Migrant? Refugee? Neither? Both? Migrant Domestic Workers, Refugees, and Regimes of Exclusion and Inclusion in Hong Kong

Abstract

Since 2014, some 5,500 women who originally entered Hong Kong as migrant domestic workers have submitted applications in the city's refugee regime, the Unified Screening Mechanism, forging a narrow intersection between two nominally distinct migration control regimes. Much has been written about Hong Kong's migrant domestic worker regime and the almost 400,000 migrant women working across the territory. Hong Kong's refugee regime, and the people who use its systems and processes, are much smaller in number and far less visible (around 14,000 people) but are also the focus of a not insignificant amount of research. Very little, however, considers the intersection between these regimes. Although only 15 former migrant domestic workers have so far been successful in their refugee applications, the intersection their applications generate reveals important aspects about both regimes as well as the broader migration governance regimes which distinguish between refugees and migrants.

This thesis uses refugee claims by former migrant domestic workers to look outwards and backwards at those regimes. It considers how Hong Kong's refugee regime uses illegalisation to works to exclude refugees while the migrant domestic worker regime uses legalisation to exclude migrant domestic workers. As governance projects which aim ultimately at exclusion, both regimes work to produce the targets of their policies as if they are only transiting through the city, physically present in the city as legal exceptions. Refugee claims by former migrant domestic workers reveal the transitory zones produced through both regimes are qualitatively different, however. The migrant domestic worker regime produces Hong Kong as a transitory space between Hong Kong and "home" on a two-year loop. In contrast, the refugee regime produces Hong Kong as a transitory zone which extends out over years, facilitating a form of illicit inclusion in the city not possible within the migrant domestic worker regime. The transitoriness of the refugee regime is also between the city, "home," and (sometimes) a new "home" through citizenship elsewhere.

The possibility of formal legal inclusion in another state (alongside a form of illicit inclusion in Hong Kong) is obscured by the refugee regime's extremely low acceptance rates. But considering the responses of civil society groups to refugee claims by former migrant domestic workers clarifies the existence of this possibility through discourses of "home" and proper belonging in the world through citizenship. These discourses underscore an economy of inclusion in which citizenship someplace else (home) is used to maintain the exclusion for those categorised as migrants while experiences labelled as displacement (without home) are used to argue for the exceptional inclusion of those categorised as refugees. Considering Hong Kong's refugee and migrant domestic worker regimes through the refugee claims of former migrant domestic workers reveals the ways in which Hong Kong's migrant domestic worker regime is a legalised form of migration that reinforces exclusion while the city's refugee regime illegalises applicants but opens up the possibility of legal inclusion. I argue that refugee claims by former migrant domestic workers show how illegality can sometimes generate less vulnerability to deportation as well as open up space for partial and sometimes illicit forms of inclusion not always available through legal migration regimes. Show more