Over the past two decades, Chinese diasporas have become increasingly important in China’s strategies for global ascendancy. Beijing designates diaspora elites as “grassroots ambassadors” to promote China’s national interests abroad, enhance Chinese ethnic communities, and suppress émigré dissidents. These homeland-diaspora ties, however, push Chinese migrants to the center of Sino-West tensions and become victims of rising Sinophobic sentiment and anti-China discrimination. Between Chinese politicization and Western suspicions, what is missing are the lived experiences and agential practices of Chinese migrants and ethnographic insights into the actual effectiveness of China’s diaspora governance. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic data, collected in two years of fieldwork in China and Europe, this dissertation argues that China’s diaspora politics do not lead to unidirectional domination by the homeland but rather produce dynamic state-diaspora interactions and negotiations across borders. I conceptualize this process as transborder state-building, defined as the bureaucratic, technological, and discursive mechanisms of extending and challenging the state’s institutional capacity and symbolic legitimacy beyond state boundaries. Following the neo-Weberian institutional approach in political sociology, I expand the scope of research on state-building to cross-border domains and delves into the making and remaking of transborder states and how they interact with emigrant citizens in foreign soil. I argue that a relational political ethnography, which pays closer attention to the mundane struggles of grassroots actors than the macro-level high politics, holds the key to understanding the real-world impacts of Global China. Transborder state-building is a complex process that involves a plethora of actors, including the central Chinese leadership, local officials, diaspora leaders, and rank-and-file migrants, whose cross-border interplay and contestations produce complex outcomes of Global China. To transcend superficial knowledge of China’s overseas outreach based on oft-exaggerated policy data, I uncover its operational specificities and everyday workings by identifying three channels through which China generates and sustains transborder state-building: diaspora associations, digital technologies, and political discourses. I demonstrate that far from being a uniform or absolute expansionist project, China's transborder state-building is shaped by the robust agency of grassroots actors and fraught with internal inconsistencies within the Chinese bureaucracy and Western host societies.

This thesis examines the potential impacts of anti-immigrant political rhetoric in the Sweetwater Union High School District in San Diego, California at two points in time, 2016 and 2018. A great number of these students are either themselves born in Mexico or have one or more parents who were. Therefore, these students and their families were the explicit targets of the immigration policy debate of the 2016 election. To explore the extent to which this potentially impacted these students, I divide them into groups based on their own place of birth and that of their parents. Based on survey data gathered as part of the Mexican Migration Field Research Project, I examine various areas of the student experience, including the rates at which bullying occurred. The results suggest that at the same time that anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy increased, students reported more bullying, particularly along the lines of their usage of Spanish, while also reporting an increase in the frequency of political discussions in their homes. Drawing on past historical patterns, I highlight these trends and the need for action to be taken at the school level to improve students’ educational environment, and suggest that these trends might occur on a larger scale elsewhere in the country, given the demographic composition of the district surveyed.

This thesis looks at the ways in which Central American migrant women confront and navigate violence in their home countries and the migrant controls in Mexico due to border externalization. It analyzes the techniques of self they use- the strategies and actions they take when they decide they must leave, throughout their journey and at their current location. This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork and 16 semi-structured interviews with migrant women from NTCA that took place between September and December 2016. I conclude that women embark in this odyssey to protect their children and themselves from the unbearable violence of gangs and poverty.

This study focuses on how Mexican Federations of HTAs have negotiated their formal membership in Mexico and the United States. In Mexico, migrants’ market citizenship opened the channels of communication between Federations of HTAs, and the Mexican government. Once those channels were established; HTA Federation leaders were able to negotiate their passage from market to formal membership. In the case of the United States, HTA Federations have advocated for a formal inclusion in the United States, by organizing marches, lobbying and writing to their representatives and by emphasizing their economic contributions to the U.S. society in their discourse. However, these strategies have proven partially ineffective. Nonetheless, Federation leaders have sought other strategies of inclusion at the local level by emphasizing the value of migrants as market citizens, encouraging migrants to show “good character” in order to be seen as “less illegal,” and through civic activities.

Venezuela is in crisis and people are fleeing. However, unlike in the Ukraine/Russia conflict, Venezuelan displacement is not a consequence of war, or any of the other five conditions delineated under the Geneva Convention of 1951. Instead, the Venezuelan exodus comes as the most impactful symptom of political malfeasance and economic mismanagement in high office. Consequently, millions of Venezuelans have been displaced and many now live precarious lives, on island nations ill prepared for their arrival and/or permanence. Notwithstanding, neighboring small island developing states (SIDS) like Trinidad & Tobago (T&T) are now experiencing unprecedented migrant inflows from Venezuela. This novel wave of immigration has presented T&T and other Caribbean countries with unique challenges seldom seen in the conventional migration states of the global North. This study asserts that these SIDS are a type of emergent migration state and advances an addition to existing migration state model by examining the unique ways in which such small island decolonized countries respond to unprecedented changes in immigration patterns. This study takes the case of T&T and uses it to illustrate the immigrant nature of population expansion in the colonial West Indies and how the now independent countries of the Caribbean had their demographics artificially created. Additionally, the study explains the use of ambivalent immigration policy in SIDMS as a function of path dependent legislation and their past.

