The "Unwelcome“? Migration Governance, Belonging and Resilience In Southeast and East Asia

The "Unwelcome“? Migration Governance, Belonging and Resilience in Southeast and East Asia

(Invited Session) Migration reshapes the social fabric in Southasian and East Asian societies in profound ways, disrupting established networks, identities, and senses of place while simultaneously compelling migrants to construct new forms of connection and acceptance in their social environments. Belonging is the sense of being accepted and welcomed in the new countries. Yet belonging is not experienced uniformly: gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, and migration status to produce highly differentiated trajectories for migrants, who often have to show strong resilience in hostile contexts and unwelcoming institutions. An intersectional analysis must therefore attend to how these axes of difference shape who feels welcomed across diverse migration contexts. Policy responses across receiving countries frequently neglect the connection between migrant belonging and institutional welcoming. As such, migrants' experiences are further shaped by repeated encounters with everyday bordering practices enacted through institutions such as the police, immigration offices, workplaces, and domestic households. Cumulatively, these encounters produce a pervasive sense of being unwelcome, a phenomenon this panel theorizes as unwelcoming: the structural and interactional processes through which migrants are rendered marginal and experience stigma. Unwelcoming operates differently across gender: from single migrant men navigating public discourse in Southeast Asia, to migrant domestic workers confronting legal exclusion and inclusiveness rhetoric in Hong Kong, to Indonesian migrant mothers forging digital infrastructures of reproductive belonging in Taiwan. The papers in this panel collectively examine how migrants construct resilience and belonging intersectionally.