Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment : Economic Migration Between Vietnam and Malaysia

Vietnam annually sends a half million laborers to work at low-skill jobs abroad. Angie Ngọc Trần concentrates on ethnicity, class, and gender to examine how migrant workers belonging to the Kinh, Hoa, Hrê, Khmer, and Chãm ethnic groups challenge a transnational process that coerces and exploits them. Focusing on migrant laborers working in Malaysia, Trần looks at how they carve out a third space that allows them a socially accepted means of resistance to survive and even thrive at times. She also shows how the Vietnamese state uses Malaysia as a place to send poor workers, especially from ethnic minorities; how it manipulates its rural poor into accepting work in Malaysia; and the ways in which both countries benefit from the arrangement. A rare study of labor migration in the Global South, Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment answers essential questions about why nations export and import migrant workers and how the workers protect themselves not only within the system, but by circumventing it altogether. |Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1. Contexts Matter: Historical, Economic, Cultural, Religious Practices of the Five Ethnic Groups Chapter 2. Transnational Labor Brokerage System and Its Infrastructure Chapter 3. Labor Recruitment Process and Indebtedness Chapter 4. Precarity and Coping Mechanisms Chapter 5. Physical Third Space Empowerment Chapter 6. Metaphorical Third Space Empowerment Chapter 7. Aspirations After Malaysia Conclusion Appendix 1. Descriptions of the Samples Appendix 2. Land Issues for the Five Ethnic Groups in This Study Appendix 3. Chronology of the Transnational Labor Brokerage State System, 1980s–2019 Appendix 4. Legal Documentation of Labor Export Policies Appendix 5. List of Organizations Notes Bibliography Index|"Focusing on Vietnam's labor export policy to Malaysia, Angie Trần shows us why gender and ethnic hierarchies matter in remaking the politics of control and dissent. Essential reading for all those interested in South-South labor brokerage and temporary migration." —Brenda S. A. Yeoh, coeditor of Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations "This book features workers describing their conditions as laborers in foreign countries. Often shining through is how workers turned adversities into triumphs, usually modest but still invigorating. Also significant is that the workers are from five ethnic groups within Vietnamese society." —Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, author of Speaking Out in Vietnam: Public Political Criticism in a Communist Party–Ruled Nation | Angie Ngọc Trần is a professor of political economy at California State University, Monterey Bay. She is the author of Ties That Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam's Labor Resistance . "This book focuses on guest workers in Malaysia from five of Vietnam's fity-four ethnic groups: the Kinh (Vietnam's ethnic majority), the Hoa (ethnic Chinese), the Khmer, the Chăm Muslims, and the Hrê. The groups engage in different migration patterns, forms of resistance, and forms of empowerment. The transnational labor brokerage state (LBS) system affects female and male migrants differently, from the dehumanizing recruitment phase, to the precarity of working in Malaysia and the open protest to abuses, to forms of empowerment, including remittances, debt defaults, and stepwise international migration, through which workers migrate to different countries in a stepwise fashion to improve their condition. These guest workers draw on their economic and cultural resources to survive, thrive in the LBS system, or bypass it altogether. They engage in different "third spaces" of dissent. Physical third spaces are not defined in terms of the legal and illegal categories of the law but by the tacit acceptance of the community in which the migrants live and work. Metaphorical third spaces are discourses of dissent, uttered by nonstate competing authorities in order to challenge the state's authority through ironic and subversive mimicries. The findings are based on eight years of research and fieldwork interviews in Vietnam and Malaysia (2008-15), a significant period of change in labor export policies"-- Provided by publisher