JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES, 2017

https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1384147

Desire as a theory for migration studies: temporality,

assemblage and becoming in the narratives of migrants
Francis L. Collins
School of Environment, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article explores the potential of desire as a conceptual Desire; migration theory;
vocabulary to enliven scholarly understandings of migrant migration management;
mobilities. Desire and questions of human aspiration draw our narratives; South Korea
attention to the generative potential of migration, not only the
myriad forces that make migration possible but also the
transformative possibilities for the subjects and spaces involved.
By focusing on desire, then, it becomes possible to
reconceptualise migration as an ongoing process of spatio-
temporal differentiation rather than as a univalent and knowable
phenomenon. The process of migration is in this respect also tied
up with a concomitant process of becoming for migrants
themselves, a transformation in subjectivity that also involves
transformations for the places they move through and the people
they move with. This article unpacks these conceptualisations of
migration through three individual narratives of migration from
Southeast Asia to South Korea. Through these narratives the
article highlights three dimensions of migration that can be re-
examined through the analytical emphasis on desire: the multiple
temporalities of migrant lives and future potential; the assemblage
of spatialities and relations articulated in migration; and the
politics of migration that is generated through the enlisting of
migrants by states and migrants’ own desire for becoming
through migration.

The migration problematic

Contemporary forms of migration are increasingly viewed through the lens of ‘migration
management’. As a regime for regulating borders and mobility, migration management
makes claims about the shared benefits of migration and the need for rational planning
and control of movement. In contrast to regimes of border exclusion, migration manage-
ment advocates ‘regulated openness’ to ‘balance the needs and interests of the sending,
receiving and transit countries and the migrants themselves’ (Ghosh 2007, 107). This
utopic vision of regionally and globally integrated migration has come to manifest in
diverse ways through national policy frameworks, regional agreements and the actions
of international organisations (Geiger and Pécoud 2013). The political rationalities of
migration management articulate most apparently through the vision of migration as
either a solely economic behaviour or forced movement. Through this vision, states and

CONTACT Francis L. Collins [email protected]

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 F. L. COLLINS

organisations seek to assemble a transparent and regularised process for entry, work and
departure or for the orderly control of individuals seeking asylum.
The figure of the migrant articulated within migration management has been signifi-
cantly influenced by the principles and theories of migration studies (Garelli and Tazzioli
2013). Most importantly, migration management relies on an idea of the migrant as a
utility-maximising individual who – when provided with full access to information and
freed from constraints – can make migration decisions that will serve his or her own inter-
ests and for which he or she can be held responsible. Certainly, migration studies as a field
has come a long way from advocating these principles explicitly, although in the absence of
alternative conceptualisations, ‘the utility-maximizing notion underlying decision-making
has not been fundamentally challenged’ (De Haas 2011, 20). As Hess (2010) formulates it,
these knowledges about migration and migrants are a form of ‘soft governance’ that inter-
act with and influence the ways that governments and populations respond to migration.
They make it possible to imagine that ‘regulated openness’ will lead to orderly flows that
will be mutually beneficial and where the politics of migration is business as usual.
In the absence of critical conceptualisations that focus on the generation of migration,
there has remained an underpinning logic to much migration scholarship, mostly notably
the claim that we know and can measure why people choose to migrate. This includes
three key propositions. Firstly, there remains a presumption that migration is principally
economic, that it results from unequal distribution of resources and migrants intentionally
set out to address this for themselves, their families or their communities (Castles 2013). In
addition to contributing to binaries around authorised and unauthorised migrations, this
assumption relies on a problematic reading of intentionality and calculative rationality
that constructs mobility and life as something to be individually predetermined and
modulated. Accordingly, and secondly, much migration scholarship still reifies the indi-
vidual migrant as a decision maker who chooses to migrate in a relatively autonomous
or individualistic way (Kennan and Walker 2011). Consequently, migration decisions
can be measured in terms of which destinations migrants prefer and codified according
to migrant nationalities, types, statuses and other factors. Lastly, migration ‘decision-
making’ is presumed to occur at a singular moment in time, or within a relatively short
time horizon prior to departure, that involves the calculative assessment of available infor-
mation in an objective and goal-oriented fashion (De Haas 2010). These foundational
elements of migration studies have contributed to a situation where, as Nail (2015, 4)
puts it, ‘the migrant has been understood as a figure without its own history and social
force’. Rather, the histories, presents and futures of the migrant have been scripted
through the lens of the nation-state and citizen where stasis rather than movement is
taken as the normal state of being (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015).
In the context of the present special issue on ‘aspiration, desire and the drivers of
migration’ (Carling and Collins 2017), this article develops an alternative conceptual
framing that focuses on the generation of migration, the social and temporal conditions
that serve as a motive and sustaining force for movement. The approach developed
here embraces rather than obscures the excesses and uncertainties of migrant mobilities,
undisciplined movement across borders and the role of migration in constituting the
places migrants move through. To do this, I foreground the conceptual vocabulary of
desire as a social force that is developed through the social theory of Deleuze and Guattari
(1983, 1986). Following Deleuze and Guattari, this article conceives of desire as the
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 3

