“Civic Legacies and Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies”
Event Description
How do we explain divergent patterns of immigrant incorporation in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan given the similarities between each country’s immigration and citizenship policies, their overlapping immigrant populations largely from neighboring Asian countries, and their common dilemmas of accommodating social diversity while adhering to liberal democratic principles? 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, 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 culture, 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.
Speaker
Erin Aeran Chung
Associate Professor of East Asian Politics
Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
Moderator
Celeste Arrington
Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
George Washington University
Date & Time
Friday, February 28th, 2020
12:30 PM-1:45 PM
Location
Room 505
Elliott School of International Affairs
The George Washington University
1957 E Street, NW, Washington, DC 20052
Note: This event is open to the public and on the record.
Speakers
Erin Aeran Chung
Erin Aeran Chung is the Charles D. Miller Associate Professor of East Asian Politics in the Department of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She previously served as the director of the East Asian Studies Program and the co-director of the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship (RIC) Program. 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 Relations, and a Japan Foundation fellow at Saitama University. She also served on the Executive Committee of the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association and is currently co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements Social Science Series on the Politics and Society of East Asia. Her first book, Immigration and Citizenship in Japan, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 (with a paperback edition in 2014) and translated into Japanese and published by Akashi Shoten in 2012. Her second book, Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She was recently awarded a five-year 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.
Professor Celeste Arrington
Professor Arrington specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. Her research interests include law and social change, governance, civil society, social movements, policy-making processes, the media and politics, and qualitative methods. She is also interested in the international relations and security of Northeast Asia and transnational activism.
Professor Arrington earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. from Princeton University. She was an advanced research fellow in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University in 2010-2011. During the 2011-2012 year, she was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is also a member of the Mike and Maureen Mansfield Foundation’s U.S.-Japan Network for the Future and its U.S.-Korea Scholar-Policymaker Nexus. In 2017-2018, she was a fellow at the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University.
