Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment: Economic Migration between Vietnam and Malaysia

Vietnam annually sends a half million laborers to work at low-skill jobs abroad, with Angie Ngọc Trần's study focusing on how they carve out a third space that allows them to resist and thrive. The Vietnamese state uses Malaysia as a place to send poor workers, manipulating them into accepting work.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 296 pages
Publication date: 11 January 2022
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Vietnam annually sends a half million laborers to work at low-skill jobs abroad, a phenomenon that has become increasingly common in the globalized economy. One scholar who has focused on this issue is Angie Ngọc Trần, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Trần's research 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.

Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment is a rare study of labor migration in the Global South that 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. Through her detailed analysis of the experiences of migrant workers from different ethnic backgrounds, Trần provides a valuable insight into the complex dynamics of labor migration and the strategies that workers use to navigate the challenges they face.

Weight: 458g
Dimension: 151 x 229 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780252085277