energies that draw different entities – human, non-human, symbolic – into relation with
each other and in the process generates social forms and affects.
Using desire as a vocabulary for understanding migration means paying attention to
how movement is instigated by a range of conscious and sub-conscious influences.
Desire is expressed through the mobilities of migrants, the combinations of strategic plan-
ning, opportunism and fancies that manifest in movements to take individuals into other
worlds, to achieve or avoid (un)desirable futures. A focus on desire, then, differs from
other concepts in this special issue because it draws attention to the embodied and
emotional generators of migration. By contrast, Carling and Schewel’s (2017) account
of aspiration and ability speaks to a two-stage process of mind-dependent thinking and
body-dependent action; more prosaically ‘intentions’ and ‘plans’ index the arrangement
of future actions that are assessed as carrying potential value. Unlike these vocabularies,
a focus on desire draws attention to striving towards possibilities that are deemed good
because we desire them, rather than vice versa. Migration is an ongoing process within
which past, present and future are folded together in the emergence of migrant lives
and subjectivities.
The next section of this article introduces the theoretical reading of desire and its poten-
tial to inform an alternative ontological position on the generation of migration. Migrant
narratives are useful for exploring desire and the unpredictable dimensions of migration
because they allow researchers and migrants themselves to piece together accounts of
movement that cut across geographic and temporal settings. The narratives of three
migrants are introduced, focusing on the ways in which they came to South Korea,
their imaginings of migration and the actors involved in their mobility, their own involve-
ment in remaking migratory routes and the framing of the future in present actions. The
article concludes through a reflection on the insights generated through a reading of desire
as a social force in migration – the multiple temporalities of migration, the relational spa-
tialities or assemblages involved in migration and the necessarily transformative and
excessive features of migrant subjectivity.

Desire as a theory for migration studies

Migration […] arises from the desire inherent in most men to ‘better’ themselves in material
respects. (Ravenstein 1889, 286)

‘Desire’ is a commonly used word in migration studies. As Ravenstein’s statement from

‘The Laws of Migration’ indicates, desire has been a reference point in migration scholar-
ship since its earliest inception. Desire is also a common albeit undeveloped vocabulary
within leading migration journals. Between 1990 and 2015, no less than 513 articles in
the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies made reference to desire (24% of 2100
articles); in International Migration the figure was 689/1915 or 36% of all articles pub-
lished; and in International Migration Review 10% or 285/2720 articles. There remain,
however, very few examples of theoretical discussions of desire in migration that move
beyond its use simply as a synonym for ‘motive’, ‘reason’ or ‘want’ (in relation to
student migration, cf. Collins et al. 2014; in relation to international relations, cf. Doty
2003; in relation to consumption and migration, cf. Hindman and Oppenheim 2014).
What is missing is a detailed elaboration of how desire can be developed to expand con-
ceptions of migration and embrace a more multifaceted view of undisciplined mobility.
4 F. L. COLLINS

In developing desire as a conceptual vocabulary for migration, I draw on Deleuze and

Guattari (1983, 31), who go so far as to suggest that ‘there is only desire and the social, and
nothing else’. For them, desire constitutes the human condition, the continual attempt to
reaffirm our status as a becoming-subject (O’Shea 2002). This view contrasts substantially
with the inert use of desire in most migration studies as a description for what migrants
want. It also differs from the long history of philosophical work on desire including that of
Plato, Hegel, Marx, Freud and Lacan, in which desire is treated as an effect of power and
relations, often as something characterised by ‘lack’ and the striving for an impossible ideal
(Goodchild 1996). Deleuze and Guattari depart from this tradition by positing that desire
is the very force that animates the world – it is not an effect of power, but rather a force
involved in the production and arrangement of social forms. From this perspective, exist-
ence is not determined through transcendence or by underlying collective interests, but
rather by unconscious drives that emanate from particular ‘assemblages’, arrangements
of bodies, things and ideas. Desire, then, acts to bring different bodies together in new
and transformative formations. In this respect, desire is necessarily productive or affirma-
tive in the sense that it creates conditions for particular actualisations as well as for gen-
erating new connections between subjects (Bignall 2008).
A focus on desire offers several avenues to extend analysis of migration to incorpor-
ate the multiple temporalities of mobility and its articulation across migrant bodies and
social relations, through places of work and study, to urban, national, regional and
global spaces. I focus on three conceptual issues where a focus on desire can advance
current approaches to theorising migration: temporality, assemblage and becoming.
Most importantly, a focus on desire makes it possible to move beyond the well-
known fallacy that migration is only the result of a calculated rational choice at a singu-
lar point in time (Adam 1984). While it is possible to claim that an individual has an
interest in migrating and through certain actions seeks to actualise this interest, for
Deleuze and Guattari such interest only exists within a particular social context and
is only possible because of desires invested in that social formation (Smith 2007).
Accordingly, the temporality of what we call migrant decision-making cannot be under-
stood as a singular now moment of the present – a fully rational and calculated choice –
but rather in relation to articulations between future, past and present (Griffiths 2014;
Shubin 2015). Migration, particularly that discussed in this article, is clearly coded in
the norms of contemporary capitalism and the valorisation of economic, social and cul-
tural powers that emanate through this assemblage. Of course, migration is articulated
through other desires that emanate from variable, if not fully distinct, assemblages – a
desire to embody different identities as a ‘global subject’ or ‘cosmopolitan’, feelings of
filial piety and commitment to community and place, a yearning for travel, adventure
and experience or to escape from social and institutional constraints (Collins et al.
2014). When we focus on desire as a social force in migration, each of these and
other factors that instigate migration serve as expressions of desire, which is a more
underlying force that cannot be reduced to rationales for action. The actualisation of
migration articulates the complex interplay between these expressions of desire,
between strategic planning and opportunism that manifest in movements to achieve
or avoid certain kinds of futures. Migration in this respect is never singular in its tem-
porality, but rather is an ongoing process where past, present and future are folded
together in the emergence of migrant lives (McCormack and Schwanen 2011).
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 5

