A Space in a Foreign Land: The Sociabilities of Emplacement of Vietnamese Labour Migrants in Taiwan

While recent research pays attention to the sociabilities of emplacement — defined as the interactions through which migrants form social relations upon settlement — to moderate the shortcomings of integration theory and the ethnic lens (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2016), researchers have largely ignored the sociabilities that happen on digital platforms. This chapter makes sense of the digital sociabilities of emplacement based on a virtual ethnographic study conducted on Facebook groups for Vietnamese migrants in Taiwan. This chapter focuses on the digital sociabilities of low-skilled and mid-skilled Vietnamese labour migrants who face tremendous forms of displacement such as long work hours, isolated employer-provided living arrangements, a lack of language skills, and the risk of exploitation and discrimination. This chapter focuses on the sociabilities of transregional migrants whom I define as migrants who develop and maintain multi-faceted connections linking multiple places, spaces, and scales. In this chapter, I argue that by forging social relations via digital platforms, transregional migrants engage in the processes of building and rebuilding networks of connection within the constraints and opportunities of their specific locales and predicament of displacement. This chapter contributes to understanding how people deal with the growing disparities and displacements of global capitalism by addressing how transregional migrants use digital technologies as multiscalar tools to overcome precariousness and displacement.