This chapter provides an initial overview of academic research into the politics of migration and a discussion of cross-border mobility within the broader Middle East, paying particular attention to works on authoritarianism, diaspora and migration politics, as well as work on 'rentierism', developmentalism, and 'safety valves.' It then proceeds to discuss the study's exact theoretical framework. It identifies how repression, co-optation, and legitimacy may interact with labour emigration in non-democratic contexts. It proceeds to historically situated Egyptian migration within the history of migration across the Middle East, and gives the reader a sense of the structure of the volume.