Further, a focus on desire in migration draws our attention to the manner in which the
drivers of migration are part of dynamic social and material assemblages. The drive or
impetus for migration does not emanate from a specific object (a certain amount of
money, an overseas degree) or being (a successful migrant returnee), but rather is
expressed in discursive productions of these things. Desire, then, is shaped by discourses
that prescribe certain actions and proscribe others, or that code, overcode and decode
objects, behaviours and opportunities as more or less desirable (Holland 2010). In
migration these imaginaries are constructed not least by nation-states seeking to activate
mobility to address labour shortages or demographic decline, to attract and capture
foreign ‘talent’ or ‘experts’ or to capitalise on multicultural presence (Ong 2007). In
addition to their role in disciplining and ordering migration flows, the mobility regimes
of migration management are also caught up in enlisting migrants in the possibilities of
migration. This occurs directly, through practices of state marketing such as on websites
advertising migration opportunities along with the images and language used to make a
particular destination attractive (Hindman and Oppenheim 2014). Just as often, migrants
are enlisted in the possibilities for migration through a wider social assemblage of actors
including brokers and other intermediaries (Xiang and Lindquist 2014), the cultural pro-
ductions of places (Y. Kim 2013), networks of friends and family (McKay 2007), pro-
motion in sending states (Collins et al. 2014) and cultural politics that valorise
migration as development (Tyner 2013). This is not to suggest that migrant desires
equate to these discourses, or that they can simply be ‘recruited’ for the purposes of the
nation-state, employers or intermediaries, but rather to emphasise that desire is consti-
tuted by both complementary and contradictory flows that shape the form and processes
of movement.
Lastly, a focus on desire emphasises the transformative dimension of migration, includ-
ing its necessary practical and political implications. Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 225)
insist that ‘the analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political’, it is ‘the art of
the new’ and it ‘actively participates in the drawing of the lines’ between bodies, of creating
and destroying assemblages. A focus on desire as a social force is necessarily affirmative in
that it emphasises the processes of becoming that migration entails. Migration has long
been understood as a transformative process, one in which migrants’ place in the
world, their ideas about themselves and possibilities for the future are reworked
(Castles 2010). The tendency, however, has been to treat this as an effect of migration,
rather than the very actualisation of this process. Likewise, for nation-states, migration
is conceived as producing certain effects in society – more diversity, xenophobia,
altered labour markets, ethnic enclaves – rather than recognising all of these objects
and processes as interlinked from the outset (Doty 2003). This article posits migration
as a process of desiring on the part of migrants that is already an expression of transform-
ation, an actualisation of deterritorialising and reterritorialising processes both in individ-
ual subjects and the places they inhabit through migration. Despite the energy mobility
regimes invest in crafting imaginaries and pathways – arrival, work, study, departure –
scholarship suggests that there is substantial variation as migrants become irregular,
subvert rules, transition between visas, depart early, demand rights or avoid support
(Robertson 2013). There is then considerable unpredictability in migration – it creates
new encounters between mobile and local subjects (Collins et al. 2014), raises questions
6 F. L. COLLINS

about citizenship and politics (Doty 2003) and alters the expectations and subject pos-
itions that migrants inhabit (Hindman and Oppenheim 2014).

Narratives of migration
The focus on desire advocated here demands an approach that can draw attention to the
ways that migration unfolds across multiple spatial and temporal horizons (Valentine and
Sadgrove 2014). Migrant narratives generated through interviews are used as the vehicle to
explore expressions of desire. Interviews do not reveal desire, but they do provide an
opportunity to observe its effects in mobility and subjectivity. The use of narratives to
explore expressions of desire has significant value because of the ways in which they
centre on human experiences while also having scope to engender reflections on shifting
forms and effects of subjectivity. This is particularly important for my purposes here,
where I am focused on moving beyond normalised scripts of migration. Indeed, as
Lawson (2000, 174) notes, stories ‘can reveal the empirical disjuncture between expec-
tations of migration […] and the actual experiences of migrants’. They draw our attention
to forms of agentive will, expressions of desire, as well as the social structures that these
emerge within and exceed. At the same time, narratives such as those used here draw
attention to how migration is situated not only in relation to present articulations of sub-
jectivity, but also in co-existence with pasts that constitute migrant becoming and future
possibilities that are desired but not yet accounted for (Shubin 2015).
The narratives presented in this article emerge from a project on the lives of temporary
migrants in the Seoul Metropolitan Region of South Korea. The project included 40 inter-
views with individuals from Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. I rely on
the narratives of three participants to draw out some of the ways in which desire emerges
as a force in migratory processes, how it is enabled through connections, impeded through
blockages and reworked through emergent migration assemblages. The narratives, hence,
are not intended to be exemplars of the ‘reasons’ or ‘patterns’ of migrant mobility. Rather,
they offer us a lens through which we might conceptualise the diversity of forces at work in
making mobility possible, channelling migrants in particular directions and generating
always unexpected transformations in individual and collective lives.
These interviews were undertaken between September and November 2011. The total
participant sample included 35 men, 4 women and 1 transgender participant, a pattern
that reflects the highly gendered character of labour migration in South Korea. The par-
ticipants ranged from ages 22 to 45, and the length of time in South Korea ranged from 7
months to 15 years. Interviews were conducted by community researchers in the native
language of each participant. The individuals whose narratives are presented below
were selected because they provide nationality and gender diversity, demonstrate different
temporal durations of migration and were part of a subset of more detailed interviews that
offered significant depth and content on the processes of migration.
These three participants, identified here with the pseudonyms Tulus (male from Indo-
nesia), Nonoy (male from the Philippines) and Thuy (female from Vietnam), migrated
through different dimensions of the South Korean government’s current approaches to
migration management. Tulus and Nonoy entered through the Employment Permit
System (EPS), a regime that was established in 2004 to manage flows of labour migrants
from 15 countries in Asia. The EPS is a guest worker regime that seeks to manage the
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 7

