Flexible Citizenship

The rise of China and India has been accompanied by a steady outflow of elite Asian migrants to global centers as investors, scientists, and professionals. These migrants may view their culture, work, and identity as unconnected to a single nation-state. Rather than seeing their identity in terms of national affiliation, they may identify with a specific city of origin as a home, but may still lack a sense of political belonging. A forerunner of these migrants of today may be seen in the émigré who, in the midst of the return of Hong Kong to mainland Chinese rule, accumulated multiple passports. The goal was to maximize opportunities to relocate one's family to a liberal country and at the same time be able to continue to do business in China. Some businesspeople were so desperate to move their families and businesses offshore that they bought passports to obscure islands, intending to hopscotch to more desirable destinations later on. Others more successfully gained entry to the United States while continuing to invest in the booming Chinese economy. These flexible strategies thus scattered family members in global sites, keeping open options for both political havens in the West and business opportunities in Asia.

Flexible citizenship is a new transnational maneuver born out of the interaction of political insecurity and the spread of global markets. We are used to thinking about migration and relocation as being coerced by poverty, or resisted by refugees. But the flexible mobility of elite subjects shows that such displacements are practices to strive for. Such cross-border maneuvers respond fluidly and opportunistically to dynamic market conditions today. As a U.S.-based Hong Kong hotelier noted, “I can live anywhere in the world, but it must be near an airport.” Sometimes labeled “astronauts,” these businesspeople have lifelines to strategic spots in the Pacific Rim.

As the foreign Chinese investor becomes a familiar figure on the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, and San Francisco, he is increasingly joined by the Asian scientist or engineer who has globally marketable skills. Again, we can trace the influx of high-tech Asian professionals to the dot-com boom of the 1980s. Labor contractors, or “body-shops,” sent thousands of Indian software engineers to meet labor demands in Silicon Valley. These techno-migrants formed a low-paid, temporary pool that had no chance to apply for citizenship. They dream of getting a permanent job with a U.S. company so that they can get a good salary and apply for a green card. However, such opportunities are extremely rare because body-shopped migrants are by definition a circulating labor pool at the mercy of fluctuating labor markets.

Today, Asian investors and professionals continue to search for flexible citizenship and earnings abroad, despite the rise of cyber centers in India and China. Despite rapid growth and economic transformation, these countries cannot employ many of their own knowledge workers. Each year, China graduates almost 200,000 engineers and India almost 130,000. By comparison, the yearly output of U.S. engineers is barely 60,000. Paradoxically, as U.S. high-tech jobs are increasingly outsourced to India, there are still tens of thousands of Indian computer workers in Silicon Valley. The number of Indian scientists and engineers is so huge that they seek jobs in different kinds of global markets. Those who do not immediately arrive in Western countries practice a kind of flexible citizenship by first testing their chances in emerging economies. For instance, some Indian knowledge workers based in Malaysia's Multimedia Corridor confide that it is only a stepping-stone to jobs in the United States or West Germany. Similarly, many mainland Chinese professionals hired in Singapore hope to one day reposition themselves into more well-paid jobs in the West. We thus have two-way traffic of high-tech jobs flowing from high-wage (Western) to low-wage (Asian) zones, and low-paid (Asian) knowledge workers flowing to well-paid (Western) labor markets.

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