Family or Worker? Negotiating Temporariness through Family Migration

• In Event: Families and Migration (Co-sponsored by Sociology of the Population Section)

Abstract

Migration scholarship often conceptualizes temporariness as a condition of exclusion and precarity. Yet, migrants and their families have long developed strategies to navigate systems that restrict permanent settlement, particularly for low-skilled and low-wage migrants. This paper introduces the concept of “temporary family migration,” a hybrid form situated between temporary labor migration and formal family reunification. Drawing on the case of Vietnamese family members of marriage migrants and international students in South Korea, I demonstrate how temporariness in family migration is not passively experienced but actively shaped through kin-based invitations and seasonal labor programs. While family migration is officially framed by the South Korean state as serving caregiving or emotional support functions, I show that temporary family migration is increasingly driven by informal labor market demands. Temporary family migrants, though formally admitted as kin, are mobilized as flexible labor, performing both unpaid care work within the household and paid work in sectors like agriculture and services. Drawing on in-depth interviews and textual analysis, I argue that this migration channel, rather than offering a pathway to settlement, further entrenches the logics of non-settlement and labor extraction, reproducing migrant families themselves as sites of flexible, gendered labor. This paper highlights how the idea of family functions as a medium through which the state extracts both care work and productive labor from migrants, all while withholding the rights and recognition typically associated with formal family reunification.

Author

• Dasom Lee, University of California-San Diego