number, quality and tenure of migrant workers and, in doing so, address labour shortages,
maintain minimum human rights and ensure departure once visas expire (M. J. Kim
2015). Through the EPS, migrants are recruited for five sectors: manufacturing, agricul-
ture, construction, fisheries and services. Before departure and after arrival, migrants
undergo job training, medical tests and orientation to South Korea. When Tulus and
Nonoy migrated, they were granted visas that allowed them to work for a specified
employer for three years, after which time they were expected to return home.
Not all migration occurs in such a regulated way. Thuy migrated through an interme-
diated marriage with a Korean man. Unlike Tulus and Nonoy, Thuy was not formally a
labour migrant, although as her narrative suggests, she did conceive of her mobility in
this way. Her narrative draws attention to less authorised pathways to becoming a
labour migrant and the discrepancies between migrant types and drivers that can be
revealed through an emphasis on expressions of desire. Equally, Nonoy and Tulus
speak to quite different encounters with the EPS. Nonoy’s mobility occurs through a rela-
tively formal negotiation of regulation and timing of migration – he applied, was accepted,
prepared, departed, took a job and followed all procedures. Tulus, by contrast, articulates
blockages in his migration that are eventually resolved through an institution that fixes his
application in an irregular fashion. These variations are not isolated to these individuals,
but rather reflect the different ways that migrants negotiate the complex rules of mobility
regimes, the work that is undertaken by other actors and the multiple ways that desire
drives migrant mobility and transformation (Collins 2016).

Tulus: multiple temporalities

Tulus narrated a migration story of opportunities and impediments – and an always-evol-
ving sense of what he wanted. The son of a teacher and a security guard, he has two broth-
ers and three sisters and grew up in the Padang province of Sumatra. Tulus graduated
from an academic senior high school. Afterwards, he sat university examinations
several times, including after studying at a private academy in Jakarta, but failed to gain
a place. Tulus followed his parents’ advice and returned to Padang to enter a ‘famous’
private financial banking academy so that he could ‘work as a public servant’. Tulus gradu-
ated in 1997 just as the monetary crisis hit Indonesia and effectively ended any possibility
of employment for young new graduates. He carried on studying towards a bachelor’s-
level qualification without a clear sense of where it might lead, as he was biding time,
waiting until an opportunity came along. That opportunity came in the first emergence
of the prospect of migration.
Well, after that I had a plan, to follow my relative’s plan, [a relative] who was the same age
like me […], he had migrated to Japan after graduating. So, in 2000, I wished I could migrate
to Japan, and somehow I took Japanese lessons.

Migration, in this context, speaks to connections between people – the social relations of
family that circulate ideas about the possibility of migration and its potential.
It seemed that it was really good to work abroad, sending money home, buying cameras; lots
of friends in the ’90s had been doing well. So I was motivated. Yes, I wanted to migrate to
Japan too. […] I joined the class that was really, the study, so promising, quickly, until I
did well.
8 F. L. COLLINS

Desire generates all sorts of effects in Tulus’ trajectory, compelling him to focus his ener-
gies on acquiring language competencies and skills and investing emotionally in what
might be possible through migration such as acquiring consumer goods, sending remit-
tances. Desire, in this context, is not simply about these material possibilities, however.
Rather, desire manifests in terms of becoming otherwise, being drawn into another
world that is expressed by these possibilities, becoming migrant. Desire moves Tulus; it
is a force that directs his actions, but as his narrative reveals, movement is not in this
instance something that the migration regime will permit.
I applied [to go to Japan], but [was] refused. Do you know why? Because my high school
graduation certificate was not acceptable. It ought to be accompanied by [a work training
centre] statement of graduation. In [academic high school], you did not get it. Well, after
that, I [asked] and they told me I had to undertake [further] study for three years.

We can conceive of these regulatory impediments as a ‘blockage’, ‘a neutralization of exper-

imental desire […], like that desire blocked by the roof or the ceiling’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1986, 4). Such a blockage is not the destruction of desire’s force, but rather serves to redirect
its movement. With his planned migration halted but his desire for different prospects in the
world enlivened, Tulus pursued other opportunities. He moved to Batam island, a key node
in the economic zone that incorporates Singapore, the Riau Islands in Indonesia and Johor
province of Malaysia (Lindquist 2009). Batam is a major site of migration in Indonesia, one
that offers possibilities for becoming part of global circulations but is also marked by con-
siderable friction as many migrants fail to succeed.
I went to Batam to join a friend who worked on the ship. A cruiser, a ship where people
gamble. […] I took the test at Batam View, I was guessing that I would pass the test with
70% scores, as I understood English a bit. […] I had been awaiting for the result, but
there was no call. You know what? There had been notorious cases caused by Indonesians
when they were aboard. So the Chinese man assumed that all Indonesians were the same.
I had been waiting about one year, and I was just stranded a year there.

