This line of inquiry approaches questions of belonging from the perspective of migration politics and policy.  

Sponsored by the Leverhulme Foundation, the project Ius Pecuniae: The Growth of Citizenship by Investment offers the first comprehensive account of the emergence and spread of citizenship by investment programs. These increasingly popular policy options enable elites to acquire citizenship through financial contributions to a state.  The multi-year study establishes the defining characteristics of commodified citizenship, analyzes the causes and impact of such programs, and assesses the consequences for citizenship more broadly.

A further strand of research, Guestwork Regimes: A Global Comparison, examines the polar opposite: low-paid temporary labor migrants who contribute to a country's economy, but typically face barriers to naturalization.  The project develops the first global mapping of temporary low-skilled migrant work programs in six world regions: Southern Africa, Europe, North America, the Gulf, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The project advances a taxonomy of exclusion based on differences in techniques for policing full membership in the state, nation, and economy. 

A third line of work, Migration Industries in East Asia, engages the emerging literature on migration industries, which to date has focused on the informal or illegal businesses that channel people across borders.  Analyzing Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, the project elucidates the ways that states cooperate with private actors to manage legal migration flows, the principal-agent dilemmas involved, and the role of politics and policy in labor migration.



Investment Migration





















Guestwork Regimes
Surak, Kristin. 2016. "Our Citizenship is Expensive!" London Review of Books. 38(18): 39-40.

Engaging Atossa Abrahamian's book Cosmopolites, this piece reviews recent transformations in  citizenship.


Surak, Kristin. "Beyond Blood and Soil: Jus Pecuniae  and the Rise of Citizenship by Investment."

What explains the rapid rise of citizenship by investment programs and what are the implications for citizenship more broadly? Moving beyond the largely theoretical economic and normative scholarship on the sale of citizenship, this article draws on qualitative fieldwork to specify the distinct properties of citizenship as a commodity and identify the internal and external determinants of its value. The analysis situates formal citizenship by investment programs within a broader field encompassing immigrant investor visas and discretionary economic citizenship. It shows how this field conditioned the development and spread of formal programs, and the role of industry actors, geopolitical inequalities, and extra-territorial rights in this transformation. Examination of jus pecuniae explains broader transformations in citizenship in four domains: strategic action, territory, inequality, and third-party actors.

Surak, Kristin. 2015. "Serious About Relocating From Trump's America? Here are Your Options." Washington Post. November 15.

With an ironic touch, this op-ed introduces a range of residence and citizenship options for Americans looking to move abroad. It also suggests two key drivers of the contentious American presidential election.

Surak, Kristin. 2013. “Guestworker Regimes: A Taxonomy.”  New Left Review (84): 84-102.
  •  Translated into Spanish (“Gastarbeiter: Una Taxonomía,” NLR Secunda Época, (84) 2014: 94-114)
Though a global phenomenon, guestwork programs have not yet been analyzed in broad regional comparison. This article examines temporary labor migration schemes in the regions where they have taken strongest hold – Southern Africa, North America, Europe, the Persian Gulf, and East Asia – to present a set of propositions about guestwork patterns within the global flows of migrant labor since the late nineteenth century. It isolates the characteristics distinctive to this mode of temporary labor migration, identifies its inherent contradictions, and develops a typology of the forms guestwork programs can take based on the ways foreign labor is integrated into a national economy (core industrial, regional supplemental, national supplemental, primary, and marginal) and on the type of state-society relationship in which this occurs (colonial, settler, autochthonous, rentier, and isolate). 

Surak, Kristin. 2015. “Guestworkers Globally.”  In Handbook of the Political Economy of Migration,  Simon McMahon, editor.  Surrey: Edward Elgar. 

Guestworkers are, perforce, outsiders within – producers, not consumers; foreigners, not nationals; aliens, not citizens – and the state must manage these boundaries for the workers to retain their value. Though guestwork programs are much in the news, little comparative research exists beyond two- or three-country comparisons.  This review piece traces the evolution of guestwork programs in several world regions across the course of the twentieth century.

Labor Migration in East Asia
 Surak, Kristin. 2017. “Migration Industries and the State: Guestwork Programs in East Asia.” International Migration Review. Forthcoming.

Building on recent studies of migration industries, this article advances a taxonomy of the ways states may partner with migration industries based on the nature of their relationship, formal or informal, and the type of actor involved. The analysis focuses on low-skilled temporary migrant work programs – schemes that require substantial state involvement to function.  The cases are selected from East Asian democracies with strong economies that have become net importers of migrants: Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. In Taiwan, the state outsources management to licensed labor brokers and utilizes market competition to maintain a strictly controlled program. The Japanese government works indirectly with the migration industry and relies on legal ambiguities to limit labor brokers. South Korea has de-privitized its program and moved to a publicly run scheme. The analysis elucidates four ways that destination states may partner or not with the migration industry – market management, concealed cooperation, public oversight, and public discharge – and explicates the techniques used within each system to confront the resultant delegation issues.

Surak, Kristin. 2012.  “Migration Industries and Developmental States in East Asia.” In The Migration Industry and the Commercialization of International Migration, Ninna Nyberg Sørensen and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, editors. London: Routledge.  89-110. 

This chapter examines the ways in which East Asian democracies employ market mechanisms to manage temporary labor migration and control the borders of the nation, state, and economy. Though broad similarities in guestworker programs across the region are evident, an internal comparison reveals that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have embraced market mechanisms to varying degrees in their management of them. Taiwan has gone the farthest in devolving management to private actors, South Korea has moved away from such strategies, and Japan has taken an indirect approach to incorporating market tactics.  The Taiwanese and Japanese systems have resulted in much stricter management regimes, frequently criticized for human rights abuses, while the Korean case is often held up by international organizations as a model program.  Nonetheless, common to all is a deep concern to manage risks to the nation, state, and economy.

Migration Policy

Surak, Kristin. 2008. “Convergence in Foreigners' Rights and Citizenship Policy? A Look at Japan.”  International Migration Review 42(3): 550-75.

Citizenship laws and immigrant rights in rich, democratic countries are widely understood to be converging. Since most accounts of convergence are based on Western examples, Japan is an important test case. I distinguish three theoretical accounts of convergence: global-institutionalist, liberal-democratic,and problem-solving perspectives. I then examine trends in foreigners’ rights in Japan since World War II in three domains: entrance, rights of residents, and citizenship. I find that convergence is occurring in the expansion of rights, partially in access to the territory, but not in formal citizenship. While the liberal-democratic perspective fails to account for trends, a combination of global-institutionalist and problem-solving accounts provides the most powerful analytic insight into convergence processes.


Skrentny, John, David FitzGerald, Javier Moreno, and Kristin Surak.  “A Regional Comparison of Family Reunion Policies.”

Though grouping states into regions is common in the social sciences, explicit attempts to understand what regions are and why they help us predict political outcomes have been rare.   This paper contributes to a political sociology of regional variation by focusing on an area of policy that is likely to be increasingly important in developed economies:  international migration, and specifically, the migration of families.  To do so, it examines the history of family reunion policy formation in three different geographic regions of migrant-receiving states: North America, Europe and East Asia.  Each of these regions has shown different policy patterns and outcomes regarding family migration, despite similar levels of economic development and liberal political institutions. In other words, knowing which region a migrant-receiving state is in helps predict what its family immigration policy will look like. Our analysis shows that regional variation is not explained by the presence or absence of particular independent variables typically associated with immigration policymaking.  Rather, a combination of historical sequencing, critical junctures, and channeled learning has yielded different policy paradigms that explain the durable patterns of difference.