Immigration, emigration and the re-migration of diasporic descendants constitute the multi-directional migration flows that are converging and diverging in nation-states today. Multi-directional migration patterns create citizenship struggles in nation-states that experience such migration trends concurrently. This presentation takes Chinese emigration as the starting point to consider how multi-directional migration has shaped and continue to shape nation building, not only in China, but also the countries where Chinese migrants have settled. By interweaving research findings from China, Canada and Singapore, the presentation draws attention to how both old and new migration trends add newfound challenges to maintaining social cohesiveness. The presentation’s focus on contemporaneity departs from conventional approaches that study migration sites in isolation or as snapshots in time. It situates the migration and citizenship politics of national societies in a trans-territorial context to signal how concurrent global events in different parts of the world can forge citizenship constellations that interconnect migration sites. The multidirectional aspects of migration routes— emigration, immigration, and re-migration—can and should be analysed alongside one another.
Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho is Associate Professor at the Department of Geography and Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore (NUS). She was appointed Dean’s Chair at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) in 2019. Elaine is author of Citizens in Motion: Emigration, Immigration and Re-migration Across China's Borders (2019; Stanford University Press), which received the American Sociological Association’s award for the “Best Book in Global and Transnational Sociology by an International Scholar”. Her current research focuses on, first, transnational ageing and care in the Asia-Pacific; and second, im/mobilities and diaspora aid at the China-Myanmar border. She is Section Editor of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (2nd edition), Editor of the journal, Social and Cultural Geography, and serves on the editorial boards of Citizenship Studies; Emotion, Space and Society; and the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography.