Expatriate Voting Rights and Voting Behaviours

The UN estimates that in 1910 roughly 33 million individuals lived in countries other than their own as migrants; by the year 2000 that number reached 175 million. During this period (1910–2000), the population of the world has increased threefold, from 1.6 to 5.3 billion. Migration, by contrast, grew almost six-fold over the course of these 90 years. Strikingly, more than half of the increase in migration occurred in the last three decades of the 20th century, between 1965 and 2000 (Benhabib, 2005). The United Nation Population Fund (2015) estimates that in 2015, 244 million people lived outside their country of origin. This constitutes to roughly 3.3 per cent of the world’s population. While some of these migrants are emigrating to different countries by choice, in the hope of better economic and social prospects, there is also a large share of political and religious refugees leaving their countries, seeking safety and security abroad. With the founding of the European Union and the free movement of labour, the possibilities and incentives for economic migration have increased even more.