Israeli policy also echoes other cases in the scholarly literature that have focused on economic incentives offered by homeland governments to entice ethnic return migration to these nation-states, including global capital flows between diaspora and homeland. Israel has commonly utilized immigration allowances, direct cash transfers, reduced housing prices and
mortgage rates, decreased taxation, or other fiscal benefits to lure migrants to return home. Many of these programs were made available to Jewish-American immigrants to the occupied territories, although my findings suggest that fiduciary interests largely did not inspire American-Israeli settlement. Rather, Jewish-American immigration beyond the Green Line
resembles Asian models of ethnic return migration, where economic incentives are often small financial and emotional expenditures that pay great dividends to governments, as “rather than the state existing to help coethnics abroad, the co-ethnics abroad have a role to play to strengthen the state.”22 Further, the Jewish-American settler case also echoes some elements
of East European incentivization of ethnic return migration, where “at the risk of sounding cynical, these attempts are designed to attract some Western capital, if not always the actual bodies, to come.”23