Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies is a major contribution to the cross-national study of immigration, ethnicity, and race. Broad in scope and methods, this book offers a comparative analysis that should be read by scholars of immigration, citizenship, and multiethnic societies. The book makes three major theoretical and methodological contributions. First, Chung identifies patterns in East Asian countries—Korea, Japan, and Taiwan—that defy a crisp generalization of immigrant incorporation rooted in a distinction between ethnic identity-based citizenship and liberal democratic citizenship. Instead, she explains that differential incorporation has come about through civic legacies that have shaped advocacy and ultimately the policy outcomes for immigrants. Second, in addition to examining politics and policies, she assesses incorporation from the standpoint of immigrants themselves, drawing on focus groups conducted in all three countries. Third, her analysis of national policy changes over time highlights that nationality and residence-status differences, more than ethnicity, inform an approach to incorporation in these countries that favors some groups and excludes others (particularly manual workers), producing country-specific constructions of multiculturalism.
Chung challenges an ideal-typical model of exclusionary incorporation for East Asia that expects countries in the region provide “descent-based citizenship policies, difficult naturalization and permanent residency requirements, limited non-citizen rights, and no representation of foreign residents in the public sphere” (p. 14). In doing this, the author acknowledges the centrality of descent-based citizenship policies and the “symbolic significance” of nationality as tied to “ethnocultural identity” (p. 15). At the same time, Chung demonstrates that while Korea, Japan, and Taiwan appear to fit the exclusionary model, certain groups of foreign residents in these countries hold extensive rights also available to those with formal citizenship. Co-ethnics do not necessarily receive the most generous rights. But across these countries, variations exist. Despite Japan's and Korea's national restrictiveness with respect to immigration and citizenship, both confer generous rights to certain groups of foreign residents. Taiwan leaves inclusion to the private sector.
Chung sets out to account for the differences among these countries. To do this, she develops a concept of “civic legacies” that embodies the “ideas, networks, and strategies” of prior social movements and their interaction with the state in each country (p. 25). Civic legacies in this analysis shape how and how much advocacy for migrants occurs. Tracing the ways that civil society groups have advocated for immigrants, Chung also highlights why some groups of migrants were able to receive enhanced attention and rights, while others were not. In Korea, immigrant incorporation has been closely tied to the democratization movement; in Japan, “ongoing grassroots movements for democratic inclusion” have been critical; but in Taiwan, civic legacies and challenges to the status quo have failed to promote much migrant advocacy (p. 31). Making this argument involves a qualitative assessment of the historical evolution of politics, advocacy, and institutions; it goes well beyond simple measures of the extent of civil society organizations or the timing of democratization.
But the book is not limited to either historical or contemporary study of politics and policies. Chung has pursued the perceptions of a range of migrants and immigrants in all three countries through focus groups to elicit reflections on nationality and identity, the lack of an option for dual citizenship, difficult procedures, and hierarchies among migrant groups, including co-ethnics. These reflections provide a subjective view of stratification among migrants and their treatment in each country, revealing the perceived impacts of policies and movement activists. The focus groups included groups of persons organized by national origin, a feat that required major coordination, multilingual expertise, and intensive labor. All conducted in the largest major metropolitan area in each country, the groups included migrants of seven national origins in Japan; six in Korea, and four in Taiwan. Transcripts of 16 of the focus groups (from Japan and Korea) and their English-language transcriptions have been archived at the Johns Hopkins University Data Services and made available for other researchers.
Chung also makes an important contribution in her discussion of the concept of “multiculturalism” as developed in these countries, which continue to use the term. In her treatment of recent national policy changes resulting from advocacy for immigrants, Chung considers how “multiculturalism” is understood and applied in each of the three countries—rhetorically; in activists’ emphases; and in the policies themselves. For the three countries, specific groups of migrants and immigrants receive different priority or are excluded, but across the board, temporary labor migrants are at the greatest disadvantage.
Chung maintains that multiculturalism in these countries represents efforts to address the perceived failures of multicultural approaches in established immigration countries, including their emphasis on cultural pluralism for “permanent members of society.” Instead, consistent with differences in politics and policies of immigrant incorporation across the three East Asian countries, Chung identifies selective and nuanced understandings of multiculturalism. Overall, she maintains, “East Asian cases represent variations of models that couple multicultural rhetoric with assimilationist policies as well as cultural monism and cultural pluralism” (p. 164).
Some readers may find this juxtaposition of inclusionary and exclusionary approaches difficult to accept in a notion of multiculturalism, but for Chung, this is precisely the point. Although the book's portrayal of a coexistence of inclusionary and exclusionary approaches challenges a binary approach to citizenship, it captures the realities, for which Chung accounts with a sound theoretical and empirical argument. It also has implications for considering how other newer countries of immigration grappling with choices about temporary and permanent migration may similarly apply limited notions of cultural pluralism and inclusion. It should be stressed, however, that Chung's agenda here is to engage scholarly literature on comparative immigration, including that outside of the Asian region, by elucidating the pivotal role of civic legacies in promoting incorporation. There is no reason to conclude that she is proposing an “East Asian model” for countries to use as justification for major limits on inclusion and rights for migrants.
This is an ambitious book that synthesizes across literatures on immigration, citizenship, and social movements to make an important contribution with original scholarship. Rather than accept a regional demarcation of East Asian countries as inherently different because of history, culture, or ethnic identity, Chung demonstrates that ignoring the experiences of East Asia would be a loss to scholars of other regions for grasping the subtleties of comparative immigrant incorporation.