As of 2020, there are a staggering 26 million refugees worldwide. While most refugees live in poor- and middle-income countries in the Global South, few get a chance to be granted asylum in rich liberal democracies in the Global North. Even in the Global North, however, the refugee recognition rate (RRR) varies widely, with countries at the low end of the spectrum, namely South Korea and Japan, granting asylum to less than 2 percent of applicants compared to the 19 percent average among the top-ten OECD countries from 2014 to 2018.

My dissertation addresses why South Korea, a wealthy democracy that is a signatory to major international treaties on refugee protection and human rights and that has an independent domestic legislation on refugee protection, accepts an extraordinarily low number of refugees relative to its Western counterparts with comparable economic, political, and social capacity. In complicating the traditional narratives that elusively point to the exclusionary national identity as the source of Korea’s restrictiveness towards refugees, I show how the Korean bureaucratic and judicial agencies adjudicating asylum claims make it nearly impossible for asylum-seekers to win their cases. This, I argue, is due to the tightly embedded internal norms of the domestic decision-making institutions that remained largely unchanged by the adoption of supranational liberal norms and their corresponding domestic legislation on refugee protection. For example, even after Korea became a signatory to international treaties protecting refugees in 1992, judges were rarely given an opportunity to be trained in refugee law, as they continued the preexisting practice of applying much higher evidentiary standards that were imported from civil law – rather than the lower standards in international refugee law – upon reviewing asylum claims. This lack of change in institutional norms, I suggest, is underpinned by insufficient political attention, a disinterested public, negative media, and a relatively weak civil society. My findings indicate how laws are executed and by which state institutions matter in the effective implementation of the laws just as much as the ratification of the laws themselves.

I support my arguments using data I gathered in Korea (2018–2019), including 35 in-depth interviews with lawyers, advocates, and former government employees; 60 hours of participant observation of asylum hearings and professional workshops; 8,000 court verdicts on refugee litigations; and various documents from the government, media, and NGOs.

This thesis explores the complexities of racialization as applied to Central American asylum seekers who have been forcibly stranded at the border in recent years. These communities are affected by a variety of political, social, and cultural systems that place them at a great disadvantage in achieving a fair quality of life. An examination of the traits on which Central American asylum seekers face discrimination, which I describe as an effect of racialization, shows that their experiences are unique to their situation in their time and place. Derailing from the common association of racialization by physical traits in Mexico, these communities at the border are more affected by racialization for their nationality, for being a migrant, and for their accent and/or manner of speaking. I identify the perpetrators of mistreatment against Central American asylum seekers and find that while immigration enforcement officials are easily distinguishable, it is much more difficult to determine who indeed forms part of Mexican authorities, the general public, and organized crime groups. Perpetrators can blur the lines between groups: a deceitful tactic in gaining power over these vulnerable populations. I also examine the repercussions of discrimination perpetrated by the actors discussed. Through my analysis, I contend that discrimination not only inflicts significant psychological harm on asylum seekers, but also obstructs their access to essential services, equitable working conditions, and fair housing. I argue that discrimination perpetuates a cycle of marginalization and reinforces existing inequalities, exacerbating the challenges faced by these populations.

This dissertation investigates the sources of political power among Mexican forced returnees during two significant periods of expulsions from the United States: The Great Depression and the Great Recession. Through the qualitative analysis of secondary sources, archival documents, government statistics, interviews with forced returnees, and field observation notes, this mixed-methods research provides a comparative historical analysis of how returnees mobilize embodied remittances (non-financial resources accumulated abroad) to legitimize their socio-political incorporation.Key findings from this investigation reveal three critical sociological insights into forced returnees' political mobilization. First, the type of embodied assets remitted shapes returnees' approaches to citizenship. Individuals with less transferable skills employ affective narratives of belonging to establish civic entitlement, while those with marketable skills use instrumental discourses to present themselves as contributors to the origin country’s workforce and society. Second, the implementation of political remittances—another form of embodied capital—is influenced by a foreign-established sense of political efficacy. Returnees with positive interactions with American institutions are more likely to participate in collective political mobilization than those with negative experiences, particularly with the American justice system. Third, the transferability of embodied remittances significantly impacts the extent and type of political involvement. Returnees with transferable skills confidently leverage their potential to contribute to economic and cultural development, exhibiting bolder political behaviors. Conversely, those with less transferable skills adopt cautious political strategies, focusing on achievable gradual changes. This work contributes to understanding the transnational dimensions of political mobilization, emphasizing the interplay between migration experiences and the pursuit of socio-political incorporation in the homeland. The study illustrates how forced returnees use their embodied remittances as organizational and symbolic resources to gain political leverage and advocate for their rights, mapping diverse pathways of social and political integration.