Papers

• Beyond Money: Remittance Motivations and the Social Meanings of Status Investment in Rural Vietnam, case study in Tam Dị, Bắc Giang Nga Ho Thi Thanh Institute of Cultural Studies, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences

  Under the dynamics of the market economy, migration has become a key livelihood strategy for many rural households in Vietnam seeking to diversify income sources and reduce economic vulnerability. Remittances sent by migrants have not only transformed the material landscape of rural regions but also reconfigured social hierarchies, kinship relations, and community power structures. While most existing studies focus on the economic functions of remittances—such as poverty reduction or narrowing income gaps—there remains a notable lack of research addressing their cultural meanings and social implications. From an anthropological perspective, this study examines remittance practices as symbolic and relational exchanges that transcend mere financial value. Remittances are understood not only as monetary transfers but as performative acts of care, obligation, and identity reconstruction, through which migrants sustain emotional attachments, reaffirm moral belonging, and strategically invest in their social status and symbolic capital within their home communities. In particular, this research focuses on remittance flows from Vietnamese migrant workers employed abroad in Tam Dị, Bắc Giang to explore how these transnational monetary exchanges contribute not only to household economies and rural development, but also to the expression of identity, status, and moral value within return communities. By unpacking the cultural logics and social constraints shaping remittance behavior, this article contributes to broader debates on international migration, transnational kinship, and the moral economy of money in contemporary Vietnam.

• Care Labour Migration between Promise and Bureaucratic Disillusionment: Vietnamese Nursing Trainees in Berlin Edda Willamowski Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

  Work, housing, and health are central to the widely diagnosed crisis of social reproduction. This paper examines their entanglement through the case of Vietnamese nursing trainees in Berlin. Recruited into a German healthcare system marked by chronic labor shortages, these trainees confront inadequate linguistic and professional preparation, absent onboarding structures, and the pressures of Berlin’s housing crisis. Increasing dependence on intermediary service structures, migration-related debt, bureaucratic neglect, and physical and emotional exhaustion not only jeopardize the politically favored care labor migration but also directly affect trainees’ health. Within this care regime, the promise of a “welcome culture” rapidly erodes.
  The article presents initial findings from an applied ethnographic research project conducted in Berlin-Lichtenberg, home to Germany’s largest Vietnamese diaspora. Focusing on the first months after arrival, the study explores the everyday living and working conditions of newly arrived nursing trainees. It further analyzes the administrative interfaces governing skilled labor migration, revealing the bureaucratic arrangements through which care regimes are organized and contested. Through thick ethnographic description, the paper demonstrates how diffuse bureaucratic accountability, discriminatory media representations, and broader societal indifference actively precarize Vietnamese nursing trainees and reproduce inequalities within Germany’s care regime.

• Informal infrastructures of care: supporting marginalised migrant workers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam during COVID-19 Rachel Tough University of East Anglia

  During COVID-19 in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of domestic migrant workers fled Ho Chi Minh City under the ‘spontaneous hometown return’ (dân tự phát về quê) movement, journeying to distant provinces in search of safety and sustenance. Many thousands of low-paid labourers remained in the city, however, immobilised by travel restrictions imposed under the country’s Zero-COVID policy or having chosen to remain there out of fear of infecting vulnerable relatives and neighbours back home. Often they faced destitution, having been laid off as the city’s economy contracted rapidly during lockdown.
  Vietnam’s local household registration system (hộ khẩu) effectively categorised many such migrant workers as ‘irregular’ and therefore ineligible for government social assistance at a time of crisis. Meanwhile, official initiatives launched specifically to support displaced migrant labourers were insufficient for the number of claimants, excluded informal economy workers, and were difficult to access. In the end, it was through community-based initiatives that many migrant workers managed to source basic provisions.
  Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in pandemic-afflicted Ho Chi Minh City, I discuss various forms of non-state support that emerged during the pandemic to support marginalised migrant workers, including migrant self- help strategies. I focus on Buddhist charity kitchens, targeted food distribution mediated through hometown associations, digitally enabled crowdfunding, and spontaneous neighbourly sharing. I employ moral economy theory - applied by James Scott to analyse earlier periods of dearth in Vietnam – to explore the moral underpinnings of these initiatives, revealing an ongoing rich tradition of mutual assistance founded on horizontal relations of reciprocity between community members in Vietnam.

• Hope in Transit: Vietnamese Vocational Aspirations before Migration Max Müller Free University of Berlin

  My paper investigates the pre-migration phase of the emerging Vietnamese–German vocational training regime, focusing on how aspirations for social mobility are shaped, disciplined, and contested before departure. Drawing on five months of engaged ethnography across diverse settings ranging from formal vocational colleges (Trường Cao đẳng) and private language centers to informal study circles, the study builds on my dual role as observer and critical language instructor. Rather than merely reiterating the pitfalls of the profit-driven migration industry, the paper foregrounds sites of intervention within this precarious landscape. It highlights the growing involvement of German-born Việt kiều who mobilize their dual cultural and linguistic capital to navigate, negotiate, and partially reconfigure exploitative migration pathways. Positioned between market pressures, state regulations, and ethical commitments, these actors seek to counter recent extractive practices by raising preparation standards and challenging unrealistic expectations. Conceptually, the paper frames language education as a critical site of intervention where diasporic knowledge converges with pedagogical practices informed by migration research in Germany. By equipping prospective migrants with more realistic understandings of vocational training, labor conditions, and everyday life abroad, these translocal efforts attempt to transform “hope in transit” from a commodified promise into a form of navigable agency within a deeply unequal migration regime.

Abstract

Keywords

• Berlin
• COVID-19
• Vietnam
• Vietnamese trainees
• Vietnamese-German vocational migration
• care
• labor migration
• language education
• migration
• mobilities
• moral economy
• pre-migration aspirations
• precarity
• remittances
• social status