Laguerre argues that migrant politics has been misfiled. Examined from inside the receiving country it looks like ethnic politics or voting behaviour; examined from the homeland it looks marginal, a shadow of real government. Neither framing captures what is happening.

He proposes diasporic politics as an arena in its own right, transnational rather than domestic or international, and without the legal foundation that gives states their legitimacy. It works by grafting itself onto institutions at both ends, party organizations where migrants live and electoral machinery where they came from, while building nonprofit structures of its own, so that a foothold in one place becomes leverage in the other.

Because it crosses borders by definition, he insists it be theorized through globalization rather than international relations, and he traces how homeland governments come to count on remittances while host states seek integration. Haitian settlements in the United States, Canada and France supply the recurring examples.