Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. vii, 208 pp. (Figures.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5531-1.
Often when considering migration, we focus on the outward journey, or the landed experience: getting there, or being there. Seldom do we focus on the return. Yet return is an important feature of migration in the transnational world, and especially in Asia, which, as D.H. Seol and J. Skrentny (International Labor Migration Review, vol. 43 (3): 578–620, Fall 2009) have argued, is much more likely to host temporary migration flows than Europe. As Xiang Biao himself notes, “transnational circulation in Asia serves as a (national) method of migration regulation” (3). He and his co-editors, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Mika Toyota, have put together a collection of exceptionally well-written essays on return migration in Asia, examining it as a goal of the state, as well as part of the imaginary of migrants themselves. Forced returns after financial crises, compulsory returns of labour migrants, returns of refugees or trafficked people, reverse flows of professionals are all considered. These chapters illustrate how the notion of return changes over history, in the minds of the migrants as well as in the projects of the state.
The first three chapters take up historical migrations. Koji Sasaki writes on the question of return since 1990 for Japanese who had migrated to Brazil from 1908, Mariko Tamanoi discusses the staggered and delayed return of Japanese soldiers and POWs after World War II, and Wang Cangbai relates the differential receptions in the People’s Republic of China of overseas-born Chinese (“Guiquiao”) from the 1950s to the late 1970s. We can feel the reverberations of Asian nations’ entwined histories throughout these accounts. For the Japanese Brazilians, emigration that began in the early 1900s as Japan pushed out excess population, ended up in reverse temporary migration of over 300,000 in the 1990s as Nikkei-Brazilians were beckoned back as labour migrants. This scheme then soured with the 2008 financial crisis. Sasaki’s finely detailed chapter, based on archival accounts, reminds us of changing meanings of mobility for Nikkei Brazilians while underlining the role of the nation in facilitating and regulating this mobility over history. In Wang’s fascinating account, we can sympathize with the guiqiao as they return to mainland China full of the anticipation of nation-building, but become increasingly disillusioned through government campaigns that render them as class enemies. Wang reports that in the decade after China re-opened its borders, some 250,000 returnees migrated to Macao and Hong Kong, partly so that their descendents would not suffer from class discrimination.
The remaining five chapters focus on return migration in current globalization. In chapter 4, Xiang Biao examines compulsory return as evidenced in migrant labour schemes of Singapore, Korea and Japan. Recruitment agents, employers and states create systems of temporary labour through bilateral agreements. The return of the workers is enforced legally through visa regulations but also illegally by the policing actions of informal employer networks. Ultimately, even if the state does not institutionalize draconian measures of surveillance, the system is set up such that employers and agents impose constraints on workers to assure that they will return at contract’s end. Hence, systems of temporary labour facilitate human rights violations. Interestingly Xiang points out that the fear of overstayers has meant that a primary goal of the whole system of temporary migration has become one of co-opting that possibility. Xiang does not suggest a way out of this mess.
In chapter 5, Sylvia Cowan tells the story of Cambodian refugees who left for the US from the 1970s. Some of the younger generation committed crimes and were deported “back” to a Cambodia of which they remembered next to nothing. Initially displaced because of US military actions in Indochina, and again displaced by the US justice system, she notes, they are expelled as aliens essentially for circumstances that were the result of US government policy that relocated them in marginal urban neighbourhoods. Cowen points out that the Iraq war has spawned a new group of poor and displaced refugees. Her query of whether these people’s children will be the next cohort to suffer expulsion rings in our ears.
Johan Lindquist analyzes Indonesians and return in chapter 6 through the lens of three projects: a deportee program, a documentary film on trafficking, and a counter-trafficking program. We can easily see how governments and NGOs alike focus on organized deportation or rescue and return, but as long as the underlying conditions that propel people to migrate are not ameliorated, return is hardly a solution. Lindquist clearly points out the absurdity of these processes. The author’s last comment in the chapter demands our attention as he points to the necessity of looking beyond the “trafficked victim” to ask ultimately about freedom of mobility and labour rights.
The return from the West of Bangalore’s hi-tech migrants is the topic of Carol Upahdya’s chapter. Facilitated by strong state policy that beckons these professionals back, as well as by the desire on the part of the migrants to contribute to India’s further development, it is a highly orchestrated sort of return, with the migrants expecting to make their contributions to the homeland while enjoying the lifestyle of affluent global cosmopolitans. Upahdya discusses some of the attempts of returnees to bring social remittances such as “modes of respectable living and civil life” from the West. Whether India will become the nation of their imaginations—that hybrid of global comforts with an Indian flare—remains a question.
In the final chapter, M.C. Lu and Shin HJ discuss the case of ethnic Korean return to South Korea, arguing that there was a divide in state policy between ethnic Koreans in developing countries and developed countries, a kind of “Hierarchical Nationhood”(170). In the post-1997 financial crisis, many Chinese of Korean ethnicity were deported to China and repatriated, but eventually, through protest movements, their return was ensured. They note, “The notion of return has to remain ambiguous in order to accommodate the contradictions between ethno-nationalism, civic nationalism, and economic rationality”(175).
In sum, this volume offers highly readable, provocative critical analyses of return migration that force us to consider how it is regulated, and at what costs. It will be valuable for anyone interested in the complexities of return migration in Asia.
Glenda S. Roberts
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
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