Since 1995 most mainland migrants to Hong Kong have been the wives or non-adult children of Hong Kong men of lower socio-economic status. The majority of immigrants are women, who throughout the past two decades have accounted for more than 60% of immigration. The profile of immigrants has been changing and they are significantly more educated than was the case in the past. Despite the improvement in the educational level of mainland Chinese migrants since 1991, and their increased involvement in paid employment, migrants have continued to experience great difficulty integrating into Hong Kong society and anti-immigrant sentiment seems to have increased over the same period. This raises the question of how gender and socio-economic factors intersect with migration to influence the extent of migrants’ adaption to Hong Kong society and culture. The growing anti-China sentiment in Hong Kong also raises the question of how the integration of migrants into a destination society is influenced by the political context. Examining the questions around migration into Hong Kong from a range of multidisciplinary perspectives, this book combines quantitative and qualitative data to portray a detailed image of contemporary Hong Kong.

This book is about the migrations for family reunion that have taken place in post-1997 Hong Kong between mothers and children living in mainland China and their long-absent husbands and fathers, residents of Hong Kong.

This book analyzes immigration policies in East Asia in the context of contemporary global migration flows and mobility. To assess how global norms of migration have impacted the East Asian migration region and explore regional migration trends, the book contains 13 case studies which investigate the regulation of immigration in China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Three analytical strands, namely, norm diffusion, identity politics, and citizenship, build the theoretical framework for the case studies which investigate how regional and national norms, discourses, and institutions affect local communities and migration patterns. In particular, the book analyzes contemporary issues such as immigration policy reforms, practices of inclusion and exclusion in local communities, and discourses on multiculturalism and risk. The book utilizes a comparative perspective which enables readers to reflect on the role of national identity, international organizations and law, public security concerns, and labour market demands in the articulation and implementation of contemporary immigration policy in East Asia. This book substantially complements the existing literature on immigration governance and interregional migration mobility in East Asia and will be of interest to academics in the fields of East Asian studies, public policy, immigration and migration studies, and comparative politics.

Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations examines the social and cultural aspects of the political violence that underpinned the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the multi-layered postcolonial realities that ensued. This book explores the reality of the lives of North African migrants in postcolonial France, with a particular focus on their access to political entitlements such as citizenship and rights. This reality is complicated even further by complex practices of memory undertaken by Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who negotiate, in their writings, between the violent memory of the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the contemporary conundrums of postcolonial migration. The book pursues thus the politics of (post)colonial memory by tracing its representations in literary, political, and visual narratives belonging to various Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who see themselves as living and writing between France and the Maghreb. By adopting a postcolonial perspective, a perspective quite marginal in International Relations, the book investigates a different international relations, which emerges via narratives of migration. A postcolonial standpoint is instrumental in understanding the relations between class, gender, and race, which interrogate and reflect more generally on the shared (post)colonial violence between North Africa and France, and on the politics of mediating violence through complex practices of memory.

Besides looking at major outbreaks of diseases and how they were coped with, diseases such as malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis, plague, venereal disease, avian flu and SARS, this book also examines how the successive government regimes in Hong Kong took action to prevent diseases and control potential threats to health. It shows how policies impacted the various Chinese and non-Chinese groups, and how policies were often formulated as a result of negotiations between these different groups. By considering developments over a long historical period, the book contrasts the different approaches in the periods of colonial rule, Japanese occupation, post-war reconstruction, transition to decolonization, and Hong Kong as Special Administrative Region within the People’s Republic of China.

Expatriate Identities in Postcolonial Organizations offers a timely and contemporary discussion of the role of organizations in maintaining or challenging structures and cultures based on racism and discrimination. It offers a key exploration of the relations between whiteness, identity and organization in migratory contexts. It delves into the experiences of expatriates in Hong Kong and the ways in which new identities are constructed in the destinations of migration by exploring the renegotiation of white identities and racialized relationships, and the extent to which colonial imaginations still inform contemporary organizations. By drawing on existing theoretical and empirical material on post-colonialism, identity-making, privileged migration, relocation, transnational work and organizations, this volume brings disparate discussions together in a new and accessible way. It will appeal to a range of sociology scholars as well as to those working in the fields of migration, gender studies, and cultural geography.

