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" Negotiating nationality: Immigration regulation and rightful belonging in Sabah, Malaysia "
Bruce A. Lindquist
J. Goss
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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52411
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| Doc. No
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TL22365
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| Call number
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3374276
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| Main Entry
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Bruce A. Lindquist
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| Title & Author
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Negotiating nationality: Immigration regulation and rightful belonging in Sabah, Malaysia\ Bruce A. Lindquist
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| College
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University of Hawai'i at Manoa
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| Date
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2009
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| student score
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2009
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| Page No
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434
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| Abstract
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In this dissertation, I analyze the discourse and practice of immigration regulation in the Malaysian State of Sabah. Immigration problematizes the conventional conception of belonging to a national population, as it introduces the possibility of becoming through the process of "naturalization" what is normatively a "natural" state of being. Ideally one is born into a nationality--a place where one's ancestral blood and culture coincide and are contained within the territorial borders of the sovereign state. In reality, of course, these characteristics do not map neatly onto one another, or onto place, and modern nation-states generally acknowledge, to different degrees, the rights of immigrants to attain citizenship. In Sabah, a context in which multiple levels of the state and complex competing conceptions of indigenous and national identities determine immigrant discourse and practice, policies lurch from amnesty to benign neglect to aggressive deportation operations. Meanwhile, Filipino and Indonesian immigrants work to build cases, by making connections and accumulating documentary evidence, which will show that they deserve official permission to stay and perhaps even to be naturalized. Through the accounts, stories and images of Filipinos and Indonesians during enforcement operations, I explore ways unauthorized immigrants Sabah negotiate laws of immigration and rules of nationality by asserting popular notions of rights and affiliations to the national territory. Popular discourses and practices do not so much resist dominant discourses as "make do" (de Certeau 1988) and they are effective both because they appeal directly to the sense of justice of agents of the state, who may be moved in ways that the law of the state is not, and because the laws of the state are after all made through the selective appropriation and abstract generalization of the very particularisms that they seek to avoid.
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| Subject
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Social sciences; Sabah; Malaysia; Immigration; Immigration regulation; Nationality; Geography; 0366:Geography
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| Added Entry
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J. Goss
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University of Hawai'i at Manoa
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