Taiwan’s transnational labor stratification in the evolution of multicultural indigenization

In recent decades, migration studies has become a major academic cottage industry, in Taiwan as well as elsewhere. Migration is hardly new in global history, nor are experiences of economic exploitation and social injustice rooted in the systemic regulation of foreign labor. Its growth in the late twentieth century was not only the product of transnational movements but also the perception of borderless economies and decentralized flows of people. Foreign labor has always been stratified, but outside the West the closed primordialism of the nation as “imagined community” reified structural inequality. In Taiwan, the fictive advent of “multiculturalism” was in fact a process of indigenization that rigidified newly instituted notions of nationality.