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| 1 |
ID:
163831
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article contributes to the current scholarship on migration brokerage and infrastructure by revealing the contingent, experimental, and dynamic nature of recruiting work for foreign-employment recruitment agencies (FERAs) in Nepal. By situating Nepal’s migration infrastructure, or foreign employment (baidesik rojgar), within the nation’s social history and long-standing discourse on development (bikas), this paper argues for the importance of tracing the experimental character of an emergent migration infrastructure. In particular, I develop the concept of “aspirational infrastructure,” by which I mean the oft-overlooked experimental practices and practicalities that shape and direct the aspirations of those involved in foreign-employment recruitment work. The ethnography traces the intense encounter, intermediation, and interaction among the actors engaged in brokerage activities at FERA social spaces, where recruiters shape not only the social imaginaries and aspirations of potential migrants, but also their own. The recruitment work and migration brokerage rely on balancing the renewed vision and familiar discourse surrounding the “promise of livelihood,” and the reconfiguration of existing institutional norms, ultimately serving the state’s reprioritization of maintaining its “developing” status.
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| 2 |
ID:
149172
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The Chinese government has long enjoyed a higher level of popular trust in its central authority than in its local governments, which means that the Chinese public’s trust in government is hierarchical. While existing research has highlighted hierarchical trust’s role in issue_images_89_4_su-et-al_govt-trust-in-china-ea-image01bolstering the Chinese regime’s rule, the formation mechanism for such trust has not been adequately explored empirically. In this paper, we use data from the China General Social Survey (2010) to explore the formation mechanism of hierarchical government trust and find that economic development, adherence to traditional values, and high frequency of Internet usage all contribute to the decrease of hierarchical government trust. These findings challenge conventional views that cultural traditions and Internet use help sustain hierarchical government trust and show that propaganda is the only variable that sustains the pattern of hierarchical government trust. We further challenge existing literature that views hierarchical government trust as a natural outcome of China’s hierarchical administrative structure and empirically prove that such trust is in fact intentionally constructed by the central government through propaganda campaigns and an institutional design aimed at strengthening the central government’s authority and at guiding people to divert dissent to local governments. Our findings make an important contribution to the dialogue and highlight a new area of authoritarian durability.
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| 3 |
ID:
163834
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Through an analysis of the field of hotel and restaurant management, a program popular among Filipino youth hoping to find work overseas, this paper argues that an integral, yet invisible, aspect of educating future migrant workers is “cooling out” working-class students for a hospitality industry that runs on low-wage, contractual labour. This practice of cooling out involves reorienting students’ ambitions towards blue-collar jobs that do not require college degrees, encouraging them to start from the bottom in pursuing their migration dreams. Based on qualitative interviews with 36 college educators and 25 students, this paper discusses how the cooling-out function serves as a form of migration brokerage, funnelling aspiring migrants into lower segments of the global labour market even before they leave their countries of origin. Yet, students do not question such practices, constructing a notion of working-class values that allows them to take pride in performing work that others might consider undesirable. This paper emphasizes the need for migration scholars to look beyond schooling as a stepping stone towards social mobility and unpack the role of higher education as part of a migration infrastructure that conditions aspiring migrants’ mobility.
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| 4 |
ID:
163829
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| Summary/Abstract |
This special issue develops brokerage as a historically specific category of practice to investigate its intricate link in shaping and sustaining Asian migration infrastructures. To understand this specific interconnection, the authors focus their analytical lenses on the emergence and functioning of migration infrastructures in the particular socio-cultural contexts of Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea. Reflecting the “Asian infrastructural turn,” the collection examines diverse infrastructural forms, processes, and potentials embedded in, and in turn productive of, a range of brokerage activities, objects, institutions, and actors. Inspired by the ongoing methodological attention to the “migrant-broker” category, our ethnographic cases illuminate in various ways the specific social histories and political processes on which understandings of brokerage are based, and account for the different ways brokerage practices materialize across Asia. Of particular interest is the contingent social worlds of brokerage as they unfold in the everyday—through indeterminacy, unstable relational dynamics, institutional limits, and experimental possibilities—(re)organizing existing socio-cultural orders as well as convening infrastructural potentials.
