Negotiating Invisibility: The Silencing of Migration Stories in Asian American Communities

• In Event: 30803 - Inequality and Diversity among Asian Americans and Beyond

Abstract

Members of immigrant communities may avoid disclosing of migratory status and details about their immigration background. Several scholars have attributed this pattern as evidence of what Erving Goffman (1963) described as stigma, or awareness of a trait as being a discreditable attribute, with consequences for identity formation, experiences of belonging or unbelonging and overall well-being (Abrego 2011; Dreby 2015; Gonzales 2015; Gonzales, Suárez-Orozco, and Dedios-Sanguineti 2013). In this paper, we start instead with the premise that modern day U.S. immigration policies are a source of structural violence (Dreby 2025. See also Golash-Boza 2015). Silencing, then, can be viewed instead as an agentic response to traumatic experiences or as evidence of generational trauma. Immigrants, their family members, and their community members may evoke silence in different ways as a strategy to navigate violence tied to a specific set of public policies, and rhetoric, that emphasize immigration enforcement over regularization.
To better understand the complex dynamics associated with silencing of migration stories, we analysis narratives collected from first- and second-generation Asian Americans living in New York State. Despite unauthorized Asian immigrants comprising 14% of the 10.5 million unauthorized migrants in the US as of 2017 (Budiman and Ruiz 2021; Lopez, Passel, and Cohn 2021), discussions about immigration status and migratory trajectories remain largely silenced at the community level among different Asian American populations (Tran and Warikoo 2021). Our analysis explores how, under this umbrella of high levels of community silencing, Asian immigrants and children of Asian immigrants navigate anxieties associated with immigration policies and especially status disclosure in their relationships, whether with romantic partners, intimate friendships or other relationships within and outside of their families. In other words, we look at strategic uses of silences in interpersonal relationships and what these silences reflect about immigration policies and the Asian American experience today.

Authors

• Joanna Dreby, University at Albany, SUNY

• Yeeun Hong, University at Albany, SUNY