LAUSR

ABSTRACT This article examines how migrants mobilise ethnicity for migration purposes by drawing on the migration trajectories of ethnic Korean migrants from northeast China (Korean Chinese) – through various steppingstone countries, including South Korea – to the U.S. I focus on how regulatory authorities, various intermediaries, and aspiring migrants interact over the valorisation, conversion, and legitimisation of what I call ‘ethnic capital’. Drawing on ethnographic field research in China, South Korea, and the U.S., I show how multiple manifestations of ethnic capital – coethnic networks, Korean proficiency, perceived phenotypical affinities, kinship relations with South Korean citizens, and derivatively, South Korean citizenship/passports (obtained legally or illegally) – facilitate Korean Chinese stepwise migration. I also examine how the differential endowment of migration-facilitating capital (including ethnic capital) produces fine-grained material and symbolic stratification in the sending community and identify the distinctive moral economy that informs Korean Chinese navigation of global mobility regimes. By illuminating the strategies of capital-constrained migrants facing policy contexts markedly different from the much-studied European cases, this article highlights the contested process through which ethnicity is turned into migration-facilitating capital, expands our inquiry on the ‘flexible citizenship’ practices beyond the jet-setting managerial class, and deepens our comparative understanding of ethnic affinity migration and external citizenship.