White Migration—From the Context of Migration in East Asia

ABSTRACT This article discusses recent development in the emerging field of white migration studies and particularly focuses on the studies on Western or white migrants in Japan and China in the past decade. It is outlining the main contribution of these studies to critical whiteness studies and migration studies as well as it identifies some of the lacunas in the research and possible theoretical and conceptual directions in which the research in this field can develop further. The article argues that establishing the transnational movement of white bodies as white migrations—what have been rather associated with privilege and different categories of mobility—contributes to contesting of the racialized categories of migration and understanding of the position of whiteness and role of white privilege in the context of global migration. The article suggests that by using common frameworks and concepts with the mainstream migration research and further analysis of the local contexts, the white migration research can contribute to our understanding of whiteness in the context of global migration without reinstating it as a Eurocentric category of research even more.