I am a sociologist of international migration with three research programs.

My first program examines the privatization of migration control and the ways aspiring migrants resist this outsourcing of state power. Based on 31 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 275 interviews in three countries (Vietnam, Taiwan, and Trinidad and Tobago), I found that brokers are necessary to the labor migration process, yet their opportunistic behavior impedes migrants’ journeys. Simultaneously, migrants are not helpless pawns even given these taxing constraints on their freedom to migrate. Rather, the results of my work demonstrate how migrants develop “broker wisdom” or strategies to subvert the intensification of migration control. These findings are forthcoming at Sociological Forum.

My second program explores the incorporation process of Asian American immigrants and their descendants. This earlier work has led to two sole-authored journal articles. The first, published in Ethnicities, finds that organizational participation based on horizontal peer groups can result in downward assimilation amongst second-generation Vietnamese Americans. The second article, published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, argues that ethnicity in a Japanese Buddhist temple fluctuates across time and place and is not something that simply dissipates in the process of immigrant assimilation.

My third program investigates the intersection of international migration and industrial fisheries. The article “Unanticipated Transformations of Infrapolitics,” published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, explains how migrant fishermen resist their despotic work conditions on the high seas and abscond to foreign shores. The acts of desertion leads to cascading transformations to national policies in Vietnam, Taiwan, and Trinidad. My second article, “The Homeland and the High Seas: Cross-Border Connections between Vietnamese Migrant Fishermen’s Home Villages and Industrial Fisheries,” was published in Maritime Studies and explores how a chemical spill in Vietnam led migrant fishermen to renegotiate their work conditions on the high seas.