian diaspora rallied behind the Prince Reza Pahlavi as he positioned himself as a leader-in-waiting, projecting an image of unified exile support.

Diasporas are often treated by media and policymakers as monolithic blocs – politically unified, ideologically coherent and ready to be mobilized for regime change. But as a scholar of migration and security in Latin America, I know this assumption fundamentally misunderstands how diaspora communities form, evolve and engage politically.

Iranian and Venezuelan émigrés might broadly oppose their current governments – having left them, this is unsurprising. But they are far from unified on what should replace those governments, who should lead or how change should come about.

Migration waves shape politics

Diasporas are not uniform because their constituent populations did not arrive all at once, from the same places or for the same reasons. Each migration wave carries distinct political orientations shaped by the circumstances of departure.

Consider the Turkish diaspora in Europe. It has a reputation for religious conservatism and nationalism favoring the ruling party of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – seemingly paradoxical given that most live in liberal democracies and support center-left parties in their host countries.

The explanation lies in history, as diaspora scholar Eva Østergaard-Nielsen has detailed. Turkish migration to Europe came in successive waves, each marginalized by Turkey’s longtime secular establishment that dominated the country’s politics until the rise of Erdoğan in the early 2000s. Religious conservatives fled discrimination, Kurds fled persecution, and later came economic migrants. Erdoğan’s ruling AKP has capitalized on this with active outreach to these established diaspora communities.

Only recently have those fleeing the AKP government itself begun to establish a foothold in the diaspora. In a working paper, Gülcan Sağlam and I found that sentiment toward the Turkish ruling party is not predictable by demographic profile, nor is it counteracted by integration or support for liberal European Union parties. Rather, members of the diaspora’s politics are informed by individual personal beliefs and perceptions of discrimination.

The Turkish experience also speaks to the tendency of diasporas to become politically frozen at the moment of departure from their home countries. The same pattern appears across contexts. For example, El Salvador’s diaspora in the United States, which first left during the 1980s civil war, developed a reputation for being “stuck in the ‘80s” – mentally still fighting battles that had long since ended at home.

This temporal displacement has consequences. Iranian-American sociologist Asef Bayat, writing about the Iranian diaspora, argues that exile opposition to the ruling government back home “suffers from a political disease, positioning itself against the movement it claims to support.”

In other words, diaspora activists may advocate positions that resonate with Western audiences, but find little support among those actually living under authoritarian rule. This lack of accountability to political consequences back home can rankle the constituencies on whose behalf they seek to advocate.

Research on the Venezuelan diaspora reflects similar dynamics. A 2022 study found that Venezuelan exiles hold more extreme anti-Venezuelan government views than those who remained.

The myth of diaspora influence

Yet despite the presumed disconnection of diaspora groups, homeland politicians often devote disproportionate attention to those who have left. The logic is simple: Emigrants send money home — accounting for as much as 25% of gross domestic product in some Central American and Caribbean countries. Politicians assume that this financial power translates into political influence over remittance-receiving relatives.

One party official in El Salvador told me: “If we get one Salvadoran in Washington to support us, that gives us five votes in El Salvador – and it doesn’t even matter if the one in Washington votes.”

My own research tested this assumption using polling and voting data across Latin America and found it to be exaggerated. Remittances and family communication mostly reinforce existing, mutual partisan sympathies rather than swing votes.

But the belief in diaspora influence matters politically. And the diaspora voters can be weaponized by authoritarian leaders.

El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, in his successful and plainly unconstitutional 2024 reelection bid, expanded external voting through online balloting, increasing diaspora votes by 87-fold over the previous election.

He then directed all diaspora votes to count in San Salvador, despite more emigrants coming from the eastern departments of San Miguel and La Unión. This helped swamp the remaining opposition parties in the capital.

Diasporas in opposition

What happens when diasporas oppose rather than support authoritarian governments? The scholarship offers sobering lessons.

Diasporas can influence home country politics through several channels: direct voting, financial support for opposition movements, lobbying host governments and transmitting democratic values through what sociologist Peggy Levitt calls “social remittances” — the ideas, practices and norms that flow alongside money transfers.

Other research has found that remittances can undermine dictatorships by helping fund opposition activities.

Yet authoritarian governments have developed sophisticated countermeasures. Research on Arab diaspora activism documents shows how governments deter dissent through transnational repression. Freedom House, the democracy and good governance nongovernmental organization, recorded over 1,200 incidents of “physical transnational repression” against dissidents – including assassinations, abductions, assaults and unlawful deportation – between 2014 and 2024 involving 48 governments.

The Cuban example

The Cuban exile community offers, perhaps, the most studied example of diaspora political mobilization. For decades, the Cuban American lobby shaped – some would say dictated – U.S. Cuba policy.

Yet even this influence is easily overstated. The exiles who fled immediately after the 1959 revolution for political reasons constitute a smaller share of the overall Cuban diaspora than commonly assumed.

Subsequent migration waves included far more working-class economic migrants with different political orientations. By 2014, polls showed 52% of Cuban Americans opposed the U.S. embargo that their lobby had championed. The lobby’s influence waned after founder Jorge Mas Canosa’s death in 1997, and the Elián González affair – a messy international custody battle involving a 6-year-old Cuban boy – further fractured the community.

The limits of exile politics

For Venezuela and Iran, these lessons counsel caution. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled their homeland – the largest displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, Iranian emigration accelerated after the 2022 protests.

Both diasporas contain passionate activists, wealthy donors and would-be leaders positioning themselves for future rule. But passion does not equal unity, and visibility does not equal representation.

The loudest voices on social media – or those amplified by U.S. government officials and media – may represent narrow slices of diverse communities. Certain figures project unified support they do not actually command. There may be a rough consensus on opposing the hated government back home, but far less consensus on what should be done – or how to achieve change.

Nor does diaspora opposition necessarily translate into government vulnerability. Authoritarian states have learned to insulate themselves from diaspora pressure while simultaneously using emigration as a safety valve, turning potential dissidents into remittance-senders – as Cuba did by abolishing exit visas in 2013.

Diasporas can contribute to democratic change through funding, advocacy and the slow work of transmitting democratic values. But ultimately, the path to democratic change in Venezuela, Iran and elsewhere will be determined by those who remain, not those who left. Diasporas can support that struggle; they cannot substitute for it.

Michael Paarlberg, Associate Professor, Political Science, Virginia Commonwealth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence