The Emotional Economy of Migration Driving Mainland Chinese Transnational Sojourning across Migration Regimes

Abstract

In focusing on the way emotional ideologies underpin migration regimes, this paper underlines how migrants manage their emotions in a quest towards wider economic and social integration. It compares the experiences of Mainland Chinese immigrants who are in Canada with those that returned to China temporarily but plan to remigrate to Canada eventually, thus sustaining transnational journeys. The paper suggests that the intersection of emotional and migration regimes imposes norms and sanctions that direct migrants towards what are considered appropriate emotions and emotional subjectivities. The economic logics shaping the circulation of emotions within and across geographical space during transnational sojourning is referred to here as the emotional economy of migration. The paper argues that certain emotions appreciate or depreciate in value as they are mobilised geographically during such transnational sojourning. The analysis contributes to migration scholarship by drawing out the emotional logics, circulations, and calculations that structure and prop up the political economy of migration regimes.

Emotions on the move: Mapping the emergent field of emotion and migration

“…Svasek, 2012;Ho, 2014). There exists something of a gap in mutual knowledge and recognition between the fields of migration studies and emotion studies.…”

“…For example, Ho's (2009;2014) work on emotional citizenship and Wood and Waite (2011) on scales of belonging. Even among long-settled immigrants and their descendants, significant homeland-related emotions are spontaneously reproduced, and (to varying degrees) manipulated by home countries, through rituals, symbols and reminiscences of their past life experience, which conflate a cognitive dimension and a deeply emotional one (Svasek and Skrbis, 2007).…”

Emotional citizenry: everyday geographies of befriending, belonging and intercultural encounter

“…Indeed, literature around migration and diaspora is concerned with the role of emotions in how immigrants' senses of belonging or alienation play a crucial role in developing social relations in any new place (Ho ; Karner and Parker ), and the ways in which emotions circulate and accumulate to inform individual and collective social relations in affective economies (Ahmed ). Research on the significance of emotion in wider migration processes examines emotional logics and regimes vis‐à‐vis decisions and experiences around movement, return and multiple migrating, highlighting ‘the emotional economy of migration’ (Ho ). Literature on forced migration considers refugees and asylum seekers' access to material resources, such as food, housing, medical services, as well as social support and inclusion, such that refugees and asylum seekers can feel they belong (Conlon and Gill ; Waite ).…”

Mobilising affinity ties: Kachin internal displacement and the geographies of humanitarianism at the China–Myanmar border

“…Second, emotions circulate within and across geographical spaces through both human mobility (Ho ) and the emotional labour of intermediaries, such as activists, international volunteers or development workers (Bosco ; Pedwell ; Baillie Smith et al . ; Griffiths ).…”