Bringing Hirschman Back In: “Exit”, “Voice”, and “Loyalty” in the Politics of Transnational Migration

Albert O. Hirschman's model of “exit, voice, and loyalty”, long a classic in the study of international migration, has been challenged by the rise of the migrant transnationalism paradigm which exposed the “methodological nationalism” underlying its assumptions. Combining theoretical considerations with empirical evidence from Latin American cases, this paper argues the need for a critical revision of Hirschman's scheme but it also makes the case that after such a reappraisal it can indeed provide helpful conceptual tools for understanding today's transnational migration and its political implications. Whereas in the classic scheme the options of exit, voice, and loyalty were considered to be mutually exclusive, now the opposite holds: the politics of transnational migration are defined precisely by the overlapping and simultaneity of the three Hirschmanian categories.