Worker Citizen: Legalization and Political Relocation among the “Walk-route” Undocumented Chinese in the US

• In Event: 50260 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 8: Precarity, Labor, and Relational Work Across Asian and Asian American Contexts

Abstract

In post-pandemic years, a surging number of Chinese citizens have crossed the southwestern border into the US relying on established smuggling networks and social media wisdom. They call themselves zouxian ke ("walk-routers"). Many walk-routers choose to file an asylum case and apply for employment authorization. This paper explores how the legalization process, unfolding in everyday life as much as in paperwork and courtroom, invokes notions of ideal citizenship and re-orients the migrants’ political selves. I focus specifically on the evolving substantiations of freedom during and beyond asylum application among walk-routers in Chicago Chinatown. Field work includes ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews with walk-routers at their homes and socializing occasions, as well as informational interviews with community organizers and immigration lawyers, during November 2024 and April 2025. I argue that the legalization process channels the political relocation trajectories of the asylum-seeking walk-routers: While the statutory fixature of the national hierarchy of human rights alienates walk-routers from their liberalist dissent against the Chinese authoritarian regime, leading to instrumentalization and displacement of liberal ideals from the US context (liberal dislocation), the discretionary, individualizing criteria of self-reliance and economic contribution foster routinized and competitive self-regulation, channeling neoliberalist dissent against the Chinese political economy to resonance with conservative political rhetoric and policy agendas in the US (neoliberal relocation). While not claiming legalization as the dominant factor in shaping migrants’ political alignment in the receiving context, this paper identifies the asylum regime as a site of political transition and transformation for migrants driven by homeland dissent and/or grievances yet continuously embedded in ethnolinguistic networks. The paper also sheds light on transnational migrants’ relational enactment of homeland political categories in the perception of and self-positioning within the receiving political landscape.

Author

• Xinting Li, University of Chicago