Transnational strategies and lifelong learning in the shadow of citizenship: Chinese migrants in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

ABSTRACT

The Chinese are one of the oldest immigrant communities in Europe, and in some countries among the most economically successful. Media portraits of immigrant Chinese, however, are often filtered through racialised stereotypes, as culturally insular and economically savvy opportunists working in low-end take-outs, retails, and garment workshops. Based on ethnographic research conducted in a small European state Luxembourg, this article examines different modalities of learning and transnational strategies among three groups of Chinese migrants – temporary workers, visa overstayers, and restaurant owners. In analysing their pragmatic struggles, creative agency, and unending hopes for better lives, the paper illustrates how they engage in what Aihwa Ong calls the dual process of self-making and being made, vis-à-vis the Eurocentric citizenship regime, knowledge hierarchies, and exclusionary labour market. I offer a reading of their agentic, melodramatic everyday experiences as forms of lifelong learning, whether intended or unintended, that are rendered invisible and deficient in immigration laws, labour market practices, and sociocultural expectations. The paper challenges the Eurocentric citizenship regime and highlights immigrants’ heterogeneous ways of learning and transnational practices as part of the humanness often silenced in the global cycle of coloniality and inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• transnational migration
• lifelong learning
• Chinese
• Luxembourg

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All personal names used in this article are pseudonyms. Due to the small size of the Chinese community in Luxembourg, certain identity markers may have been erased or altered to protect anonymity.

2. Before the journey, he and other would-be migrants were gathered in a boot camp to learn basic travel English, memorise fraud identity information, and get orientation with airport procedures.

3. Scholars increasingly prefer to use the adjective ‘illegalized’ over ‘illegal’ to describe immigrants without formal status as unrecognised members of the society. They highlight the legal and institutional processes that act on immigrants as forms of punishment and render them ‘illegal.’ They call for new terminologies as important steps towards the protection of the affected population. See Bauder (2014).

4. New-comers are provided with employment at small enterprises run by relatives or hometown fellows, and in turn, after paying back their migration debts, help their own kin to come and settle in the new country.

5. Such as the 1993 Golden Venture boat drowning in New York and the 2000 truck suffocation in Dover, England.

6. By 2016, close to 46% registered inhabitants were non-nationals, one of the highest percentages among all OECD countries (Emigration and Immigration, 2016).

7. The figure was an estimate by a Chinese embassy staff during an interview and likely did not include undocumented arrivals.

8. The Prime Minister’s proposal to give foreigners the right to vote was overwhelmingly opposed by 80% of voters who feared that ‘soon there will be no more Luxembourg’ (Turner, 2015).

9. Benelux refers to the consortium of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg [Aides a la Formation-Recherche Grant number Ref#: 4863316].

Notes on contributors

Jinting Wu

Jinting Wu is Assistant Professor of Educational Culture, Policy and Society at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.