Boat People Research Articles

Fireside Chat on the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Special Edition of the Health Equity Journal Featuring Authors.

Fireside Chat on the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Special Edition of the Health Equity Journal Featuring Authors.

Choirs on the Coast: Impact of COVID-19 on Musical Pedagogy and Festivals

Coastal landscapes inspire their own genre of folk songs and musical instruments intrinsic to the traditions of the local boat people and fisherfolk, often coexisting with a strand of popular music embedded within the modalities of coastal tourism. In post-colonial coastal cities, these strands are part of a larger musical space carved out by the legacies of colonial cultural transmission and subsequent assimilation into aspirational European cosmopolitan tropes. I examine the shifting engagement of Western classical choirs in the context of two coastal cities: Goa in India and Colombo (with a focus on Negombo) in Sri Lanka. Combining in-depth interviews with two choral conductors alongside the predicament of musical production in the digital space, I argue that choral music impinges on a notion of personal intimacy that combines a collective sense of creativity and community, organically linked to Catholic landscapes animated by a ‘Catholic affect’.

Malaysian and Indonesian Law and Policy on Rohingya Refugees: A Comparative Review

Majority of ASEAN member countries consider themselves to be non-immigrant countries. As a result, the majority of ASEAN countries are not perfect locations for immigrants to settle. However, all states are bound by the non-refoulment principle laid down under Customary International Law in which, the states are prohibited to return the refugee to their original country where there was danger known around them. Hence, in the absence of a formal mechanism produce by the ASEAN region for the protection of refugees, Malaysia and Indonesia perform their efforts and experiences in terms of handling refugees. The paper explains the comparison of how the policy and law on refugees within Malaysia and Indonesia by referring to the case study on the Rohingya people crisis and also the Vietnamese boat people. The qualitative method has been chosen to explain the literature of the paper. This paper also discusses on how both countries respond to the right of a refugee within their sovereignty since they are non-signatory states to the 1951 Refugee Convention. As a result, the paper intends to elaborate on to what extent the laws and policies apply to the refugee according to the Malaysia and Indonesia experiences.

Contributors

Contributors

Policies and Issues relating to Vietnamese Boat People in Malaysia

An island in Malaysia bear witness to the survival of Vietnamese boat people fleeing their war-torn country in the mid-70s. Thousands of Vietnamese boat people were granted temporary refuge on Bidong Island while they were processed for resettlement by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The island situated off the coast of Terengganu was designated as the principal refugee camp for Vietnamese boat people in Malaysia in August 1978 with the Malaysia government towing any arriving boatloads of refugees to the island. Despite its ability to receive 4,500 refugees, the less than one square mile island ended up with a refugee population of more than 40,000 by June 1979. This paper presents a literature assessment of Malaysia's strategy and policy adopted during that period of time, as well as current legal framework on refugee and asylum seekers, to better understand how Malaysia dealt with Vietnamese boat people and how it is currently dealing with refugees and asylum seekers.

Leaving No One Behind: Interventions and Outcomes of the COVID-19 Vaccine Maximising Uptake Programme.

The devastating impact of COVID-19 on individuals and communities has accelerated the development of vaccines and the deployment of ambitious vaccination programmes to reduce the risks of infection, infection transmission and symptom severity. However, many people delay or refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19, for many complex reasons. Vaccination programmes that are tailored to address individual and communities’ COVID-19 concerns can improve vaccine uptake rates and help achieve the required herd-immunity threshold. The Maximising Uptake Programme has led to the vaccination of 7979 people from February–August 2021 in the South West of England, UK, who are at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19 and/or may not access the COVID-19 vaccines through mass vaccination centres and general practices. These include: people experiencing homelessness; non-English-speaking people; people from minority ethnic groups; refugees and asylum seekers; Gypsy, Roma, Travelers and boat people; and those who are less able to access vaccination centres, such as people with learning difficulties, serious mental illness, drug and alcohol dependence, people with physical and sensory impairment, and people with dementia. Outreach work coupled with a targeted communication and engagement campaign, co-designed with community leaders and influencers, have led to significant engagement and COVID-19 vaccine uptake among the target populations.

