Migrant-led diversification and differential inclusion in arrival cities across Asia and the Pacific

Abstract

The closely related processes of migration and diversification call for greater scrutiny of how contemporary arrival cities incorporate increasingly diverse groups of newcomers through practices and processes of differential inclusion. This special issue highlights arrival cities in the Asia-Pacific region, attending to how they are being transformed by the wide-ranging temporal and spatial dimensions of migrant-driven diversification. Rather than begin with how coexistence in the context of diversification ought to be, the collection of papers included here builds inter-references through contexts that are, ultimately, non-universal. In so doing, this special issue responds to recent calls by social scientists to extend our frames of reference beyond the dominant centres of knowledge production in Europe and North America in understanding the links between migration and urban diversity. The papers included here focus on arrival cities and urban places in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand as an exercise in open-ended imagination, advancing the conversation on urban diversification in the age of global migration. We organise these forms of urban change and migration-driven differentiation along four key themes of temporalities, spatialities, intermediaries and norms that emerged from the collection of papers. Using these four conceptual themes, modes of differential inclusion function as tools of discipline and governance at one level, and are mobilised to subvert and negotiate power relations at another. As refracted through these four axes of analysis, differential inclusion draws our attention to the multiscalar and multi-actor politics of diversification.

Sydney as ‘Sinoburbia’: Patterns of diversification across emerging Chinese ethnoburbs

“…Race and ethnicity are clearly not the only axes of migrant difference that shape both settlement processes and urban space (Ye and Yeoh, 2022). Ethnoburb models are based on two social variables – ethnicity and middle-classness.…”

A longitudinal analysis of arrival infrastructures: The geographic pathways of EU labour migrants in the Netherlands

“…Arrival infrastructures are ‘those parts of the urban fabric within which newcomers become entangled on arrival and where their future local or trans local social mobilities are produced as much as negotiated’ (Meeus et al, 2019, p. 1). This perspective emphasizes that migrant mobilities are mediated by socio‐material constellations that include not just physical structures such as roads and airports, but also EU laws, websites and apps, social networks and recruitment agencies (Lin et al, 2017; Ye & Yeoh, 2022). The arrival infrastructure literature is mostly conceptual or tends to focus on ethnographic case studies (Hanhörster & Wessendorf, 2020; Meeus et al, 2019, 2020; Schrooten & Meeus, 2020).…”

Digital borders in spatial-temporal mobility: Social inclusion and exclusion of Chinese migrant students in Macao

“…In 2022, a special issue titled “Migrant-Led Diversification and Differential Inclusion in Arrival Cities across Asia-Pacific” emerged to discuss migrants’ experiences of differential inclusion/exclusion in urban diversification and in non-western contexts (e.g., Ye & Yeoh, 2022), wherein Bork-Hüffer (2022) explored the influence of digital media on migrants’ friendship-making and entangled inclusion/exclusion. In aligning with this scholarly concern, our study, based on a 2-year ethnographic study of migrant students (i.e., an important immigrant group), further paid attention to the entire process of mobile social media use, territorial/internal mobility of migrants, and their consequent dynamics of social inclusion/exclusion.…”