ABSTRACT
Diaspora organizations (DOs) play an important role in facilitating settlement and integration, homeland politics, and grassroots diaspora-led development. While past scholarship focuses on political opportunity structures for diaspora mobilization, fewer studies consider how the combination of state policies, community resources, and societal attitudes affect the transnational orientation and organizational capacities of DOs. Using the case of the Pakistani diaspora in two different receiving societies, we demonstrate how state-sponsored immigrant integration policies and socioeconomic attainment shape the size, composition, and homeland-oriented of Pakistani DOs in Toronto and New York City. In addition, we show how negative societal attitudes constrain Pakistani DOs as they strive to serve constituencies in Pakistan and North America. Our study findings provide an IR perspective on DOs showing how the organizational capacities of Pakistani DOs are shaped by domestic and interstate contexts.
