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Nam Center for Korean Studies Colloquium Series | Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies

Erin Chung, Charles D. Miller Associate Professor of East Asian Politics, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
4:30-6:00 PM
Room 1010 | 10th Floor Event Space Weiser Hall Map
This book examines how national policies and immigrant advocacy groups interact to shape collective identity formation, solidarity networks, and strategies for political empowerment among immigrants and their descendants in East Asian democracies, focusing on Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. With immigrant agency at the center of its analysis, this book asks why foreign residents make the political choices they do as they become permanent members of their receiving societies. Based on over 150 in-depth interviews with immigrants, pro-immigrant activists, and government officials and 28 focus groups with the major foreign resident groups in each country conducted in the greater Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei metropolitan areas from 2009 to 2013, this book prioritizes the role played by civil society actors—including migrants themselves—in giving voice to migrant interests, mobilizing migrant actors, and shaping public debate and policy on immigration. Departing from the dominant scholarship on immigrant incorporation that focuses on national cultures or traditions, domestic political elites, and international norms, I argue that civil society actors drew on existing ideas, networks, and strategies previously applied to incorporate historically marginalized groups, or what I call civic legacies, to confront the challenges of immigrant incorporation. Rather than determining the paths available to later generations, civic legacies form the opportunities and constraints that demarcate the rules of the game for migrant claims making, thus framing the direction of immigrant incorporation, the level of penetration in society, and the potential for structural reform. As the first English-language book comparing three countries that represent a single model of immigrant incorporation in East Asia, Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies proposes to shed insights into the gaps between policy intent, interpretation, and outcomes.

Erin Aeran Chung is the Charles D. Miller Associate Professor of East Asian Politics in the Department of Political Science and the Co-Director of the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship (RIC) Program at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She specializes in East Asian political economy, international migration, and comparative racial politics. She has been a Mansfield Foundation U.S.-Japan Network for the Future Program Scholar, an SSRC Abe Fellow at the University of Tokyo and Korea University, an advanced research fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Program on U.S.-Japan Relation, and a Japan Foundation fellow at Saitama University. Her first book, Immigration and Citizenship in Japan, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 and translated into Japanese and published by Akashi Shoten in 2012. Her second book, Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies, is under contract at Cambridge University Press. She was recently awarded a grant from the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) to support the completion of her third book project on Citizenship, Social Capital, and Racial Politics in the Korean Diaspora.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.
Building: Weiser Hall
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Asia, Politics
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Nam Center for Korean Studies, International Institute, Asian Languages and Cultures