Educational imperatives and the compulsion for credentials: family migration and children's education in East Asia

Abstract

This paper provides an examination of recent scholarship on family migration for children's education in the context of East Asia, in an attempt to counter tendencies towards ‘adultism’ in migration studies [White, A., C. Ní Laoire, N. Tyrrell, and F. Carpena-Méndez. 2011. “Children's Roles in Transnational Migration.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37 (8): 1159–1170]. It highlights the significant role that children do, in fact, play in precipitating contemporary migration, and educational migration provides an appropriate lens through which to do this. First, the paper considers some of the transnational household forms to have emerged in response educational migration. It then focuses on theorising the important drivers underpinning educational migration, including the acquisition (by children) of cultural and linguistic capital and the notion of children as ‘accumulation strategies’ [Katz, C. 2008. “Childhood as Spectacle: Relays of Anxiety and the Reconfiguration of the Child.” Cultural Geographies 15: 5–17]. It then turns to consider some of the implications of such mobility, alighting in particular upon its gendered nature, and the ways in which local geographies invariably impinge upon migrant families’ strategic intentions. It concludes with some thoughts on how the role of children might be better integrated into understandings of migration.

Keywords:

• education
• children's migration
• East Asia
• accumulation strategies
• gender
• local geographies

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Brenda Yeoh, Ah-Eng Lai, Melody Chia-Wen Lu and Cheryll Alipio for inviting me to participate in the 2nd Inter-Asia Round Table, organised by Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and the corresponding special issue. Thanks to Shirlena Huang for providing very helpful comments on my paper, and to all the participants for their critical and supportive feedback. Two anonymous referees provided valuable feedback. I thank them.

Notes

1 In addition to the ‘children's education’, the main reasons given by families from Hong Kong and Taiwan for immigration are ‘political uncertainty’ and the security offered by obtaining a ‘second passport’, and environmental/lifestyle factors (Kobayashi and Preston 2007). Unlike most ‘economic’ migrants, it would seem that these families never migrate to pursue economic opportunities abroad (Ley 2010).

2 Astronaut families tend to be found in countries with immigration regimes that have actively attempted to attract wealthy and skilled migrants from East Asia (see Ley 2010). Canada and Australia, for example, implemented ‘business immigration programmes’ during the 1980s, through which a significant number of astronaut families immigrated.

3 I thank one anonymous referee for this particular point.