Transitional Refugees: Waiting, Sticky Labor, and the Politics of In-Between Status in Hong Kong

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 17. Refugee resettlement

Abstract

This paper examines Hong Kong as a critical yet under-theorized site of refugee “transitionality” situated between globalization and anti-globalization regimes. While refugee scholarship has predominantly focused on pre-flight decision-making and post-settlement integration, far less attention has been paid to prolonged in-transit contexts where legal recognition, mobility, and livelihood remain suspended. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with asylum seekers, undocumented workers, and overstayers in Hong Kong, this study conceptualizes “transitionality” as a structured condition of directional temporariness—one shaped by overlapping global resettlement systems (e.g., USRAP, Canadian initiatives) and restrictive local immigration governance. Unlike refugee camps heavily supported by UNHCR, Hong Kong represents a hybrid transit zone where refugees must survive through informal labor markets, NGO networks, and mixed-status communities. I show how “sticky labor” binds refugees to unstable employment, how state allocation mechanisms simultaneously marginalize and tacitly tolerate their presence, and how hope for onward resettlement organizes everyday temporalities of waiting. Paradoxically, even the acquisition of legal status often extends rather than resolves temporariness, revealing how transnational legal regimes institutionalize permanent transition. By theorizing transitionality as a sociological condition produced by global border regimes, this paper contributes to migration studies, political sociology, and the sociology of temporality. It argues that Hong Kong exemplifies how global mobility infrastructures generate populations who are neither fully excluded nor fully incorporated, but structurally maintained in a state of governed in-betweenness.

Author

• Haicheng Wang, Hong Kong Univ of Science and Technology