Seeking Asylum, Finding God: Korean Chinese Migration to the US

Jaeeun Kim will examine the migration careers, settlement patterns, and legalization strategies of ethnic Korean migrants from northeast China to the United States.

In this working paper, Jaeeun Kim examines the migration careers, settlement patterns, and legalization strategies of ethnic Korean migrants from northeast China (Korean Chinese henceforward) to the United States. As colonial-era migrants from the Korean peninsula, Korean Chinese remained concentrated in their ethnic enclaves in northeast China throughout the Cold War era. Yet since the late 1980s, labor migration to other cities inside and outside China have become a major strategy with which Korean Chinese have weathered China’s drastic economic transformation. This presentation addresses the following questions. (1) What role do various participants in the “migration industry” play in the organization of long-distance, unauthorized international migration?; (2) How does the complex interplay between immigration regimes, legal professionals, and migrants themselves contribute to the making of “refugees” from above and below?; (3) How do religious institutions, which have developed distinctive understandings of the nation and the community of faith, get involved in, respond to, and shape migrants’ legalization strategies?; (4) How do relevant actors selectively and variably present and contest the ethnic, national, and religious identities of these migrants, and how do the meaning and resonance of “homeland” change through these processes?

Jaeeun Kim is a postdoctoral fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University for the 2012-13 academic year. Before coming to Stanford, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University for the 2011-12 academic year. She specializes in political sociology, ethnicity and nationalism, and international migration in East Asia and beyond, and is trained in comparative-historical and ethnographic methods. Kim’s publications include articles in Theory and Society, Law and Social Inquiry, and European Journal of Sociology. Kim holds a BA in law (2001) and an MA in sociology (2003) from Seoul National University, and an MA (2006) and PhD (2011) in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She will be an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University, beginning in fall 2013.