Abstract The literature on comparative migration policies overwhelmingly focuses on immigration to democratic states, taking state sovereignty in migration policies for granted. This article addresses a question that has not been posed so far: How do migration policies manifest in contexts of contested sovereignty and external interventions? We study a region of the world that displays a variety of sui-generis sovereignty and multilevel governance arrangements: the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and the Special Administration Regions (SARs) of Hong Kong and Macau. Revising how these polities regulate migration internally, toward each other, and externally, our analysis shows that the control of both internal (i.e. intra-state) and intra-regional migration surpasses the internal vs. international migration and national vs. non-national dichotomies. Based on this analysis, we develop a conceptual reflection that considers the regulation of mobility as a whole, showing that for such political configurations, it is not only immigration policy but also emigration control and emigrant policies which reveal competing sovereignty claims over migration policy.
Pedroza et al. (2025) studied this question.