Wei Si Nic Yiu

This project focuses on migrant Chinese women and aims to 1) ethnographically document how migrant Chinese women experience, navigate, and understand their self-deportation from the Western U.S., including California, Oregon, and Washington to Vancouver, B.C., Canada; 2) examine and challenge narratives of deservingness and migrants’ rights; 3) analyze the effects of the U.S. and Canadian immigration regimes, and 4) how these effects are gendered, racialized, and carceral. "Traveling Up North" examines Chinese women’s self-deportation as a constrained and coerced decision produced out of an extraordinary set of circumstances. This research uncovers migrant Chinese women’s experience of the violence of immigration regimes and afterlives of self-deportation. Migrant women’s stories in the United States do not end there.