Foundations in Asia Pacific Studies, v. 2. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012. xiii, 270 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-85745-740-0.
This collection of essays is a significant publication on migration and ethnicity, with a particular focus on East Asian context. This volume has five sections. The first section, the introduction, offers background information about contemporary East Asian migration and provides the book’s organization. The second section (chapters 1 to 6), focuses on the regional, state and city level, in which cross-border migration takes place. The third section (chapters 7 to 12), deals with immigrants in both the traditional and the modern sense. The fourth section (chapters 13 to 16) explores the intersection of ethnicity and nationality with work. The conclusion summarizes the four cross-cutting themes in this volume.
The objective of this book is to shed light on East Asian migration, and to examine whether migration theory and findings based on the industrialized West can be applied to this particular context. In essence, this book demonstrates ‘”East Asian immigration exceptionalism” (Wong and Rigg, Asian Cities, Migrant Labor and Contested Spaces, New York: Routledge, 2011), namely, the distinctiveness of migration phenomena in East Asia, which treats the global economy as a force affecting migration in a comprehensive yet local way.
There are three valuable points made in this book. First, unlike conventional migration studies that draw on dichotomous categories, this book attempts to use a dynamic perspective to overcome two extremes. For example, in discussing the direction of migration, the authors assert that there is more than one, which is against what traditional research defines as “unilinear.” As global cities develop and their geographical spread widens, migration has no long followed developing-to-developed routes only, and instead, it may occur in the opposite direction, or between multiple locations. As for the status of immigrants, definitions such as permanent or temporary resident, and legal or illegal all constitute changeable identities. Instead, their statuses vary, depending on many temporal and spatial factors. Considering changes with time and space advocates a perspective which emphasizes the process through which migration occurs, and treats migration or immigrants as a dynamic rather than predetermined/static concept. This dynamic perspective not only represents an actual picture of complicated and various migratory experiences, but also allows an observation of its continuity and change.
Second, contributors not only adopt a relational perspective that focuses on the importance of connecting immigrants and origin/destination places, but also borrow concepts, such as contact zones, time-space compression, and agglomeration to emphasize the existence of a “field” for encounters between individuals who previously lived in different locations, and for communications of information and capital across borders. Many East Asian cities can be deemed as such contact zones, because of “extensive and complicated intersections of national and international forces and connections” (7). This effort suggests the “intermediary agent status” of migrants to create, sustain, affect and in turn be shaped by the association between origin and destination places (Wong and Rigg, Asian Cities, Migrant Labor and Contested Spaces, New York: Routledge, 2011). More importantly, it also helps us understand migrants’ circumstances of social inclusion/exclusion in host cities and the reasons for this, for instance, unequal relations embedded in the migratory process (Yeoh and Willis, “Singaporean and British transmigrates in China and the cultural politics of ‘contact zones,’” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31 (2), 2005: 269–285).
Third, this volume pays attention to a close association between social structures and migration flows. In chapter 13, by exploring the unique temporal and spatial agglomerations of a Korean business community in Japan, a sharp contrast is found regarding labour market participation between legal immigrants, who take the first-shift in clubs and bars, and illegal ones, who have disadvantaged attributes (e.g., precarious visa status) and dominate the second shift. This dual-shift employment model represents illegal migrants’ lack of agency, their reliance on informal institutions as survival strategies to avoid intense control and frequent expulsion. In addition, it indicates the existence of an underground economy consisting of undocumented migrants in destination countries. The notion of “foggy social structure,” in contrast to a “transparent society,” is used to indicate the ambiguities and complexities of social settings that emerge from irregular migration and which allow the migrants to integrate. Irregular migration, in this sense, is seen as “a structural feature of modern society, rooted in the internal structural tension” and “between shared legitimate goals and available means” (Bommes and Sciortino, Foggy social structures: irregular migration, European labor markets and the welfare state, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012, 17). Obviously, they are inbetweeners, living in a world of double societies, consisting of the secret society (i.e., informal institutions) and manifest society (i.e., public worlds).
There are two points this volume could have made more successfully. First, contributors to chapter 15 downplay the importance of married Singaporean women during the migration process and overstate patriarchal oppression against them. Transnational migration with their husbands means they have to end their own careers in Singapore and take the role of non-working spouses while migrating to China. According to the contributors, this undoubtedly reinforces their vulnerability to patriarchy. However, this argument, in essence, makes domestic division of labour more like a contradiction between two genders. In response to migration, whether a couple makes changes with respect to work patterns within the household depends on several factors. A changed division of labour in Singaporean migrants’ families must be a family strategy, which reflects a negotiation between diverse factors and involves these women’s power in decision making, and absolutely not a “reproduction of patriarchy beyond national shores” (224). Moreover, considering that full-time housewife is an occupation pursued at home, though its value cannot be evaluated by standard economic output, women’s contribution to the whole family cannot be ignored. So the contributors’ perspective that migration perpetuates patriarchy because these married Singaporean women are being valorized for domestic skills rather than for economic skills reveals stereotypes and stigmatization about full-time housewives. Meanwhile, it indicates the contributors’ arbitrary judgment: women migrants normally migrate for social and familial rather than economic reasons, and they play a less important role than male counterparts.
The second concerns insufficient exploration of contrast and comparison regarding nationality and ethnicity between different East Asian countries. For instance, having observed that both China and Japan are “homogeneous nation” countries where “minorities are either assimilated, ignored, or given marginal recognition” (6), no further contrast or comparison is done between them. Authors pay attention to the similarities and differences in manifestations of nationality and ethnicity between two countries only, leaving the nature of and reasons for these similarities and differences unknown. However, it is easy to see the uniqueness of the hukou system in China, namely, its discriminatory and oppressed implications and subsequent social exclusion suffered by officially designated minorities (i.e., migrant workers) in terms of a comparison with registration policies in other countries (e.g., Japan). This is why some scholars (Han, “Policing and racialization of rural migrant workers in Chinese cities,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(4), 2010: 593–610) advocate locating racism and emphasize a process of racialization in the context of contemporary urban China.
In sum, despite some limitations, this book should be a welcomed by a broad audience, such as academics and practitioners interested in migration and ethnicity. Given its timely content and tight writing style, the editors should be commended for their enterprising entry into the important field of international migration studies, and for compiling an insightful and engaging book.
Yixuan Wang
Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China
pp. 117-120