Please cite as: Mullan, Brendan & Cristián Doña-Reveco, 2012, Emigration and the Sending State, in Steve Gold and Stephanie Nawyn, Routledge international handbook of migration studies. New York: Routledge. Emigration and the Sending State Brendan Mullan 1 & Cristián Doña-Reveco 2 “Emigrants are in another state’s grip, so governments of countries of emigration must develop creative ways to manage citizens abroad, preserve their national loyalty, and extract their resources,” (Fitzgerald, 2009: 4). “… sending countries around the world, from Turkey to Mexico, have recently shifted their view towards their emigrants, from “traitors” to “compatriots” abroad,” (Joppke, 2011: 1). Introduction It is by now a truism that international migration is a process, not an event. As evidenced by the contributions to this handbook, the cultural, demographic, economic, political, and social causes, content, and consequences of international migration as a process are well documented. However, there remain lacunae and among all the processes embedded within international migration, the complexities of the reciprocal relationship between the sending state and its emigrants has recently begun to receive the detailed attention and critical analysis that it deserves (Jopkke, 2011; Délano, 2011, 2010; Kapur, 2010; Fitzgerald, 2009; Gamlen, 2008). Despite a weakening in new migration flows across the world because of the global economic crisis that began in 2008, more than 215 million people (3% of the world population) were living outside their country of origin in 2010 (World Bank, 2011). The Mexican-US migration corridor is the world’s largest with 11.6 million migrants in 2010 3 . These migration flows are a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of history, subjects of a polity could not 1 Correspondence at mullan@msu.edi 2 Correspondence at donacris@msu.edu 3 In 2010, excluding migration from the former Soviet Union, the top migration corridors were: Mexico-US, Bangladesh-India, Turkey-Germany, China-Hong Kong, India-UAE, China-US, Philippines-US, Afghanistan-Iran, India-US, Puerto Rico-US, and West Bank/Gaza-Syrian Arab Republic (World Bank, 2011).