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Abstract
Ethnic diasporas are important actors in the global economy. Thanks to their transnational networks and cultural skills, migrants help to deepen economic ties between nations. Existing research, however, overlooks that diaspora communities are ethnic minorities embedded in potentially hostile social environments, as they often face social exclusion and discrimination. This article studies the economic implications of international migration by focusing on the relationship between migrant minorities and indigenous majorities. It argues that ethnic prejudice against entrepreneurial diasporas may constrain their ability to foster international economic integration, as it lowers public support for international flows. Empirical support for this hypothesis is found in a survey experiment leveraging on the case of Indonesia, a Muslim-majority society in which a small Chinese minority has long played a key role in domestic and international business. The findings have implications for research on migrant networks, international political economy and diaspora policy.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute and the Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, for funding this project. The manuscript has benefited greatly from generous and insightful comments by Colin Brown, Amy Liu, Kai Ostwald, Tom Pepinsky, Andrew Reddie, David Shack and Jason Sharman. All errors are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
Notes
1 International business is of course only one of the many areas in which diasporas can leverage on their unique position in transnational networks (for a broader discussion of the implications of network positionality, see Koinova (Citation2017)). As we focus in this article on economic rather than political activism in diaspora networks, our engagement with the rich literature on diaspora politics in international relations is limited.
2 The special effort to overcome marginalization and vulnerability, in turn, can have broader implications for governance and development (Pepinsky, Citation2016).
3 Other studies have focused on economic determinants of international flow preferences. See for instance Scheve and Slaughter (Citation2001) and Goldstein and Peters (Citation2014).
4 Work on trade and FDI, while not specifically focusing on ethnicity, has studied the effect of national stereotypes on economic policy preferences, showing that support for economic flows is contingent on attitudes toward the specific country that is being considered as a potential economic partner (Disdier & Mayer, Citation2007; Jensen & Lindstädt, Citation2013; Spilker, Bernauer, and Umaña, Citation2016). Similarly, research using aggregate data has investigated the role of cultural factors such as cultural distance and language in fostering FDI (Kim et al., Citation2015; Guiso, Sapienza, & Zingales, Citation2009).
5 For space constraints, we do not examine the behavioural implications of policy preferences or the relationship between public preferences and public policy, which, in the context of international economy policy, may be multi-faceted and contingent on domestic politics and institutional settings (Kono, Citation2008).
6 Theoretical background, hypotheses, research design and data analysis plan were pre-registered at an online repository (Evidence in Governance and Politics Database, ID 20170511AA) prior to data collection. Appendix C includes further information on the procedures used for the estimations reported here, and it discusses discrepancies between the pre-analysis plan and this manuscript.
7 The same sampling strategy was followed in Pepinsky, Liddle, and Mujani (Citation2012).
8 As interviews were carried out in the second half of May 2017, fieldwork took place in the aftermath of the trial of former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok. Following a series of mass demonstrations in Jakarta led by radical Islamic groups, Basuki, a Christian Chinese Indonesian, lost the gubernatorial elections in April and was sentenced on blasphemy charges on May 7 for allegedly insulting Islam during a public event. The survey was thus implemented during a time in which religious identities were especially salient in Indonesian politics. However, in the absence of historical data on public attitudes toward Chinese Indonesians, it is impossible to determine if the increasing religious sectarianism triggered by the Ahok case was coupled with a surge in anti-Chinese sentiments.
9 Each survey instrument includes a full list of all vignette versions in the experiment. For each respondent, six profiles are then selected at random and circled in red on their respective instrument printout.
10 Interestingly, the Indonesian language still differentiates between pribumi and non-pribumi Indonesians when translating the English term “ethnic group”. While Arab Indonesians, like any other indigenous group, can be referred to as a “group” or suku, this term does not apply to the Chinese minority, for which the more generic word orang (“people”) or the foreign etnis must be used.
11 Varying religion conditionally on ethnicity allowed us to decrease the total number of profiles available for random assignment, thereby reducing the cost of the project and minimizing error related to data collection and coding.
12 Specifically, the prompt ‘some prominent Chinese businessmen’ resonates to an Indonesian audience, whereas the prompt ‘some prominent Christian businessmen’ would be grammatically correct but would appear awkward and unrealistic.
13 We also suspect that survey respondents would have identified a ‘Muslim Chinese’ with one particularly prominent and very unpopular Chinese Indonesian who converted to Islam and was associated with the authoritarian New Order regime: Muhammad ‘Bob’ Hasan (born as The Kian Seng).
14 Descriptive statistics and information on operationalization strategies are included in Appendix B, Table B1. See Appendix C for further information on estimation procedures, including a full list of the covariates included in the models.
15 Results for this and other diagnostic tests are reported in Appendix C.
16 Here are a few examples of the items included in the scale: ‘Chinese Indonesians have too much influence in the Indonesian economy’; ‘Chinese Indonesians may still harbor loyalty toward China’; ‘Chinese Indonesians only care about their own kind’. The full scale is reported in Table B2, Appendix B.
17 See Table B3 in Appendix B for a full list of the items. Both scales for anti-Sinicism and political Islam were pre-tested on a small developmental sample of 50 respondents in East Java about two months before the implementation of the national survey.
18 Table B4 (Appendix B) reports the four questions and their operationalization. In all questions, higher values are associated with more negative responses (i.e. lower levels of admiration for China, more pessimistic assessments of the implications of the rise of China, etc.), so we expect estimated coefficients of interaction terms to be negatively signed.
19 Table C1 (Appendix C) reports the full estimation results for the models used to generate the figures.
20 An analysis of the composite index of anti-Sinicism confirms that this is the case. The average value of the index for Muslims is 3.40 (on a scale from 1 to 5), significantly higher than 2.91, the average value scored by non-Muslims.