Moving past the literature on states granting migrant voting rights, in this article I focus on individuals exercising these rights in order to question the connections between (non)citizenship, political membership, and participation in contemporary societies. With over 120 countries worldwide having enfranchised migrants in some form, the binary of 'here' and 'there' is insufficient to categorize and study migrant political engagement. This article contains a new typology to classify the four options of migrant voting: immigrant (only in the destination country), emigrant (only in the origin country), dual transnational (in both), and abstention (in neither). While emigrant voting requires citizenship, immigrant noncitizen voting does not, so active noncitizen voting weakens the defining dimensions of citizenship as a concept. As a first application, I analyze differences between individuals pertaining to each of the four types, based on a 2017 survey of 680 migrants in Chile since this country grants extensive migrant suffrage rights.

Contemporary liberal democracies have employed exclusive or restrictive language, such as promising stricter border control, to ease domestic concerns about increased immigration, while simultaneously maintaining inclusive outcomes by accepting immigrants to support labor markets or to concur with global norms. Dynamic changes in migration flows disrupt this exclusive–inclusive balance known as the policy gap. Aligned with the South American shift since 2016 to more restrictive migration measures, in 2018, Chile’s new administration proposed legislation to replace the migration law, started a regularization process, and issued two executive decrees to change nationality‐specific visa procedures. We analyze the language, timing, and implementation of the decrees as units of analysis, juxtaposing their apparent versus actual purposes. Since Chile positions restrictive measures as protective of immigrants, this case of migration governance inverses the policy gap debate; now, inclusive language disguises exclusive outcomes.

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