Around 5.6 million British nationals live outside the United Kingdom: the equivalent of one in every ten Britons. However, social science research, as well as public interest, has tended to focus more on the numbers of migrants entering the UK, rather than those leaving. This book provides an important counterbalance, drawing on the latest empirical research and theoretical developments to offer a fascinating account of the lives, experiences and identities of British migrants living in a wide range of geographic locations across Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia. This collection asks: What is the shape and significance of contemporary British migration? Who are today’s British migrants and how might we understand their everyday lives? Contributions uncover important questions in the context of global and national debates about the nature of citizenships, the ‘Brexit’ vote, deliberations surrounding mobility and freedom of movement, as well as national, racial and ethnic boundaries. This book challenges conventional wisdoms about migration and enables new understandings about British migrants, their relations to historical privileges, international relations and sense of national identity. It will be valuable core reading to researchers and students across disciplines such as Geography, Sociology, Politics and International Relations.

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Territorial Autonomies affords a comprehensive, pioneering and interdisciplinary survey of this emerging field. Moving beyond traditionally narrower engagements with the subject, it combines approaches to comparative law and comparative politics to provide an authoritative guide to the principal theoretical and empirical topics in the area. Bringing together a team of cutting-edge scholars from different disciplines and continents, the volume illuminates the latest thinking and scholarship on comparative territorial autonomies. This Handbook is an authoritative, essential reference text for students, academics and researchers in its field. It will also be of key interest to those in the fields of comparative politics, comparative law, local/regional government, federalism, decentralisation and nationalism, as well as practitioners in think tanks, NGOs and international governmental organisations.

The chapters in this volume study transnational social relationships and cross-border connections between ‘ordinary’ people that arise from the increasingly large-scale mobilities and migrations between Thailand and ‘the West’. While Thai and Western people’s social relationships are usually studied as personal stories within a cross-border marriage migration perspective, this book considers it necessary to see them as more than marriage migration. Even though a focus on the ‘personal life stories’ of marriage migrants provides valuable insights, it can also mask consideration of the structural context of socially embedded cross- border connections and exchanges, as well as state restrictions, that, first, make people’s decisions to move a possibility in the first place, and second, shape a migrant’s post- migration life- trajectory and experiences, relative to others in their origin and settlement societies. The chapters on Thai women who marry and move with older Western men, Western men and women who move to Thailand to retire or for leisure, and Thai rural families transformed by mobilities and migration, try to draw out their gendered experiences of transnational living. The individual choices that shaped these lives, and the surprising prevalence of lives like these in Thailand and abroad, needs to be understood within context as an outcome of the specific globalisation processes that have shaped Thailand through transnational links to other parts of the world over the last decades. Globalisation and penetration by foreign capital, cultures, and people through mass tourism is key to this explanatory backstory as well as the internal rural/ urban cleavages that drive Thailand’s economic development. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

This volume addresses recent issues concerning language change and standardization in postcolonial settings. The book brings together experts from North America, Africa, Asia and the insular areas of Australia and Trinidad and Tobago, and discusses aspects of language variation in the emergence of new varieties. The approaches range from linguistic diagnostics and related methodologies to the most accredited interpretative theories on the evolution of New Englishes. The book includes a section on emerging varieties of English in new media, and special focus has been given to those new varieties of Philippine and Nigerian English spoken in a non-canonical post-colonial context represented by the city of Turin, Italy. The result is a collection of studies that illuminate issues of language variability from different perspectives in order to contribute to the lengthy debate on language contact, diversification, speciation and standardization.