With his mobility again halted by this new blockage, Tulus went to Tanjung Pinang in
neighbouring Bintan and worked with a friend for three months in a printing business
before his friend sent him home. Back in Padang, Tulus engaged in a range of overlapping
activities: he worked for his sister in a water refilling business, collected, repaired and sold
motorcycle parts and volunteered to help with earthquake recovery in Padang. Following
his involvement in the recovery, a microfinance charity offered Tulus and his sister money
for personal development – they undertook some courses in mobile phone repair but
eventually started a catfish breeding business. While initially successful, the business col-
lapsed after Tulus was cheated by a friend. This crisis coincided with the return of his
cousin from Japan, and international migration loomed again.
Everything was gone. After that, I intended to migrate to Korea. I would push my luck
working in Korea. […] I wanted to migrate to Korea. My cousin had just come back from
Japan and wanted to migrate to Korea. I gained information about Korea from him. […]
Everyone I asked liked Korea. […] I loved to talked about it, and it became exciting.
Sharing information. I asked them: ‘How was Korea? Did you find this, or this? How was
the food?’ They said everything was great in Korea. So I felt excited again.

South Korea emerges here at a moment of both crisis and opportunity as Tulus got relinked
into the circuit of migration upon his cousin’s return. The linkages between imagination and
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 9

desire are particularly pronounced here, with South Korea emerging as a place known for
food, culture and opportunity and, crucially, generative of ‘excitement’, of bodily energy
for doing and being otherwise. As in his earlier experience, Tulus’ desire to migrate is articu-
lated through multiple connections, not least the requirements of the migration regime, here
the EPS and its emphasis on skills and language. The path was challenging – Tulus failed the
language test in 2008 and 2009, only passing finally in 2010 when he invested a significant
sum of money in a ‘special programme’ which would ‘guarantee’ success.
In South Korea, Tulus worked in a cardboard collection and processing factory, work
that he described as much harder and heavier than he had imagined. In a painful story of
isolation and conflict, he recounted being the only Indonesian and speaking little Korean.
Eventually, after constant requests he was provided a resignation letter and, at the time of
his interview, was still looking for a new job. Tulus had no specific plans for the present or
the future, but rather was again biding his time before the next opportunity, ready to
anticipate what might come next. He said: ‘It’s better to be here anyway. If you want some-
thing, [it will] depend on how we manage it, negatively or positively. That depends on us.’
While these future trajectories point to the unfolding of new desires for action and
potential mobility, I am concerned with the emergence of migration, its generation
across multiple temporalities and the desire involved in making movement. What
Tulus’ account suggests is that we cannot limit our understanding of migration to singular
moments and purely strategically oriented linear progression. Rather, Tulus’ narrative
reveals the multiple temporalities of migration (Cwerner 2001), the way it involves
starts and stops, possibilities and prospects but also blockages and diversions. His
migration is entangled in a whole array of expressions of desire, for livelihood, to
support his family, to seek excitement and possibility, for being successful and, as he
put it, ‘risk’ and ‘speculation’. Critically, none of these trajectories is known in advance.
Tulus is rather driven by desires for becoming otherwise, but he is also channelled
along unexpected pathways to neighbouring towns, Jakarta, to Japan imaginatively but
not corporeally, to Batam and Bintan, back to Padang and finally to South Korea. His
arrival in South Korea is equally unknown, both in terms of what his life will be like
and the kinds of possibilities that lie ahead. Even as he experiences limitation and difficul-
ties in this new life, desire nonetheless drives his mobility and his will to remain in South
Korea – it creates the conditions for doing things that are difficult and unpredictable; it
generates, in other words, migration.

Nonoy: migration assemblage

Nonoy came from a family where migration was the norm. He grew up as the eldest of
three children, born to a Spanish mother and a Filipino father, who lived across four differ-
ent provincial areas of Luzon. His aunties raised him as his mother held jobs as a clerk, a
teacher and a farm labourer while Nonoy’s father was working in construction in Saudi
Arabia. All of Nonoy’s cousins have lived and worked abroad, and his younger sister is
currently working abroad as a first-aid assistant in shipping.
Nonoy completed high school and holds a bachelor’s degree in information systems. His
aunties and parents had long encouraged independence – ‘that was the rule in our household’
– and Nonoy had been working and independently supporting himself both during and fol-
lowing university. After graduation, he planned to work for a while and then study nursing.
10 F. L. COLLINS

But then migration generally, and South Korea specifically, suddenly appeared on the
horizon. Nonoy’s cousin (whose siblings had all been to South Korea) proposed that they
go see the recruiter. While Nonoy at the time had no migration intentions, he decided to
go along as a favour. The recruiter they met had other ideas, immediately asking:
‘Would you like to go to Taiwan? Because you’re in already. All they look for in Taiwan is just
the appearance, anyway. They want people who look tall, and then decent-looking, good-
looking.’ […] So I said, ‘Well!’ But my cousin said the salaries were quite low. Then [the
recruiter] said, ‘What’s booming now is Korea.’

