Asylum Seeking Journeys In Asia

This book looks in detail at the journeys to asylum in Asia which are largely neglected in the media and academic analyses, despite Asia becoming the most essential region for asylum, receiving refugees from both within and outside of the continent. Treating asylum-seeking journeys as a transnational space, the author investigates the actual asylum-seeking process from homelands to either Hong Kong or Bangkok. Today, refugees undertake multiple, long, and life-threatening journeys before arriving in receiving societies; from the moment of arrival in Hong Kong or Bangkok, they face a wide array of challenges. An ethnographic account of how refugees navigate and negotiate their journeys to asylum, this book highlights the social, political, economic, and psychological processes involved in "becoming" and "being" a refugee. This encompasses not only the physical movement of refugees, but also their embodiments and emotional encounters. The author offers a micro-level analysis of asylum-seeking journeys - from the aspiration to flee, to migration preparation, to border crossing, to homemaking in prolonged displacement. All of these stages reveal how these journeys create ever-evolving realities with new constellations of options and constraints. By focusing on refugees’ understanding, perception of, and interaction with the people, environments, and situations around them, this book illustrates how refugee life plans are shaped and reshaped by the embodied experience of their journeys, and how their ideas of home have changed over time. Asylum-seeking Journeys in Asia will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of migration and refugee studies, diaspora studies, globalisation, and Asian studies. It will also be of interest to policymakers and humanitarian workers involved in providing services and assistance to the global refugee population.

ChorSwang Ngin radically shifts the asylum-seeking narrative by focusing on rarely heard stories of persecution and escape from China and southeast Asia. Identities on Trial in the United States weaves together the cases of a tortured student from a Myanmar prison, an apostate of Islam, several victims of ethnic and sexual violence from Indonesia, and the escape of men and women from China’s draconian one-child policy, among others. Joann Yeh, an immigration attorney and contributor to this work, examines asylum seeking in a Mandarin-speaking Californian community and discuss the failure of the United States' quasi-judicial immigration system, highlighting "asylum lawfare" in courtroom dramas and arguing for an anthropological advantage in asylum preparation. This book is an essential text for policy makers, students, lawyers, activists, and those engaged with migration studies seeking a more just asylum outcome.

This book examines Southeast Asia's rejection of international refugee law through extensive archival analysis and argues that this rejection was shaped by the region's response to its largest refugee crisis in the post-1945 era: the Indochinese refugee crisis from 1975-1996.

This edited volume fills a gap in current research on asylum seekers and refugees. By focusing on two East Asian countries, Japan and Taiwan, this volume offers material for comparison and reflection on an area of the world in which this theme is still relatively underdeveloped. By approaching the theme through the different perspectives of human rights, social construction through media representation and public opinion, and lived experiences, the book offers a multifaceted and sophisticated analysis of the phenomenon. The main aim of this collection is to expand current scholarship on refugee studies and offer policy recommendations on the timely topic of refugee and asylum seekers in East Asia. This is an open access book.

Asians make up the largest and most dispersed people of the world, and Christians make up a sizable proportion of this demographic. Asian Christians are more likely to emigrate, and many have continued to embrace Christian faith at their diasporic places of settlement. They are quick to establish distinctively Asian churches all over the world and infuse diversity, revival, and missionary consciousness into their adopted communities. They preserve the ties and cultures of their ancestral homelands while assimilating and adapting into the new setting. They have become a recognizable force in the transformation and advancement of Christianity itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The dozen essays in this volume are written by leading scholars of Asian backgrounds situated in various diasporic locations. The authors trace the contours of their dispersion and highlight diverse missiological themes, including the scattering (diaspora) and the gathering (ekklesia) of Asian Christians around the world. This volume traces the origins and destinations of major Asian migration and diaspora communities from a variety of perspectives and geographical locations. It is pan-Asian in scope and multidisciplinary in nature. It also provides the latest data and infographics on Asian diasporas worldwide.

Identities on Trial in the United States radically shifts the asylum seeker narrative by focusing on rarely heard stories of persecution and escape from China and Southeast Asia. ChorSwang Ngin, with contributions from immigration attorney, Joann Yeh, explores asylum seeker cases through an anthropological and legal lens.