Abstract
Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment by Angie Ngọc Trần offers an in-depth analysis of the migration of five ethnic groups (Kinh, Hoa, Hrê, Khmer, and Cham Muslims) in Vietnam, focussing on their migration patterns to Malaysia, spaces of resistance, empowerment and return. The book shows that these ethnic groups respond differently to risks, precarity, and opportunities depending on their economic and cultural capital. The central argument of the book is that inequalities resulting from ethnic hierarchies in Vietnam are perpetuated in the state-sponsored migration system—known as the labor brokerage state (LBS) system—and thus impact Vietnamese migrants from predeparture to return migration.
Drawing upon rich fieldwork, Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment effectively joins key scholarly and policy questions on “migration in the global South”; particularly on why migration policies fail migrants, how migration policies perpetuate inequalities created by ethnic hierarchies, and how migrants from different ethnic groups overcome the inequalities and empower themselves based on their unique economic and cultural capital. By analyzing “South-South migration” from bottom-up and top-down perspectives, the book addresses the Eurocentrism of migration studies and may act as a way of “recentering the South” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020, 1). More specifically, the book contributes to the study of migration within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), with important conceptual, empirical, and policy implications.
First, the book examines the role of the LBS and its impact on migrant protection. Vietnam is a typical LBS, which initiated and encouraged a labor export policy among its rural citizens to reduce poverty and generate remittances. At all administrative levels, the LBS focuses its efforts on collaborating with private, state-owned and quasistate companies to recruit potential workers and provide them with state-sponsored loans. The Vietnam-Malaysia recruitment industry has been crucial to create jobs for state administrators, employment agencies and bank officials in Vietnam without much gain for the migrants themselves. Malaysian industries, employment companies, and airlines also benefited from transnational migration. However, the LBS system left migrants recuperating only a tiny fraction of their earnings. Trần's book thus highlights that the LBS bureaucracy is insufficient in protecting the workers from exploitation in Malaysia. The low-interest-rate loans, offered by the state, actually perpetuate the poverty of migrant workers, trapping them in a cycle of indebtedness (Chapters 2 and 3). This rejoins insights from other studies that debt bondage is essential for understanding contract labor migration in Asia (Hoang 2020, 40).
Second, the book explores the relationship between ethnicity and transnational migration. Trần shows that different ethnic groups have different access to economic resources (land, finance, education) and social capital (networks, language, religion), which in turn impacts migrants’ circumstances, survival strategies, and success in the LBS system. The wealthy Hoa and the Kinh, for instance, could easily tap into their economic resources to go to work in Malaysia, while the other three ethnic groups rely on their cultural resources to thrive in Malaysia. The book also highlights that language is the most important social capital in the destination country; the ability to speak Chinese and Malay (rather than English) with their employers provided them with better negotiation terms for contract renewal (Chapter 1). Ethnic hierarchies also determined how the five ethnic groups moved up the social ladder upon returning to Vietnam. With their economic capital, the Kinh and the Hoa were more likely to engage in so-called stepwise migration; using Malaysia as a transit point to gain the necessary experience and skills before moving to a more developed country, such as Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan. In contrast, Cham and Khmer returnees were more likely to engage in regional migration to other Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia and Thailand, or to migrate internally to work in the industrial zones of nearby cities. Thus, migration patterns among Vietnamese returnees differ across ethnic groups, with some engaging in domestic, regional and stepwise transnational migration, depending on their accumulated capital (Chapter 7).
Third, the book offers fascinating insights into the dynamics of migrant empowerment, i.e. how Vietnamese migrant workers developed strategies to challenge, bypass and survive the state-sponsored transnational LBS, which has not successfully protected its overseas migrant workers. In particular, Trần argues that creating a third space of dissent is vital for migrants’ survival. Applying Homi Bhabha's concept of the third space (see Bhabha 1994), Trần defines the third space of dissent as strategies, collective actions, and forms of safe protest in response to labor exploitations confronted (2022, 123 and 150). Trần illustrates how migrants created both physical third space of dissent, i.e. forms of protest which occur in gray areas between the legal and illegal categories, as well as metaphorical third space of dissent, i.e. resistance in the forms of mimicry, negotiations, utterances, and encounters. The concept allows the author to analyze how migrant empowerment takes place when the state fails to protect its welfare. Trần also demonstrates that Vietnamese migrants utilize different forms of physical third space of dissent depending on their ethnic group: For instance, the Kinh and the Hoa take naps in the restrooms and hide the “above-quota finished products” for the following day, while the Hrê work for other employers outside the contract and the Cham work on tourist visas. Also, Vietnamese workers in Malaysia run away from their employers and turn into undocumented migrants as a way to protest the employer-sponsored working permit (Chapter 5). Meanwhile, parents, village heads, and religious leaders have engaged in the metaphorical third space of dissent by protesting the state's labor export policy, refusing to settle the loans incurred, and demanding loan forgiveness policies (Chapter 6).
In addition to this rich ethnographic study of Vietnamese migrant workers in Malaysia, a significant contribution of the book is its discussion of policy implications. In particular, the author makes a series of policy recommendations, including the proper protection for overseas Vietnamese guest workers with the collaboration of unions in receiving countries, the provision of pre-departure language orientation programs in the Chinese and Malay languages or the improvement of job opportunities for returnees. Furthermore, the author advocates that ethnicity and gender should be incorporated into the state's labor export policy, considering that different ethnic groups have different economic and cultural capital and that the protection of female migrant workers is still lacking. In this sense, the book calls for sustainable migrant empowerment that goes beyond the definition of temporary empowerment provided through the third space of dissent. Indeed, permanent empowerment of migrants can only be achieved by improving the conditions of the LBS system and leveling the imbalanced power relations between workers and employers. The 2020 revision of the law on contract-based Vietnamese overseas workers, which prohibits brokerage fees, could be one step in the right direction to reduce the perpetuated inequality in the migration system.