This was 2004, and the EPS was being established as a new scheme for migrants. At the
time, there was a minimum wage, backing came from the government and Korean
popular culture flooded the Philippines. Desire lurks in such encounters not because indi-
viduals suddenly change their minds, but because desire is a force that draws subjects into
wider social assemblages that generate possibilities once either unknown or shrouded;
individuals themselves become part of a migration assemblage (Rubinov 2014).
A week later, Nonoy received a callback from the recruiter saying, ‘You’re in for the
interview.’ He had to make a difficult decision – he was due to pay tuition fees for
nursing school that day and was also required to attend a medical examination, without
which he could not go forward for migrant selection. He did the medical, though noted
that study was ‘the only thing on my mind’. It was his parents, who have their own his-
tories of mobility, who added the extra motivation.
I talked to my mom and dad. I said, ‘Well. I might be going abroad. I would like to study
again though.’ I really wanted to study, and they knew it, that I wanted to study again.
[…] They said, ‘You don’t know your luck – if you’d like to give it a try, since your papa
went abroad in the past too.’ […] Then [Papa] said, ‘Just try it and then lucks comes.’ I
passed the medical exam. So that’s when I started training.

With one year until deployment, Nonoy started preparing, a process that engendered exci-
tement and anxiety, feelings that we can understand as common results of desire. He met a
Korean volunteer at university and started to learn the language, tried some Korean food –
including a month of eating kimchi every day – and watched lots of dramas, films and
videos to learn about Korea.
Nonoy’s narrative is one of becoming part of a ‘migration assemblage’ – the social and
material interactions that constitute migration as a process and set of practices (Rubinov
2014). This assemblage involves various actors and objects: recruiters, the intergovernmen-
tal agreement between South Korea and the Philippines, Nonoy’s friends and family and the
Korean volunteer as key facilitators; popular culture; objects like kimchi and other Korean
foods; as well as Nonoy’s own personal history and predilection for independence. These
diverse components interact to generate migration. They articulate desire for movement
as a necessary undertaking, one that takes Nonoy forward in the world, even if, as in
Tulus’ case, not in a direction he can fully grasp at this stage. The migration assemblage
is one that stretches across territories, articulated through regulatory settings and border
spaces, but nonetheless creating channels for mobility of different kinds.
In South Korea, Nonoy undertook the required training and was employed in Ulsan. In
Ulsan, friends who had earlier migrated to South Korea helped Nonoy get oriented to his new
setting and provided information about how to relating to employers and other people. Still,
there was newness and conflicting feelings of pleasure, concern, excitement and anxiety.
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 11

Korea is beautiful, but I said, ‘This is the kind of beauty that’s got something hidden behind it.’
That’s what I discovered, that Korea is beautiful, but there are things that you need to adjust to
as a foreigner. […] There’s the feeling of excitement, […] you’re nervous, anxious, like what
kind of attitude do these Koreans have, since all the Koreans I’d met at that point were very
nice – but [the Korean volunteer] said, ‘Not all Koreans are kind, they’re rude.’ […] I’d only
been at my company for a month, and I got to see all types of Korean attitudes.

Over his six years in South Korea, Nonoy became increasingly entangled in various
migration assemblages. He stayed in Ulsan for two years until the factory closed and
then moved to Cheonan for another two years before relocating to Suwon. Throughout
this time he travelled frequently, visiting new places and equipped with only a map and
a language book, meeting new people (often migrants) and learning about South Korea.
These contacts shaped his mobilities in important ways, providing information about
employers and conditions that he might find in different jobs. Nonoy also became
involved in migrant organisations, initially in Ulsan, where he helped form a group to
connect Filipino workers and Filipino wives of Korean men, and then in Cheonan,
where he worked with a migrant community organisation. Eventually, as his profile
grew, he was asked to take on a key role in a Filipino publication for migrant workers,
which would have him shuttling from Seoul to Cheonan each week.
I was an officer for a community there, an education community. The people who would visit
were, people from the Philippine embassy, they said, ‘Hey, you could be a writer for this pub-
lication in Seoul. […] Just give it a try.’

Nonoy’s mobility and practices can be understood as examples of the ‘social and material
interactions that constitute migrant assemblages’ (Rubinov 2014, 186). His increasing
involvement in these activities intensified his investment and role in migrant lives and net-
works in South Korea. It reflects how he was drawn into this world of opportunity not only
for strategically imagined instrumental outcomes, but also as part of a wider process of
becoming otherwise. Becoming part of these arrangements is about becoming increasingly
central in the migration assemblage, about being one of the gears or cogs in the machine
that makes migration possible; desire, in this context, can be understood as a person’s ‘fas-
cination with these gears, his desire to make certain of these gears go into operation, to be
himself one of these gears’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 56). Nonoy’s narrative demon-
strates that migration is relational, and that the desire that generates migration cannot
be disentangled from the wider social and material assemblages that migrants become
part of. Many migrants remain at the periphery of these arrangements, engaging in mobi-
lity that is generated through relations to various actors, materials, ideas and systems, but
only taking a partial role as a gear in these assemblages. Others like Nonoy are driven by
desires for not only migrating – a specific practice – but also becoming through that
process, for being otherwise in ways that alter their own subjectivity and place in the
world as well as the configurations of migration itself.

