From formal membership to substantive belonging

Abstract

This article concludes the special issue ‘Immigrant Life in the Age of Extremism’. It brings the five contributions — on the political participation of Korean Australians, dementia care for Korean migrants in Australia, migrant interpreting in Taiwan’s courts, Jadid reform in Russian Central Asia, and party competition over immigration in Japan — into a single comparative argument organized around two concepts. Membership denotes the formal statuses through which a person is recognized as part of a community, including citizenship, residence status and eligibility for public services. Substantive belonging denotes the condition in which those statuses are realized in everyday life as participation, voice, recognition, care and dignity.

The comparison yields three cumulative propositions: first, that a gap between the two exists across different institutional sites; secondly, that the gap is widened or narrowed by institutional mediation, that is, by how parties, media, interpreters, families, professionals and schools enable or constrain the practical use of formal status; and thirdly, that the gap becomes politicized when exclusionary politics attaches itself to existing hierarchies and structures of mediation. The comparison further specifies these propositions. It treats the study of Mahmudkhodja Behbudiy as a limit case in which the institutional foundations of membership had first to be constructed, and distinguishes the informal transfer of mediating labour to minorities from minority-led efforts to build alternative institutions.

Cautioning against treating every institutional inequality as extremism, the article proposes an institutionally grounded approach to interculturalism centred on access, authority, accountability and the capacity for institutional change. The synthesis is offered as a working hypothesis for future research rather than a definitive generalization.