Abstract
This chapter reviews some of the lessons that emerge from previous work on the comparative consideration of migration in East Asia. The discussion in the chapter is phrased largely in terms of a framework of theory, policy, and practice. In theoretical terms, for example, the East Asian experience helps illuminate how migrants are often people in perpetual motion, living in-between, and residing at the interstices of global and local networks. Migration is thus about the destinies of migrants yet also about the maintenance of routes of migration; conversely, it is about the processes of migration and also about the results of those processes. In policy terms, this suggests that attempts to categorize migrants narrowly (as individual labor migrants, for example) may miss the ways in which different people’s migrations are interrelated and have longer-term and often unpredictable trajectories. One way in which to gain a better grip on this variability is to revise academic practice toward more cultural analysis of the way migration is viewed by different societies and at different times in history. A consideration of classic Chinese sources, for example, helps illuminate the way in which migration is often a moral choice about people’s obligations both to their own destinies and to the fates of their families. Key points in the discussion include: (1) the very broad range in migration experiences by type and duration; (2) the importance but variability in the skills that migrants carry with them; (3) the complex and very long-term interactions between migration and family formation and development; (4) the increased blurring between the conventional migration categories of origin and destination; and (5) the different scales and levels in migration, particularly in the bureaucratic structures that channel, control, and facilitate contemporary migration.
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Notes
- 1.
This discussion draws from the full multi-year set of academic panels, workshops, and conferences that began in Vancouver in the spring of 2006 at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, continued with a panel on international marriage (“Marriage out of Place”) in Hong Kong later that year at the meeting of the Society for East Asian Anthropology (only later did I find that Louisa Schein (2004) had already used virtually that title for her analysis of Hmong/Miao intermarriage), and in three separate events in Japan in 2007: a two-day conference at the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku), an academic panel at the annual meeting of the Japan Society of Cultural Anthropology, and a one-day workshop at the University of Tokyo. In 2008, discussions continued with a two-day workshop at the Institute of East Asian Studies (at the University of California, Berkeley with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation), a summary academic panel at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, and a series of three academic panels at a conference organized by the Ritsumeikan Center for Asia Pacific Studies in Beppu, Japan. Finally, in 2009, there were four interlinked panels at the International Congress of the Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Kunming, China. For all of these, I am especially indebted to Shinji Yamashita and Keiko Yamanaka, who were there at the beginning of this process in Vancouver, were central to the parts of this project held in Japan, were again together at the workshop in Berkeley, and who are co-editors of the final project volume (Haines et al. 2012).
- 2.
As our previous panels and workshops quickly indicated, there is now much research on various aspects of migration to, from, and within East Asia, with a good amount available in English. The edited volumes by Akaha and Vassilieva (2005), Constable (2005), and Douglass and Roberts (2003) are perhaps especially crucial, supplemented now by a volume from our conference at Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology (Yamashita et al. 2008; Haines et al. 2007), a new volume on diversity in Japan (Graburn et al. 2008), and journal special issues that have taken either one country as focus (e.g., Roberts 2007) or looked more comparatively at Asia (e.g., Shipper 2010). The extensive work on returning Nikkei from South America to Japan also deserves note (Linger 2001; Roth 2002; Takenaka 1997; Tsuda 2003). The discussion in this section of the potential of the East Asia versus North America comparison, with particular emphasis on Japan, appears in more detail in Haines (2008).
- 3.
- 4.
Discussions of labor activism on behalf of migrants in Korea can be found in Chung and Seok (2000), Kim (2003), Kim (2009), Lee (1997, 2003), Lim (2003), Moon (2010), Park (2004, 2006), and Seol and Han (2004). Despite the general comment in the text about similarities, there are of course many differences. Moon (2010) is especially clear on the political requirements of being an NGO in Korea and Kim (2009) on the way NGO activities are justified with rather strategic discourses of nationalism and modernity. Nevertheless, the Korea case seems rather more similar to the U.S. than the Japanese case.
- 5.
“Practice” has gained great currency in anthropology, particularly through the work of Bourdieu (1990). However, its use in public administration is in many ways more germane to this discussion of policy, since it connotes a “being in the world” that is also an official exercise of rationality (see Schon 1983; Haines 2003).
- 6.
Despite the emphasis in the text on differences, there is also much about this topic of migration in East Asia that is rather similar to what we know from North America and Europe. Many of the migrant groups are nominally the same: Vietnamese, Filipinos, Thai, Pakistanis, Brazilians—much less the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans who are again now found with increasing frequency in each other’s countries. Much of the dynamic of migrant life and migrant-host society interaction is also quite comparable. In particular, the situation of low-wage migrant labor is similar, including the range from fully legal (and regulated) workers to over-stayers to undocumented border crossers. The day-to-day realities of such migrant lives in the shadows—whether Chinese in Japan and Korea, or rural Chinese in Chinese cities—would be all too familiar to a North American audience: financial insecurity, weak unionization, limited housing, lack of medical care, poor (if any) education, harsh constraints on family life, and general cultural and social disavowal. Yes there is indeed much that is different between East Asia and North America. The scale of international migration is still, for example, far lower in East Asia. Historically, the degree of cultural diversity is also much lower. One result is that, somewhat paradoxically, the smaller numbers of migrants in East Asia are in many ways more culturally challenging. On the other hand, at least in China, the scale of internal migration is far greater and does (like transnational migration) involve the crossing of many “borders” whether of culture, language, ethnicity, or even legal residential status.
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Haines, D. (2014). “Wind over Water”: Some Anthropological Thoughts on East Asian Migration. In: Zhang, J., Duncan, H. (eds) Migration in China and Asia. International Perspectives on Migration, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8759-8_2
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