Vietnamese migrant networks in Taiwan: the curse and boon of social capital

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnographic research on Vietnamese migrant workers in Taiwan, I seek to engage with and contribute to the scholarship on migrant networks and social capital. My research demonstrates that migrant networks are central to the social life of Vietnamese workers, offering not only a vital source of material and psychological support but also a platform where relationships are developed, sustained and contested. It reveals both productive and destructive potentials of social capital in situations where the migrant labourer becomes a disenfranchized underclass and their radius of trust is unsettled by physical displacement. Through this research I highlight the complexities and subjectivities in individual experiences of social capital and offer important insights into the various ways in which social networks are reinterpreted and reconfigured at the intersection of mobility, class and ethnicity within the context of Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational labour migration
• migrant networks
• social capital
• gender
• Vietnam
• Taiwan

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of Ethnic and Racial Studies and anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments. The dedication and hard work of my research assistants – Nguyễn Thị Thu Huyền, Nguyễn Đức Tuyến and Nguyễn Thành Chung – made this research possible. I am grateful to the strong and brave Vietnamese migrant women who graciously shared stories of their lives with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘Running away’ (chạy trốn) is the term that Vietnamese migrants workers use to refer to the act of deserting one's legally contracted job, most likely to enter the informal labour market. In Taiwan, foreign migrant workers are not allowed to freely circulate in the labour market and any changes in their employment arrangements must be initiated or endorsed by employers and brokerage agencies.

2. Vietnam is among the top four countries sending marriage migrants to Taiwan. The number of Vietnamese women receiving partner visas to Taiwan increased from 1,476 in 1995 to 75,251 in 2004 (Nguyen and Tran 2010).

3. Media Release on the 2009 Housing and Population Census, General Statistics Office of Vietnam (http://www.gso.gov.vn/default_en.aspx?tabid=599&ItemID=9788).

4. According to the 1999 census, only 0.5% of Vietnamese are Protestants.

5. Table 12-6: Foreign Workers in Productive Industries and Social Welfare by Nationality and Sex, Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training (http://statdb.mol.gov.tw/html/mon/c12060.pdf).

6. Table 12-4: Foreign Workers in Productive Industries and Social Welfare by Industry and Nationality, Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training (http://statdb.mol.gov.tw/html/mon/c12040.htm).

7. Chị is a Vietnamese word for sister that is also used as a pronoun to address an older woman.

8. The New Taiwan Dollar (NT$) is commonly referred to as yuan. The exchange rate at the time of fieldwork in July 2012 was US$1 = NT$30.

9. Bird and butterfly are euphemisms for penis and vagina, respectively.

10. The scholarship on networks divides them into two main sets of ties: intra-community (strong) ties (also known as bonding capital) and inter-community (weak) ties that cross various social divides based on religion, class, ethnicity, gender and so on (also known as bridging capital) (see Gittell and Vidal 1998; Granovetter 1973).

11. The exchange rate at the time of the fieldwork in 2011–2012 was US$1 = VND20,000.

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the Wellcome Trust, UK [grant numbers GR079946/B/06/Z and GR079946/Z/06Z].