Governmentality in Asian Migration Regimes: the Case of Labour Migration from Vietnam to Taiwan

Abstract

The phenomenon of 'runaway' migrant contract workers in Asia has attracted considerable media attention. Drawing on a qualitative study in Vietnam and Taiwan, I examine the critical links between the neoliberal governmentality rationalities and technologies, the structural vulnerabilities that they produce, and the migrant worker's 'technologies of the self'. In so doing, I point out that the 'manufacturing' of the 'ideal' migrant subject is a multi-actor and multilayered process that involves not only state and market actors but also the migrants themselves through their internalisation of subordination. I emphasise that illegality is not just a legal status but also a political tool for the state and its proxies to discipline neoliberal subjects and a social image that informs individual practice in the context of transnational labour migration.

‘The Good Live-in Care Worker’: Subject Formation and Ethnicisation in Austrian Live-in Care

“…With regard to the complex and diverse techniques that come into play in the (self-)construction of good live-in workers, studies from different world regions are instructive. They show how social policy, migration, and employment regulations as well as agencies' recruitment and matching strategies shape subject formation processes and that they are concerned with questions of cultural and ethnic closeness or otherness (e.g., Abrantes 2014;Deshingkar 2019;Findlay et al 2013;Hoang 2017;Lan 2018;Liang 2011;Polanco 2017;Rodriguez -Schwenken 2013;Strüver 2013).…”

Outlaws on the Jade Island: Runaway Vietnamese Migrant Workers in Taiwan

“…However, as Putnam (1995) indicates, the benefits of social capital are not always positive; they can also be negative and destructive. Hoang (2016) suggests that social capital and social networks are deeply embedded in the inequalities and vulnerabilities engendered by restrictive migration regimes.…”

Thai Guestworker Export in Decline: The Rise and Fall of the Thailand-Taiwan Migration System

“…As of November 2016, Vietnamese workers constituted about 42.5 percent of all foreign workers in the manufacturing sector (Ministry of Labor 2016). One possible explanation for the rapid ascendance of Vietnamese workers, especially in relation to Indonesians and Filipinos, is that they are willing to pay substantially higher employment agency fees (Hoang 2017). If true, this would be a powerful incentive for recruiters to hire workers from Vietnam over those from other sending states.…”