Contenu de l'article

	Titre	The Dual Roles of ICTs in International Movements: A Case Study of Undocumented Chinese Migration to the United States
	Auteur	Shasha Lin
	Revue	China perspectives
	Numéro	no 143, 2025 Rethinking Global China through Migrants in the Margins: Precarity, Agency, and Multi-directional Mobility
	Rubrique / Thématique	Special feature
	Page	29-39
	Résumé anglais	In the fiscal year 2023, more than 24,000 Chinese nationals were apprehended at the southwest border of the United States. Drawing on interviews and digital ethnography, this paper finds that post-Covid-19 undocumented Chinese immigrants, also known as zouxian migrants, rely on information and communication technologies (ICTs) to mediate and facilitate international movements. This finding shows that digitally mediated social networks are a continuum of the social networks that have facilitated waves of Chinese migration to the US since the mid-nineteenth century, yet they are distinguished by faster information flow and broader reach in the twenty-first-century digital age. Moreover, this paper finds that ICTs played dual roles in international migration. On the one hand, ICT use makes the migration process more accessible, affordable, and manageable by providing migrants with access to information, resources, and social networks. On the other hand, ICT use exposes migrants to misinformation, disinformation, and selective success stories of unauthorised border crossings, obscuring the physical, emotional, and financial tolls of undocumented migration. These selective migration narratives leave migrants ill-prepared for the dangers and challenges ahead while exposing them to the risk of social media surveillance and control. By underlining these dynamics, this paper contributes to the existing literature on undocumented Chinese migration to the US and the digital mediation of migration. Source : Éditeur (via OpenEdition Journals)
	Article en ligne	https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/19938