Grant Projects: Activities

This report was reprinted from issue No. 5 of the new Japanese-language publication JOINT, featuring the topic: "Toward Mutual Reliance and Collaboration in Asia." JOINT was launched to publicize the Toyota Foundation's activities and philosophy. Currently, it is only available in Japanese. Back issues may be downloaded here.

ARENA (Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives) is an NGO that builds human networks including researchers, authors, artists, and other intellectual actors, among others, in order to foment social change within Asia. Based in South Korea, it enjoys the participation of members from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Australia, and Japan, as well as numerous other regional countries. Hung Ying Chen, who hails from Taiwan, served as a program officer in the ARENA Center in South Korea from 2008 to 2010. She is the leader of "Consolidating Regional Cooperation Among Marriage-Migrant Groups for New Citizenship of Marriage-Migrant Women in Asia," a project funded by the Toyota Foundation in fiscal 2009.

With the support of the Toyota Foundation, ARENA is forging ties among organizations involved in Asian migrant issues and getting migrants themselves involved as it implements this project. Just 26 years old, Ms. Chen is not herself a migrant, but she works hard to take participants' views into account and to help all of them play an active part in the project. When workshops are held, for example, she has set up a program in which they sing songs from their native countries, thus helping them to reconfirm their identities and draw them into more independent roles.

In fiscal 2007 the Toyota Foundation funded the predecessor to this project, which sought to build networks including migrants in international marriages in the Asian region, under the Asian Neighbors Network Program. This was later renamed the Asian Neighbors Program, under which the present project has been funded since fiscal 2009. (by Program Officer)

Establishing a Sense of Identity for Marriage Migrants
Hung Ying Chen, Project Leader

The citizenship status of marriage migrants is recognized based only upon their marriage relationship. Accordingly, the tenets of migrant movements so far have focused on individual-based advocacy for citizenship. Based on the previous phase of our project, however, we have determined that in addition to the advocacy work for the legal aspect of citizenship, it is equally important to pursue the social recognition of women migrants in the receiving societies. Thus, in the second phase of this project, we shift our focus to addressing citizenship issues on the community level in a progressive way that highlights the importance of migrants’ collective action and identity and their capacity for participating in the crafting of migrant policy. This is also meant to transcend the current policy landscape, which merely utilizes the multi-ethnicity of marriage migrants as a decoration accenting mainstream society's multiculturalism.

Nowadays, the challenges for many marriage migrants can be outlined mainly in terms of different phases of migration, as well as marital status and citizenship. These issues are the key themes seen in past forums, workshops, and conferences. Here I list some of the key issues: problematic international marriage brokerage and the failure of transnational governance; adoption and heirship issues of premarriage children; domestic violence and insecure citizenship status; discrimination in daily life because of language, ethnicity, and citizenship status; and even institutional oppression in current legal systems because of nationalism or post–Cold War international relations.

In distinction to most of the government-funded programs which feature a unilateral dimension of social integration with the underlying intent to promote cultural hegemony, we hope this project will maintain multilateral routes of vibrant transnational exchange among migrant women activists. Moreover, through the process of mutual inspiration and reflection, we hope it will help to promote social awareness against racial discrimination to achieve real multicultural communities. Most of all, it is important to note that the principle of such practices is to reinstill a sense of identity in the migrants themselves in migrant movements. In this regard, we have designed a series of cross-boundary dialogues, such as comparative policy analyses, forums, regional schools, international workshops, and international conferences.

Our activities this year, for example, included a forum in April to discuss Chinese migrants in Korea and ways toward their integration in Korean society.

In June, we set up an international workshop as a watershed of our regional exchange on marriage migration programs. This was not only to extend and strengthen migrant women’s leadership and their solidarity networks, but also to explore the possibility of shifting the objectives from the previous emphasis on individual rights toward community rights.

One participant, a Taiwanese of Indonesian descent, commented: "This is my first time to attend this kind of workshop. The experience is very precious for me because there are so many participants from different countries in Asia. We are curious about each other's experiences and we carefully listen to each other’s voices. I now realize that we can also do work as good as anyone, and that we migrant women also have our own ways of thinking—something that we had forgotten for a long time." However, despite the exchanges built and inspiration brought to migrant women through such regional gatherings, this only fulfills part of our goals—to achieve the substantial empowerment of migrant women in leadership building. At the same time, we also want to open routes of direct communication to address migrant policy on a transnational level. In the context of the mainstream of international migrant movements, in which marriage migrants have long been considered as characteristically and strategically different from other migrants, a critical challenge left to conquer in this project is to find best practices and the balance between two different directions of activity design.