Holland Winner: Erin Aeran Chung
Can you tell us about some of the intellectual and personal reasons you became interested in the subject?
As I was writing my first book, Immigration and Citizenship in Japan (Cambridge, 2010), I found that much of the scholarship on immigrant incorporation focused on a two-way relationship between the state and immigrants. State-centered approaches tend to concentrate on entitlements granted by the state and the symbolic role of immigrants. Studies of immigrant political incorporation in countries with birthright citizenship policies often limit their analyses to naturalization rates with the assumption that naturalization is the primary indicator of political incorporation. My research on immigration politics in Japan, however, demonstrated that intermediary organizations and civil society groups play central roles in shaping paths for immigrant political empowerment on the ground. In particular, I argue that multi-generational Korean resident activists have used foreign citizenship status to gain political and social visibility in postwar Japan, thereby challenging the conventional understanding that citizenship acquisition is always politically empowering. My second book project places immigrant agency at the center of its analysis and takes a multidimensional view of noncitizen political engagement well beyond naturalization. Rather than attempt to measure political incorporation with conventional indicators, this project seeks to offer insights into why foreign residents make the political choices they do as they become permanent members of their receiving societies. This article thus serves as a bridge to my second book project, which examines how “ethnic” citizenship regimes shape collective identity formation, solidarity networks, and strategies for political empowerment among immigrants and their descendants. By comparing countries with similar citizenship policies, I hope to shed insights into the gaps between policy intent, interpretation, and outcomes.
What is the central argument of your article in a nutshell?
While Korea and Japan’s citizenship and immigration policies suggest convergence toward an exclusionary model, cross-national and intra-national variations in immigrant incorporation policies and practices highlight divergent patterns. Rather than products of deliberate decision-making by either state to manage the permanent settlement of immigrants, these divergent patterns reflect grassroots movements that drew on existing strategies previously applied to incorporate historically marginalized groups in each society prior to the establishment of official incorporation programs. Migrant workers in Korea made significant inroads in gaining rights largely because of the strong tradition of labor and civil society activism in Korea’s democratization movement. In Japan, grassroots movements led by generations of Korean residents from the 1960s set the foundation for decentralized, community-based strategies for incorporating new immigrants from the late 1980s. In both countries, therefore, the processes of immigrant incorporation—in the forms of advocacy, support, and political mobilization as well as the establishment of services, institutions, and local programs for foreign residents—preceded either state’s acknowledgement of immigrants that needed to be incorporated within their borders.
How did you gather the empirical data for your article? Were there any unexpected challenges or developments during the process of research?
The empirical data is based on field research that I conducted in Japan and Korea from August 2009 to July 2010 as an Abe Fellow. In addition to Japanese and Korean government publications, I relied on a combination of focus groups, questionnaires, and in-depth interviews with immigrants, pro-immigrant activists, and government officials in the greater Tokyo and Seoul metropolitan areas. The focus groups were, by far, the most challenging component of my research. Because I conducted focus groups with the major foreign resident groups in both countries—Chinese, South Korean, Zainichi Korean, Brazilian, Peruvian, Filipino, Bangladeshi, and Ethiopian residents in Japan and Vietnamese, Chinese Han, Chinese Chosŏnjok, Taiwanese Hwagyo, Filipino, Mongolian, and Burmese residents in Korea—I had to assemble and train a team of research assistants in each country who were fluent in the native languages of the target foreign resident groups in the study. Although I anticipated that the recruitment process for the focus groups would be difficult, the matter of compensating focus group participants for their time proved to be unexpectedly delicate in Japan. Focus group recruitment and compensation were much easier in Korea. What took weeks of preparation and negotiations in Japan could be arranged in a matter of days in Korea. But I quickly realized that I had to be prepared for the unexpected in Korea. Whereas some of my interviewees in Korea planned out an entire day’s itinerary for my visit (without my prior knowledge), others were haphazard and required multiple follow-ups.
What are the larger implications of your argument and research for citizenship and migration (and/or other subjects) for countries in Asia and the Pacific?
Further research is needed not only on explaining differences between national immigration and citizenship policies but also on the intervening variables between state policies and immigrant political behavior. Especially in Asian countries that link nationality with ethnocultural identity, we should not assume that foreign residents want to be incorporated into the existing political system and that structural or individual-level barriers stand in their way. By doing so, we overlook the possibility that noncitizens may seek to change the existing political system or may be working toward goals that transcend the existing political system. I propose that we shift our lens of analysis from the dominant paradigm that treats immigrants as either victims of restrictive policies and discrimination or recipients of institutionalized rights and advocacy to one that views immigrants and their descendants as political actors in their own right.
