LAUSR

This article examines whether and how migrants’ engagement with the religious asylum regime brings about changes in their religious self-understandings. Instead of taking for granted the predominant impact of immigration law on migrants’ identities, I pay attention to the intersection of multiple temporalities that shape migrants’ encounters with immigration law, offering alternative futures and competing possibilities for their becoming. The article draws on long-term, multisited ethnographic research among ethnic Korean migrants from China (Korean Chinese) who applied for asylum in the USA as Christians. It explains the Korean Chinese migrants’ encounter with the US asylum institution and its impact on their religious self-understandings through the intersection of three temporalities: the temporality of the asylum regime in the post-Cold War USA; the temporality of the migration boom in China’s northeastern ethnic minority region; and the temporality of Korean evangelicalism with global missionary networks. Korean Chinese (im)mobility in the post-Cold War era was understood, propelled, and governed according to the spatiotemporal and political imaginations that undergirded these three temporalities. They also influenced how futures were imagined, desired, and dreaded, and how the present was organized in relation to these alternative futures. The interplay among these three temporalities shaped whether Korean Chinese migrants applied for asylum as Christians, how they organized the prolonged refugee status determination process, and how they made futures out of it, refusing or embracing Christian conversion as a desirable and plausible future. I conclude by discussing the article’s implications for the temporal turn in migration scholarship.