Jaeeun Kim, Ph.D.

Korea Foundation Endowed Associate Professor of Sociology, Professor of Law (by courtesy)

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Geboren 1978 in Seoul
PhD, Soziologie, University of California, Los Angeles

Arbeitsvorhaben

Repertoires of Redemption: Asylum, Migration, Religion

Students of international migration have long treated religion largely as an engine of assimilation or a sanctuary from exclusion for migrants. But what if membership in a faith community opens for migrants a path to formal, de jure inclusion into their states of residence, leading to the acquisition of coveted membership in affluent liberal democracies? What kinds of practical challenges, legal intricacies, and moral dilemmas do the actors involved face, and how do they make sense of and respond to these? The book I am completing, preliminarily titled Repertoires of Redemption: Asylum, Migration, Religion, seeks to answer these questions. It empirically draws on an in-depth ethnographic investigation of the migration trajectories, legalization strategies, and religious conversion careers of Korean-Chinese migrants to the U.S., focusing especially on those who applied for asylum as Christians in the first two decades of the 21st century.
The book intervenes in three broad subjects. It illustrates the politics of deservingness in the development of immigration relief built on the discourse of “religious freedom” and “global Christian persecution.” It enriches our understanding of migrants’ “unauthorized identity craft”—their transgressive efforts to assume desirable legal personae to achieve their migratory goals. And it sheds light on the complex ecology of for-profit and non-profit intermediaries—including evangelical activists, immigrant churches, and missionaries—that buttress, appropriate, modify, or contest the story that the law tells about itself. In so doing, these intermediaries shape migrants’ aspirations, future-making, and self-making in distinctive ways. Bringing these three subjects together, Repertoires of Redemption offers a multi-perspectival and multi-scalar view of how various state (e.g. the legislative, executive, judicial, and administrative bodies) and non-state actors (e.g. legal professionals, commercial migration brokers, advocacy groups, religious actors, and migrants themselves) make and unmake refugees out of unauthorized migrants from above and below. It shows how migration governance, human rights regimes, and transnational religion are navigated and negotiated on the ground with their full complexity and contradictions.

Recommended Reading

Kim, Jaeeun (2022). “Between Sacred Gift and Profane Exchange: Identity Craft and Relational Work in Asylum Claims-Making on Religious Grounds.” Theory and Society 51 (2): 303–333. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09468-8.
– (2025). “Getting Saved from Illegality and Unbelief? Religious Asylum, Migration Dreams, and Christian Conversion.” In “Mobile Temporalities and Political Possibilities,” special issue, Migration Studies 13 (3). https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnaf041.
Kim, Jaeeun, and Apostolos Andrikopoulos (2026). “Unauthorized Identity Craft: Rethinking ‘Fraud’ in the Study of Migration.” International Migration Review, ahead of print, January 6. https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183251409752.