About

Erin Aeran Chung is the Charles D. Miller Professor of East Asian Politics and serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research specializes in East Asian political economy, comparative citizenship and migration politics, civil society, and comparative racial politics. She has authored significant works including 'Immigration and Citizenship in Japan' and 'Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies,' which have received multiple awards and recognitions, such as the 2021 ASA Asia and Asian America Section Transnational Asia Book Award and the 2021 Research Excellence Award from the Korea Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea. Professor Chung has also been awarded a five-year grant from the Academy of Korean Studies to support her research on Korean Diasporic Citizenship. She has held various prestigious fellowships, including positions with the Mansfield Foundation U.S.-Japan Network for the Future, the SSRC Abe Fellowship, and as an advanced research fellow at Harvard University. At Johns Hopkins, she teaches courses on Japanese, Korean, East Asian, and Asian American politics at both undergraduate and graduate levels, focusing on topics such as civil society, citizenship, immigration politics, democratization, and the political economy of development. Her work contributes to understanding migration, citizenship, and racial politics within East Asia and beyond.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Political economy
• Law
• Development economics
• Gender studies
• Geography
• Epistemology
• Economic geography
• Economics

Selected publications

• JAPAN AS A COUNTRY OF NON-IMMIGRATION

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2025-01-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• 3 The Contingencies of Diasporic Membership

  Lynne Rienner Publishers eBooks · 2025-04-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 11 JAPAN AS A COUNTRY OFNON-IMMIGRATION

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2025-04-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The side doors of immigration: multi-tier migration regimes in Japan and South Korea

  2023-10-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking the migration state: historicising, decolonising, and disaggregating

  Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies · 2023 · 38 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  This essay (re-) introduces the concept of the migration state and its significance for migration studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, discussing its intellectual history and relationship to Hollifield's wider body of work.The authors lay out the main features of the ideal-typical liberal democratic migration state before discussing the extent to which it can be used to describe and theorise a wider variety of migration states, paying attention to the particularities of state development across different cases and regions, but also looking forward to how imperial and colonial legacies may shape future state responses to managing migration and mobility.Drawing on the individual contributions to this special issue, we suggest three theoretical and conceptual moves that can enrich our understanding of contemporary migration states: historicisation, decolonisation, and disaggregation.We discuss how the articles in this special issue engage with the migration state concept in ways that incorporate developments in migration studies over the past twenty years, using the concept to push the field in new temporal and comparative directions that open up the possibility of a more global approach to understanding migration.The essay concludes by looking at the future of the migration state and suggests areas for further research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Politics of Citizenship in Postwar Japan

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

  PublisherDOI

• The developmental migration state

  Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies · 2023 · 38 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  What drives some states to liberalise immigration policies while others resist doing so? Why do states expand rights for some migrants and not for others? Building on Hollifield's [(2004). 'The Emerging Migration State'. International Migration Review 38 (3): 885–912] theory of the migration state, this article explores how the process of political economic development in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan shaped their citizenship regimes and, later, their immigration policies. We argue that the specific patterns of migration management in East Asian democracies – characterised by partially open borders and discrete institutionalised rights for specific subcategories of migrants – is not a reflection of an incomplete liberal migration state but rather, migration control by (formerly or contemporary) developmental states that have historically prioritised economic development, social stability, and national security over democracy and equality. Based on an analysis of archival, policy, and legal documents collected in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan from 2010 to 2019, this article analyzes the emergence of the 'developmental migration state' that correlates migrants' access to rights and permanent settlement with their utility towards national developmental goals.

  PublisherDOI

• Migration governance in East and Southeast Asia

  International Relations of the Asia-Pacific · 2023-09-15 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article explains migration governance in East and Southeast Asia by comparing guestworker programs that have institutionalized labor migration flows between Southeast Asian countries (especially Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam) and the two largest Northeast Asian recipients of labor migration, Japan and South Korea. It demonstrates how these programs have led to heightened competition for skilled labor between countries of destination, while facilitating greater migration flows between countries in Southeast and Northeast Asia. Bilateral economic agreements have engendered highly uneven, underdeveloped frameworks for protecting migrant rights and facilitating migrant integration in countries of destination. The analysis also provides insights into theories of complex interdependence and global migration governance, and shows how migration interdependence (MI) can lead to both cooperation and conflict.

  PublisherDOI

• 14 Immigration and Citizenship in Japan and South Korea

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2022-11-11 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 6 THE DEVELOPMENTAL MIGRATION STATE IN EAST ASIA

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2022-03-01 · 11 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Yunchen Tian

  Tianjin Agricultural University

  4 shared

• Darcie Draudt

  Princeton University

  3 shared

• James F. Hollifield

  2 shared

• Fiona B. Adamson

  Universidad de Londres

  2 shared

• James Tong

  Monash Medical Centre

  1 shared

• Eugene Yong

  1 shared

• Sheila A. Smith

  1 shared

• Daisy Kim

  Pasadena City College

  1 shared

Education

• B.A., Politics

  University of California Santa Cruz

• Ph.D., Political Science

  Northwestern University

• M.A., International Studies

  University of Washington

Awards & honors

• 2021 ASA Asia and Asian America Section Transnational Asia B…
• 2021 APSA Migration & Citizenship Section Book Award Honorab…
• 2021 Research Excellence Award from the Korea Ministry of Ed…
• Five-year grant from the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS)
• Mansfield Foundation U.S.-Japan Network for the Future Progr…