In the half century before World War I, the world experienced massive international migration. As we know, during that time it also experienced the first and largest wave of democratization. In the preceding chapters we have learned that the relationship between emigration and political development cannot be characterized simply: It is a relationship influenced strongly by a number of contextual variables and linked by complex causal mechanisms.

This, in itself, is not surprising. After all, the general literature is filled with a host of competing and more established variables than emigration for explaining democratization and political development. The most common of these draw on the political and economic pressures emanating from an organized working class in the heat of industrialization – when established political elites extended the suffrage and relinquished political authority in the face of a growing and increasingly radical working class.