When Diaspora Movements Make a Difference 41 Relatively poor migrants do indeed transfer billions of dollars to their families, and as data from the World Bank illustrate, these amounts appear to be growing every year (Ratha et al. 2019). However, remittances are not as freeflowing as they may appear from these data (Faist 2000). The allocation of resources to a political movement in the home-country depends on a number of factors, including diaspora members’ migration histories and collective wealth. Immigrants from the professional, middle, and upper classes in the home-country are more likely to enter the professional sector, less likely to be tasked with supporting family members at home, and less likely to arrive to the host-country with significant debts. Those from refugee and working-class communities often face the opposite situation, finding themselves burdened with settling debts and sending remittances homeward, paying the way for family members to join them, and working long hours in jobs without benefits. Diaspora members with socioeconomic privilege are therefore more likely to allocate their time and resources to social movements and have the capacity to convert resources to political causes. Furthermore, as Lauren Duquette-Rury (2020) finds in her study of exit and voice, US-based migrants’ interventions for development in Mexico are constituted not only by members’ willingness to help the people and places left behind, but also by the conditions in their home-countries. Mistrust between insiders and outsiders, the absence of partners to receive and distribute resources on the ground, and violence undermine their abilities to remit homeward. Even the wealthy will have their fungible resources drained when causes and crises become prolonged. In these ways, resource conversion depends on the continuous availability of resources and active, networked relations with insiders. Without these, diaspora members will lack resources to give or persons to receive them. Furthermore, during periods when remittances are needed most, diaspora members may face legal and territorial blockages that prevent them from moving resources to the front lines. This leads us to the importance of geopolitical support, explained below. 1.5.2 Geopolitical Support Social movements are embedded in historically situated political environments that bestow some movements with advantages and others with disadvantages, and these environments shape whether movements are likely to achieve their goals (Amenta 2006; Eisinger 1973; Kitschelt 1986; McAdam 1999[1982]; Tilly 1978). Such factors include whether governments are receptive to movements’ demands and whether movements have or gain allies over the course of their campaigns (McAdam et al. 1999; Meyer 2004). As case studies of proIsrael Jewish American and anti-Castro Cubans suggest, diaspora lobbies become powerful when their interests and ideologies are shared with policymakers (Haney and Vanderbush 1999; Quinsaat 2013, 2019; T. Smith 2000). Studies of transnational movements also widely support the notion that https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press