No abstract

This article contributes to the anthropological discussion on precariousness and labor precarity, with regard to temporality, potentiality, and subjectivity, by examining how asylum-seeking accounts intersect with, interrupt, and, above all, inform people's everyday labor activities outside the asylum process. Drawing on my ethnographic research among Nepali migrants and asylum seekers in the United States, I document people's adoption of a familiar sociocultural understanding of "the work of making paper" and retrospective logic to describe their subjective entanglement with the asylum documentation process and their impending labor subordination. I argue that it is through asylumseeking work that people participate in and inhabit the precarization process, sustaining and exacerbating, in some cases, their precarious working lives. In this sense, asylum-seeking work involves a subjective transformation of asylum seekers into precarious "claimantworkers," providing the condition of possibility for labor precariousness.

Nepali is one of the national languages of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, with an estimated 17 million speakers. The Nepali language is tied to the historical construction of Nepali diasporic consciousness and migrant-community formations worldwide, including Japan. The mass outmigration of Nepalis began with the democratization process in the 1990s. Nepalis are the largest South Asian community in Japan, and Nepali is one of the major migrant languages of Japan. The vibrant and ethno-linguistically diverse Nepalis contribute to various aspects of Japanese civic life—as long-term residents, newly arrived entrepreneurs, restauranteurs, trainees, student-workers, and caregivers. An emphasis on their status as a homogenous group of ‘temporary workers’ dominates media representations. This affects their social visibility and access to healthcare, education, translation, and interpretation of many first- and second-generation Nepali youth.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC license at the time of publication.