This lecture advances contemporary scholarship on ethnicity, migration, and racialisation by examining new dynamics of racism that complicate the conventional white/Other binary often referenced in Western migrant-receiving societies. Drawing on migration trends in East Asia, including Singapore, China, Japan, and South Korea, the lecture foregrounds co-ethnic racialisation and intersectionality as critical frameworks for understanding the way that intersecting social categories (e.g., skills, class, nationality, legal statuses) shape migrant identities and produce “polysemic immigration hierarchies”. The paper highlights how non-white migrant groups navigate forms of racialisation that could involve exclusion by external dominant groups alongside distinctions and hierarchies within their own ethnic groupings or amongst migrant groups, thereby multiplying identity boundary-making. It also considers the growing multidirectional migration flows that are reshaping ethno-racial power relations worldwide. These approaches challenge dominant Eurocentric paradigms of race and migration studies that typically cast racialisation as a white versus non-white dichotomy and prioritise Western contexts. By revealing varied racialisation processes occurring within co-ethnic groups and outside Eurocentric frameworks, the paper calls for more nuanced theoretical approaches that better capture the diverse realities of ethnicity and racism globally.
Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho is Provost’s Chair Professor at the Department of Geography and Research Leader of the Migration and Mobilities Cluster at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. Her research examines the geographies of citizenship through studying various transnational migration streams as well as the ageing and the wellbeing of non-migrant and migrant older adults. She is Editor of the journal, Social and Cultural Geography, and the Routledge Series on Asian Migration. She also serves on the editorial boards of geography, citizenship, migration and area studies journals. Her monograph, Citizens in Motion: Emigration, Immigration and Re-migration Across China's Borders (2019, Stanford University Press) received the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) award for “Best Book in Global and Transnational Sociology by an International Scholar” in 2019.
This public lecture is presented as part of the Winter 2026 Course on Asian Community: Border-Crossing Diasporic Formation, and Social Transformation in the Asian World, in conjunction with the UCLA Asia Pacific Center and made possible through generous support from the Eurasia Foundation (From Asia).