ABSTRACT
Looking at Asian migration over the longue durée helps us to remember that Asia is an arbitrary space. There is no form of “Asian” migration that is different from mobility in other parts of the world. Asia has encompassed a huge variety of mobilities and regional migration systems. And many of the most important migratory movements in human history have crossed the borders of what we now know as Asia. At best, Asia has emerged as an imaginative construct out of the minds of Europeans over the past 700 years, and the minds of Asians over the past 200 years. But that exercise of imagination has had its effects. By the 1880s they resulted in a series of
migration laws and racist policies that excluded Asians from most non-Asian destinations and confined their migration to separate Asian systems. This segregation came hand in hand with an erasure of the historical memory of Asian mobility over the last two centuries. Although Asians continued to migrate at rates comparable to Europeans, they were depicted as immobile landbound peasants without the resources or structures necessary to migrate. When Asian migration was recognized, it was usually in small numbers as “coolies,” “sojourners,” victims of famine and corruption, or other forms of tradition-bound mobility that made Asians distinct from the modern and free mass migrations thought to characterize the Atlantic world. The segregation of Asian mobility from the rest of the world was brief. It has broken down
rapidly since the 1940s, as Asians have moved in increasingly large numbers both within and outside of Asia. Historical memory, on the other hand, has not changed so rapidly. Much current migration policy, historical accounts and social scientific research is based on assumptions that mass migration in Asia is a recent phenomenon. Contemporary mobility is then presented as a new challenge for regions long thought be characterized by relative immobility, “coolies,” and isolation from the trends of modern history and globalization. This account will place Asian migration within long-term trends of human migration around
the globe. It will note the ways in which mobility has linked “Asia” to other parts of the world, the similarities in the organization of human mobility around the world, and the extent to which all of the human communities we now know are the products of mobility and hybridity. It will then look at the rise of distinct systems of Asian mobility in the late nineteenth century, and conclude with a discussion of the effects of that segregation on our understandings of contemporary migration.
