社会研究中心系列讲座第56期（线上）

【主题】The Violence of Asylum: The Case of Undocumented Chinese Migration to the US（庇护暴力：中国非法移民美国案）

【主讲人】Amy Hsin（美国纽约城市大学皇后学院社会学系副教授）

【时间】2020年9月23日20:00—21:30

【地点】zoom线上

【工作语言】英文

【主办单位】北京大学社会研究中心北京大学社会科学学部

Research shows that legal status is a critical axis of stratification, but existing scholarship is primarily based on studies of undocumented immigration from Latin America, limiting our understanding of illegality experienced across race/ethnicity and national origin. A sizable and growing part of the undocumented population in the US comes is Chinese. We know little about their migration pathways and the way illegality shapes their lives and their communities. We analyze secondary literature and policies to understand the understudied case of undocumented Chinese migrants in its historical and contemporary contexts. We draw on interviews with undocumented migrants, community organizers, social workers, and others working in the Chinese community in New York City, as well as participant observation of community events, to examine how illegality is constructed and experienced by undocumented Chinese migrants. We highlight the unique aspects of the Chinese migration process, including the extraordinary burden of debt, the seemingly more accommodating yet violent asylum regime, and family and community adaptations of survival. The particularities of the Chinese case reveal the ways in which the intersecting asylum and immigration systems enact violence even on those migrants that purportedly benefit from them. Like other groups, Chinese migrants are subjected to a body of laws that criminalize those who do not fall into narrow eligibility requirements, leaving them vulnerable to deportation, prolonged periods of precarity and uncertainty, and exploitation. They experience years-long family separations and stratification of the co-ethnic community into those who have hope of asylum and those excluded from it.