Tinjauan Historis Pengungsian Vietnam di Pulau Galang 1979-1996

Vietnam's long history starts from the effort to gain independence from France, the prolonged civil war between Communist North Vietnam and nationalist South Vietnam, to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, which led to the massive migration of Vietnamese people to various countries using boats so that refugees This Vietnamese, known as the "Boat People." This study provides a comprehensive explanation of the background of the migration of Vietnamese refugees to Galang Island, the role of UNHCR and the Government of Indonesia in overcoming these problems, and their lives on Galang Island. This historical research was carried out successively from the heuristic process taken from the Vietnam-camp refugee document and observations on Galang Island. The data is then verified, interpreted analytically and synthetically, and presented in descriptive-explanative historiography. Apart from the pluses and minuses of various aspects of the history of Vietnamese refugees on Galang Island from 1979 to 1996, the Indonesian government has been maximal in overcoming the problem of Vietnamese refugees.

Treading the border of (il)legality: statelessness, “amphibian life,” and the Rohingya “boat people” of Asia

ABSTRACT In Myanmar, the state and the Buddhist-majority civil society have long been hostile to the people known as the Rohingya. The Muslim Rohingya have lived in Rakhine state for centuries, but the Myanmar government, labelling them “illegal Bengali migrants,” has rendered them stateless under the 1982 Citizenship Law. The recent “democratisation” of Myanmar facilitated neoliberal expansion in the resource-rich Rakhine and intensified discrimination and violence, and the Rohingyas have been forced to flee in large numbers. They leave Myanmar on fishing boats and trawlers and attempt to enter countries like Bangladesh, Thailand, and Malaysia, “illegally” aided by smugglers. The boat people travel from marginality to ever-prevailing precarity and liminality; en route through the seas and lands of their host countries, they experience further monstrosities perpetrated by state and non-state actors. The judiciary, state, and capital together produce categories of “legality and illegality” that constitute the “amphibian life” of the “boat people” and create for them an ambivalent identity of “refugee-hood” and/or “statelessness.” Here we present our ethnographic study of this violence-laced field of forced migration, situated at the cusp of South Asia and Southeast Asia. We critically extend Agamben’s theory of “state of exception” and “bare life” to elaborate upon the “spaces of exception” experienced by the “boat people” and conceptualise the notion of “amphibian life” by analysing their agentic capability, after and beyond “bare life.”

Hepatitis E in 24 Chinese Cities, 2008-2018: A New Analysis Method for the Disease's Occupational Characteristics.

Background: The disease burden of hepatitis E remains high. We used a new method (richness, diversity, evenness, and similarity analyses) to classify cities according to the occupational classification of hepatitis E patients across regions in China and compared the results of cluster analysis.Methods: Data on reported hepatitis E cases from 2008 to 2018 were collected from 24 cities (9 in Jilin Province, 13 in Jiangsu Province, Xiamen City, and Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture). Traditional statistical methods were used to describe the epidemiological characteristics of hepatitis E patients, while the new method and cluster analysis were used to classify the cities by analyzing the occupational composition across regions.Results: The prevalence of hepatitis E in eastern China (Jiangsu Province) was similar to that in the south (Xiamen City) and southwest of China (Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture), but higher than that in the north (Jilin Province). The age of hepatitis E patients was concentrated between 41 and 60 years, and the sex ratio ranged from 1:1.6 to 1:3.4. Farming was the most highly prevalent occupation; other sub-prevalent occupations included retirement, housework and unemployment. The incidence of occupations among migrant workers, medical staff, teachers, and students was moderate. There were several occupational types with few or no records, such as catering industry, caregivers and babysitters, diaspora children, childcare, herders, and fishing (boat) people. The occupational similarity of hepatitis E was high among economically developed cities, such as Nanjing, Wuxi, Baicheng, and Xiamen, while the similarity was small among cities with large economic disparities, such as Nanjing and Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture. A comparison of the classification results revealed more similarities and some differences when using these two methods.Conclusion: In China, the factors with the greatest influence on the prevalence of hepatitis E are living in the south, farming as an occupation, being middle-aged or elderly, and being male. The 24 cities we studied were highly diverse and moderately similar in terms of the occupational distribution of patients with hepatitis E. We confirmed the validity of the new method on in classifying cities according to their occupational composition by comparing it with the clustering method.

