The Financial Lives of Irregular Vietnamese Migrants to the UK

September's CHASM online seminar will be led by Dr Seb Rumsby, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow based at University of Birmingham's Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity (IRiS). Seb is an interdisciplinary scholar with a wide range of interests including everyday politics, labour exploitation, undocumented migration, ethno-religious politics, grassroots development, and financialisation.

How do marginalised labour migrants make ends meet under the pressures of precarious work, debt incurred to finance migration, obligations to send remittances, and inflation? In this seminar he will explain the political economy of recent labour migration from Vietnam to the UK, exploring the impacts of financial and immigration policies in both origin and destination countries. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Vietnamese migrant community in the UK, Seb will analyse people's financial and employment decision-making rationales in light of their legal precarity and exploitative working conditions.