Becoming a Migrant: Workers and Brides from Vietnam to East Asia

Southeast Asia Speaker Series

Danièle Bélanger
Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario

Becoming a Migrant: Workers and Brides from Vietnam to East Asia

Friday, September 18, 2009
2:00 pm – 4:00 p.m.
Munk Centre for International Studies
North House – Room 108N
1 Devonshire Place

Please register online at http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?EventId=6818

Since the early to mid 1990s, several million peasants from Southeast Asia have migrated to East Asia by becoming ‘migrant workers’ or ‘foreign brides’. Based on five years of on-going fieldwork in migrants’ communities of origin in rural Vietnam and visits to Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, this presentation will argue that the categorization of migrants as either ‘workers’ or ‘wives’ in research obscures the complex trajectories and motives involved in the process of ‘becoming a migrant’. This presentation thus puts migrants’ perspectives and experiences center stage and sheds light on the significance of various factors that lead migrants to exit Vietnam and enter a destination country with a certain status or type of visa. Migrants’ narratives powerfully show how migration policies, the recruitment and selection process, networks, and the cost of migration together create both opportunities and constraints that give more options to some and fewer to others. The stories of these global peasants illustrate the tension between migrants’ agency and the structural constraints in international migration flows within Asia.

Professor Danièle Bélanger is the Canada Research Chair in Population, Gender and development and Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. Her work examines social processes related to demographic change, such as increasing female singlehood, declining fertility, the growing female deficit, and increasing international migration flows, within the Asian context. Her current major project, funded by SSHRC and IDRC, focuses on migration from Southeast Asia to East Asia and examines the impact on sending and receiving communities. She is the co-editor of the recently published volume Reconfiguring Families in Contemporary Vietnam (Stanford University Press, 2009).