The Contemporary Labor Market Integration of Vietnamese Refugees in Canada

Decades after the arrival of the Vietnamese boat people (1979-1981), we reassess their economic integration, along with that of a second wave (1982-1990). We compare current occupational locations and weekly earnings across the two waves and between the Vietnamese and immigrants born in China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and North and West Europe (arriving 1979-1990). Occupational and earnings profiles document that the second Vietnamese wave has done less well than the first. Birthplace differences in demographic characteristics and educational attainments help explain labor market inequalities between the two waves and between the Vietnamese and other groups. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2021.1957190 .

Contributors

Contributors

A (Lay) Catholic Voice Against a National Consensus

Abstract In both a canon law student’s essay and in oral remarks to the 2017 Onclin Chair conference at KU Leuven, the author critiques his own country’s closed border consensus excluding admission of boat people. He argues this political consensus in Australia is at odds with the celebrated national identity of Australians. Moreover, the author identifies that the closed border consensus is contrary to the Gospel, because it does not welcome the stranger and because it betrays the universality of the love of neighbour which the Gospel demands. The author argues that the voice of the Catholic lay person is not to remain silent, but is to speak out against the injustice of the policy because the Gospel, the magisterium of the Second Vatican Council in its decree on the Apostolate of the laity, the Canon law, Catholic moral theology and the dictates of conscience all demand the articulation of a contrary view.

'Boat People' and Discursive Bordering: Australian Parliamentary Discourses on Asylum Seekers, 1977-2013

This article draws upon content analysis of Australian parliamentary transcripts to examine debates about asylum seekers who arrived by boat in three historical periods: 1977–1979, 1999–2001, and 2011–2013. We analyze term frequency and co-occurrence to identify patterns in specific usage of the phrase “boat people.” We then identify how the term is variously deployed in Parliament and discuss the relationship between these uses and government policy and practice. We conclude that forms of “discursive bordering” have amplified representations of asylum seekers as security threats to be controlled within and outside Australia’s sovereign territory. The scope of policy or legislative responses to boat arrivals is limited by a poverty of political language, thus corroborating recent conceptual arguments about the securitization and extra-territorialization of the contemporary border.

The Other Side of Citizenship? Narrating Flight and Refugeeism in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People

The Other Side of Citizenship? Narrating Flight and Refugeeism in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People

Writing-Mediated Interaction Face-to-Face: Sinitic Brushtalk (漢文筆談) as an Age-Old Lingua-Cultural Practice in Premodern East Asian Cross-Border Communication

Abstract In Western societies, speaking is construed as an interactive social activity while writing is widely perceived as a solo or private endeavor. Such a functional dichotomy did not apply to the “Sinographic Cosmopolis” in premodern East Asia, however. Based on selected documented examples of writing-mediated cross-border communication spanning over a thousand years from the Sui dynasty to the late Ming dynasty, this paper demonstrates that Hanzi 漢字, a morphographic, non-phonographic script, was commonly used by literati of classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic to engage in “silent conversation” as a substitute for speech. Except for a “drifting” record co-constructed by Korean maritime officials and Chinese “boat people,” all the other examples featured Chinese–Japanese interaction. While synchronous cross-border communication in written Chinese has been reported in scholarly works in East Asian studies (published more commonly in East Asian languages than in English or other Western languages), to our knowledge no attempt has been made to examine such writing-mediated interaction from a linguistic or discourse-pragmatic point of view. Writing-mediated interaction enacted through Sinitic brushtalk (漢文筆談) is compatible with transactional and interactional language functions as in speech. In premodern and early modern East Asia, it was most commonly conducted using brush, ink, and paper, but it could also take place using a pointed object and a flat surface covered with a fluid substance like sand, finger-drawing using water or tea on a table, and so forth. Such an interactional pattern appears to be unparalleled in other regional lingua francas written with a phonographic script such as Latin and Arabic. To facilitate research into the extent to which this interactional pattern is script-specific to morphographic sinograms, a “morphographic hypothesis” is proposed. The theoretical significance of writing-mediated interaction as a third or even fourth known modality of synchronous communication—after speech and (tactile) sign language—will be briefly discussed.