Thuy: becoming otherwise

Thuy grew up in a rural area north of Hanoi, Vietnam. Her parents were farmers and
before coming to South Korea when she was 20, Thuy had not travelled outside their
village. She described her family as ‘poor’ and described having limited opportunities.
She completed secondary school, but could not afford further study and felt that she
12 F. L. COLLINS

was not helpful on her parents’ farm. The prospect of South Korea emerged in quite a
different way than it did for Tulus, Nonoy and many other participants in this research.
Through neighbours, Thuy’s parents were introduced to a Korean man seeking a Vietna-
mese wife. During the interview she whispered:
I decided to go to Korea to work to earn money. I came here because I wanted to work. In
order to come here, I had to arrange a ‘fake marriage’. […] I was introduced by neighbours
and people living around my home.

Initially, this ‘fake marriage’ brought Thuy to Busan, where she lived with her husband’s
family. The experience was difficult. A contrast to her aspirations for work and supporting
her family in Vietnam, her new family envisaged her role as a wife and a future mother
restricted to the household. The marriage lasted six months and was characterised by fre-
quent arguments and domestic violence that eventually led Thuy to flee. She did not wish
to travel back to Vietnam because she would not be permitted to return to South Korea.
Without legal status outside the marriage, however, Thuy had to find a means to establish
an undocumented way of living. She followed advice offered by other Vietnamese people
and went to Gyeonggi Province in Seoul’s outskirts, where she lived in an overcrowded
apartment with other migrants.
Eight people shared the apartment, so our lives were so complicated. At that time, I don’t
have a job so life is very tough and miserable. I lived for one year here just staying at
home without working because I didn’t dare collect my documents at that time and employ-
ers don’t hire labourers without [their first having] legal documents. If I was lucky, they
might hire me, but just for a few days. My earnings were so little that I had to borrow
money from my friends.

Despite the stark differences in experience, Thuy’s account was reminiscent of the social
assemblage of migration that Nonoy described. She took advice from other Vietnamese
people to escape her marriage and became part of a group of migrants who lived below
the radar in Seoul’s urban periphery (Collins 2016). The situation is more complex of
course, with eight different women living together without status – a ‘complicated’
space where the hopes and aspirations of migration turn to ‘misery’. Thuy’s narrative
also reminds us that migrant assemblages manifest both in transparent ways, such as
the establishment of associations and publications, and below the radar, in situations
where invisibility is a means for maintaining the possibilities of migration (Papadopoulos
and Tsianos 2013).
What is desire, though, in this case? Surely in moments when life is ‘miserable’ staying
does not appear as a desirable pursuit. ‘Why do [people] fight for their servitude as stub-
bornly as though it were their salvation?’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 29). As Deleuze and
Guattari (1983, 1986) remind us, desire should not be confused with choice or ‘interest’; it
needs to be understood as a wider investment in social formations. Thuy’s investment in
the prospects and possibilities of migration has drawn her into a wider social assemblage,
which is not determined only by independent decisions about what might be calculated as
best for her in a given situation. Desire is a force that makes it possible for individuals to do
things in the world. Desire ‘is not a question of a consciously willed personal decision’
(Massumi 1992, 95), but rather of being taken elsewhere.
In the ensuing years, Thuy established a more secure but still marginal position for
herself in South Korea. She eventually found a job in a car accessories factory, a very
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 13

physically demanding role working from 8:30 in the morning until late in the evening.
Thuy remained in this job for a year, during which time her family re-established
contact with an aunt who had lived in South Korea for 11 years. This new connection
made it possible for Thuy to have a more stable life even as she remained undocumented.
Her aunt helped her to learn some Korean language, to find less demanding and exploi-
tative work and to establish a sense of stability in life. At the time of her interview, Thuy
had a quality-checking role at work, which she described as giving her increased autonomy
on the job and fostering good relations with her employers and colleagues.
I’m very satisfied. At the beginning, it was so difficult to learn from scratch that I wanted to
give up sometimes. But now after three months, I’ve got used to it and find my job very inter-
esting. Most of the people in the company – six colleagues including me, Filipino and Thai
[colleagues] – are satisfied with this job. […] My boss is [also] very friendly. Sometimes he
teases me when he meets me at work. I think other bosses must be different, but my boss is
very easy-going.

Thuy also revealed a level of familiarity and comfort with living in her current neighbour-
hood, which may seem surprising for an undocumented migrant. She continued to learn
Korean and talked about how she had established relationships with other foreigners in the
area as well as elderly Korean neighbours. She also started to support a young Vietnamese
woman who had left her marriage and began trying to establish a sustainable life without
documents. Thuy herself is looking to the future.
I want to live in Korea forever, but it is a pity that I have lived here for seven years without living
with a family. I moved out to live, so I don’t have legal documents. I am asking some people to
help me to have Korean nationality so I can live here. I badly want to have nationality, but I don’t
know [if] my dream can come true or not. […] At first [my parents] were very worried about me,
but now they feel better. I always tell them that I am fine here, live alone here very well, no bond
or no difficulties. For the first time in Korea, it was really tough, but after seven years, I feel like I
don’t think I am Vietnamese anymore. Although my Korean is not so good, but I keep thinking
that I am the same as other Korean people. I never think that I am a foreigner, a Vietnamese
[person]. Now I think I am a Korean, I live in Korea so I am a Korean.

