Law, Future-Making, and Self-Making in Asylum-Seeking on Religious Grounds

How does immigration law shape migrant subjectivities? The paper examines whether and how migrants’ engagement with the asylum institution brings about changes in their religious practices and self-understandings, drawing on ethnographic research among ethnic Korean migrants from China who applied for asylum in the U.S. as Christians. The paper unpacks the black box through which immigration law shapes migrant subjectivities in variable and dynamic ways by focusing on their future-making. Various intermediaries and transnational migrant communities provide competing cultural scripts, creating frictions in migrants’ future-making. Whether and how these frictions are coordinated shape migrants’ self-transformation. The paper demonstrates how the interplay between asylum law, Korean immigrant churches, and transnational migrant communities shaped whether Korean Chinese migrants applied for asylum as Christians, how they organized the prolonged refugee status determination process, and how they made futures out of it, refusing or embracing Christian conversion as a desirable and plausible future.