Boat People and the Entrenchment of Exclusion

Together with Canada, the United States and New Zealand, Australia is considered to be one of the world’s major ‘immigration nations’. Immigration is a defining feature of Australia’s economic and social life. Almost half of Australia’s population is now comprised of first or second-generation migrants. Most people who have left their country of origin and settled in Australia have migrated voluntarily. A smaller number have settled in Australia as refugees after fleeing their country of origin and seeking asylum from persecution. The means by which immigrants have travelled to Australia may strike the reader as far less significant than the reasons why they have come. Means of travel have changed over time in accordance with economic circumstances and technological advancements. Wealthier migrants began to travel to Australia by air as early as the 1930s, and the 1960s saw a transition from mass sea travel to mass air travel. By the 1970s, most people coming to Australia were travelling by air. These people included voluntary migrants, refugees resettled from overseas and those who travelled to Australia with a visa and subsequently claimed protection as refugees. One group of migrants has continued to travel by sea. This group is comprised of asylum seekers for whom obtaining a visa and coming to Australia by plane is impracticable. Their trajectory is complex and precarious, and the likelihood that they are entitled to protection as refugees is high. For members of this group, it is their mode of arrival rather than the reasons why they have come that has defined their treatment under the law. This chapter focuses on the legal and policy framework applied to this group of asylum seekers, namely irregular maritime arrivals. The immigration detention regime has provided a policy foundation which has been built on incrementally by measures designed to deter irregular maritime arrivals from entering Australia and to distance and exclude them from the body politic and protections afforded under Australian law. These measures have increasingly sought to bar irregular maritime arrivals from entering Australia and culminated in their erasure from Australia’s Humanitarian Program.

Transitions of Folk Religion Accompanying Boat People’s Movement to the Land in Gaozhou

Transitions of Folk Religion Accompanying Boat People’s Movement to the Land in Gaozhou

Dilema Tata Kelola Pengungsi Global: Penanganan Illegal Maritime Arrivals (IMA) di Australia

Australia as one of the countries that signed the Convention of Refugee 1951 has an obligation to apply principle of non-refoulement in the handling of refugees and asylum seekers entering its territory. However, the issue of national security and domestic turmoil caused Australia to continue use restrictive policies in dealing with refugees and asylum seekers, especially those who came by the sea (boat people) and did not have official documents. They are called Illegal Maritime Arrivals (IMA). Giving the term “illegal” causes no distinction between IMA and smuggling/trafficking criminals. This paper aims to explain the existence of dilemma in the management of refugees especially in Australia in handling IMA. This research uses qualitative methods with secondary data sources from books, journals, articles and other sources related to the problem being studied. By using the concept of securitization approach in the paradigm of constructivism, this paper argue that the restrictive policies adopted by Australia as a form of protection of national interests. Australia experiences a dilemma in applying the principle of non-refoulement and protecting its national interests. This is challenge in the management of global refugees.

Trembling strength: Migrating vulnerabilities in fiction by Sharon Bala, Yasmin Ladha, and Denise Chong

The Boat People by Sharon Bala, Blue Sunflower Startle by Yasmin Ladha, and Lives of the Family: Stories of Fate and Circumstance, by Denise Chong, are texts that engage with vulnerability as it relates to immigration, one of the most precarious of states or sites that Canadian literature chronicles. The abstract and concrete politics of adaptation are exemplified in these narratives of displacement, inspired by the Tamil refugee crisis of 2009–2010, the Indo-Tanzanian immigration wave of the 1970s, and the resourcefulness of Chinese immigrant families in the mid-twentieth century. These narratives effectively investigate vulnerability within spaces of interconnection, imprisonment, relation, visibility, and transformation. This paper works with their explorations of the Canadian trope of immigration as a process that moves from the vulnerability of strangeness to the vulnerability of adaptation to the vulnerability of commitment. Addressing the ways that these stages are subverted, the paper examines the extent to which migrancy and its resolution resist a “national” narrative in these texts, undercutting the prototype of success through adversity. How they model Hirsch’s “openness to unexpected outcomes” recites the complexity of their depictions of vulnerability.

Stopping them Using Our Boats

Controlling entry to an island continent proved more complex than the Immigration Restriction Act, 1901 framers imagined. Chinese people had been coming to Australia in numbers since the 1850s and by 1901 had substantial community, family, and economic links with their Pearl River Delta villages, around the colonies and with Hong Kong and Shanghai. Resistance was fought out on the boats themselves; musters were held, documents examined, searches made, and dictation tests administered. Secrecy, fraud, informers, and harassment reduced but did not eliminate communities while also causing governments much embarrassment before this first attempt at halting boat people was abandoned.