While caution is needed in assessing the possibilities for Thuy to be recognised as Korean,
legally or socio-culturally, this assertion of an alternative future reveals a substantial trans-
formation of subjectivity. Like other undocumented migrants, Thuy’s insistence on
remaining in South Korea despite her lack of status subverts the regulations of migration,
both in the framework of the EPS, which limits migrants’ time as workers, and in the mar-
riage migration regime that links individual rights to a woman’s role as wife and mother.
Her articulation of desiring to become Korean, or to make a future in South Korea, was not
shared by all participants in this research, but it does demonstrate the kinds of unforesee-
able futures that emerge through migration. Indeed, the restrictions placed on migrants’
rights or tenure in South Korea are designed to reduce the amount of experience that
migrants might build up, to disrupt attempts to establish belonging and identification.
Becoming undocumented subverts this because it exposes migrants to the risks and repres-
sion of irregular migrant life. This transformation also, however, allows individuals like
Thuy to direct their own mobilities, to support the presence of others and to establish a
new life and future. Desire makes things possible. It forces us towards futures that are
not known in advance, entangles us in wider social assemblages and generates a new poli-
tics of becoming in the world through our own transformation.
14 F. L. COLLINS

Conclusion
The rationalities of migration management, such as those expressed in South Korean
migration regimes, are based on the ideal of ordered and regulated flows. They presume
that migrants will act in the manner of rational calculating subjects, making decisions
from available information, assessing risks and planning for determinate futures within
the constraints of regulation. The narratives presented here demonstrate the unpredict-
ability and excess that is manifest in movement, even through highly regulated arrange-
ments and despite the seemingly undesirable outcomes of migration. When read
through the conceptual vocabulary of desire, it becomes possible to put aside more reduc-
tive visions of migration as always being a result of rational economic actions, which still
haunt the field of migration studies today. This focus on desire is a particularly important
tool for responding to the normatively charged optimism around migration and develop-
ment and the idea that migration can be a ‘win-win-win’ scenario (De Haas 2010). A focus
on desire demonstrates that migration is never so circumscribed, that it is rather caught up
in forces that are entangled in migrant lives but are not theirs to fully control. The narra-
tives presented here show that migrants can certainly direct their own mobilities in spite of
regulation. However, it is also clear that this direction can only be revealed through careful
attention to the ways in which desire emerges in a socially distributed, rather than simply
atomistic way, and the manner in which desire is encouraged, enlisted, channelled or
impeded in relation to migration regimes.
Three more specific points emerge from the notion of desire and its expression in these
narratives. Firstly, the focus on migrant desires demonstrates the multiple temporalities
and rhythms of migration – the ways in which the generation of migration is distributed
across the pasts of migrants and their families and into their lives abroad. As Tulus, Nonoy
and Thuy reveal, migration cannot be understood as generated in a singular moment of
‘decision-making’, but rather must be grasped across past–present–future. The prospect
of migration emerges through family situations and orientations, encounters with
images and imaginings of different places, the mobility of others, as well as the work of
actors such as friends, agents and volunteers. As much as migration can be situated in
relation to projective future-oriented aspirations, these stories also demonstrate how it
hinges on opportunism and the time of grasping the moment. Migrants like Tulus,
Nonoy and Thuy articulate a kind of ‘anticipatory politics’ (Simone 2010). They speak
of taking chances when they arise, taking risks or speculating on opportunities in order
to alter their position in the world or to achieve certain things for themselves or their
families. Migration intersects, in other words, with drives for going elsewhere or being
otherwise, for achieving or avoiding (un)desirable futures, that are often not the result
of calculative rationality as it is so often conceived in migration research.
Secondly, migration involves relational spatialities, or what I have called ‘migration
assemblages’. As each participant has demonstrated, migration is entangled in relation-
ships between multiple people, places and objects that come together to shape migration
and its outcomes. Recognising the way desire works through these social formations is
critical if we are to understand the ways in which migration regimes, such as those in
South Korea, stretch across borders and into the lives of individuals in both sending
and receiving nations. Yet, these assemblages cannot be understood simply as a static
infrastructure. They must be examined in terms of the effects they have in migrant
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 15

mobilities – the desires they generate or reconfigure, the possibilities they offer or impede.
Desire also draws attention to the role of migrants as active constituents of these assem-
blages, actors who in different ways become the very gears in the machine that makes
migration a desirable phenomenon in the world.
Lastly, these narratives and the focus on desire highlight the ways in which migration
necessarily involves becoming as much as being. In their imaginaries, mobilities and every-
day lives, migrants transcend mobility regimes and their attendant politics of truth. In
their very being and becoming in the world, migrants both appropriate and rework the
territorialising powers of migration regimes – they become the labouring bodies desired
in these regimes as well as active human subjects whose presence can never be completely
contained. They become key actors in organisations that alter the politics of migration, like
Nonoy, or they subvert the workings of the migration regime by becoming undocumented,
like Thuy, and insisting on their continuing presence and stability. In either case, such
becoming, as this article has shown, is more than the result of calculative thought on
the part of migrants or government. It demonstrates the way in which desire and the
migration it generates is always about transformation of subjecthood, about becoming
more than just a migrant.

Acknowledgements
This research would not have been possible without the contribution of four research assistants: Đô
Diêu Khuê, Vorarerk Khunthongkum, Jeremiah Magoncia and Viko Zakhary. I would also like to
thank Jørgen Carling and the anonymous reviewer for their commentary and guidance on the paper.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Korea Foundation [1022000-3992].

ORCID
Francis L. Collins http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9453-4465

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