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| 5 |
ID:
163835
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| Summary/Abstract |
Developments in the field of social robotics have increasingly played with the boundaries between human and machine, using remote or tele-presence technological innovations as a way to mediate or revolutionize human-machine interactions. This paper explores one such development, namely the roboticization of care labour in the realm of education, and the ways in which it brokers relationships between human and non-human interaction. Drawing on fieldwork in the Philippines and South Korea and using the telepresence robotic innovation of Engkey as a case study, this paper describes practices that represent the convergence of technology, politics, and intimacies that shape the complexities of contemporary forms of labour migration, articulations of gendered and racialized “skill,” and changing relationships between human and non-human. The paper argues that these relationships are intentionally produced mediations of care: gendered and racialized hierarchies that produce new forms of affective labour and sociality that are governed by modes of simultaneous disembodiment and embodiment, immobility and mobility, and marketized statecraft through vocabularies of innovation and exploitation. These technologically produced mediations of care have implications for how we understand the connections between human and machine and how labour and sociality are ultimately brokered in the context of a neoliberal and capitalist world order.
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| 6 |
ID:
149170
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Recent research has found that since 2001 a disproportionate number of Indonesian offenders sentenced to jail for people smuggling, both in Indonesia and Australia, are fishermen from Eastern Indonesia, the poorest part of the country.2 Based on three field trips to the Eastern Indonesian island of Rote, a frequent departure point for asylum seekers to Australia, and semi-structured interviews, this article investigates the socio-economic backgrounds of sentenced offenders from this area to explain their high numbers amongst imprisoned people smugglers. Through the narratives of fishermen who have been involved in the transport of asylum seekers, this article seeks to reconstruct their decision-making and risk-taking strategies in light of their generally precarious lives. Their motivations to become involved in people issue_images_89_4_missbach_rote-island-2smuggling are correlated with two structural problems they face, overfishing and pollution, which have exacerbated their economic situation over the last years. Understanding the local structural constraints of these impoverished fishermen helps provide a clearer understanding of why and how transnational people-smuggling networks succeed in recruiting them. Rather than viewing the decision to become involved in people smuggling as an individual’s poor judgement and its negative outcome as self-inflicted misery, this article stresses the notion of collective hyper-precariousness, which is enhanced by extrinsic factors such as Australian policies that have further limited the meagre choices for making a living legally on Rote
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| 7 |
ID:
163836
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores the trend of “infrastructuralization” in state-sponsored programs of low- and semi-skilled labour migration from Asia. These programs increasingly focus on facilitating migration rather than generating actual opportunities for mobility and substantive development. While providing training to develop skills targeting specific jobs in specific countries, the programs generally leave complaints about actual working conditions and wages to be managed by the migrants themselves. In this process, labour migration programs are infrastructuralized, meaning that there is an ongoing expansion and intensification of the socio-technical platform that makes mobility possible, as facilitation becomes an end in itself. This trend is tied to changes in the general development paradigm, labour and state-citizen relations across Asia, as well as the increasing importance of brokers in facilitating connection. This article first probes a number of internal dynamics around which infrastructuralization unfolds in practice. We then highlight how commercial intermediaries and public institutions, the two key actors in infrastructuralization, shape migration by producing context-specific migrant subjectivities, making aspirational work a central element of infrastructuralization. In the conclusion, we explore research agendas that can be developed further.
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| 8 |
ID:
163832
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| Summary/Abstract |
Labour protection has become a dominant agenda in global migration governance, particularly for sending countries whose diasporic citizens are denied political rights in host states. Despite having limited authority to arbitrate extraterritorial disputes, sending countries like Indonesia have deployed novel techniques of statecraft to improve migrant protection. Through the prism of the professional competence exam and pre-departure orientation seminar, this article investigates the Indonesian state’s regulatory practices that focus on migrant conduct. Although outbound domestic workers are subject to a prolonged process of skill formation, other Indonesian contract workers pursue emigration upon acquiring basic legal knowledge without undergoing accreditation. While both programs are designed to inculcate migrant capabilities for self-protection, the state’s professionalization of domestic workers constitutes a liberal strategy of exclusion that is predicated on their master status as “vulnerable victims” in public discourse. To understand Indonesia’s increasingly mediated migration infrastructure, then, requires attention to the liberal rationality of protection that involves the transformation of migrants into self-regulating subjects.
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