Tourism, Ethnic Diversity and the City

Jan Rath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415514019
• eBook ISBN: 9781134315949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Tourism, Ethnic Diversity and the City fills a gap in existing research in terms of how immigration relates to urban tourism and investigates the new theoretical insights and challenges for empirical research using informative case studies drawn from several advanced economies in Europe, North America and Australia.

This enlightening book clearly explores the frontiers of knowledge on the interrelationship between tourism, migration, ethnic diversity and place. Exploring further the manifestations of ethnic diversity that have been commodified by immigrants in gateway cities, questioning how these expressions of culture can be transformed into vehicles for further developing the urban tourism economy.

Tourism, Ethnic Diversity and the City presents a multidisciplinary approach drawing on key names from the field of geography, sociology, planning and political science and will appeal to those with an interest in any of these areas.

Part I
Immigrant entrepreneurs

2
Making the new economy

Immigrant entrepreneurs and emerging transnational networks of international education and tourism in Seoul and Vancouver

Min-Jung Kwak and Daniel Hiebert

International population movements have been a key feature of globalization. With the rapid economic restructuring of recent years, most urban centres in advanced economies have been transformed by a significant level of global migration (Castles and Miller 2003). Migrants arrive through different means and under different administrative categories, depending on the purposes and conditions of their travel. They include people working in unskilled jobs, asylum seekers, highly skilled workers, entrepreneurs, students and tourists. For most immigrant-accepting countries, the four latter groups have been considered more welcome as sources of labour and innovation – and, of course, consumer spending – and have therefore been favoured with friendlier migration policies. This has been the case in Canada too. Since the mid-1980s, the numbers of ‘economic-class immigrants’, foreign students and tourists have grown significantly in major Canadian cities.

While these movements are often discussed as concurrent outcomes of globalization, there has been little effort to examine them as mutually reinforcing phenomena. Tourism has been categorized as a movement more or less divorced from other, more ‘purposeful’ migrations (such as temporary migration for work or education and permanent migration). While much research has been done in the separate disciplinary areas of tourism and migration, there has been little effort to conceptualize the interrelationship between them (Williams and Hall 2000). In this chapter, we examine some of the ‘messy’ dynamics of different migrant flows between South Korea and Canada. We do this through a case study of Vancouver, in the province of British Columbia (BC), focusing more particularly on its Korean-origin community. We thereby situate immigrant entrepreneurs both in the circuits of tourism and in other forms of temporary and permanent migration, and we discuss their active roles in connecting what are usually seen as relatively autonomous processes. This, in turn, leads us to challenge the assumed boundaries between the production and consumption of cultural tourism. We also examine the extent and ways in which nation-states regulate (and deregulate) the operational circuits of tourism and migration. Finally, we discuss the unpredictable future of the new economic opportunities emerging in tourism and educational migration.

Conceptual framework

Tourist activities are conceptually understood as an escape from routine in a search for ‘other’ experiences (Cloke 2000). Tourists are thus seeking transient consumption of aesthetic ‘Otherness’ in unfamiliar nature and/or culture. Riding on the developments in transportation and communication technologies, the search for Otherness has tremendously expanded its territorial boundaries. As tourism grew into an increasingly important aspect of the global economy, a large volume of research projects on the subject emerged, contributing to our practical understanding of these activities. Until the 1990s, however – before social science was transformed by what has come to be known as the ‘cultural turn’ – most tourism studies focused on the consumption side of tourism. The patterns, sites, impacts and behaviours associated with tourism have been studied extensively. Meanwhile, the ‘production’ of these sites has largely been taken for granted and assumed to be a gift of nature or, in urban cases, the result of fortunate historical circumstances.

Drawing on the critical views of cultural studies, recent critics of these foundational studies have called for more nuanced attention to the issues of tourism production. Britton (1991), for example, argued that tourism and travel have been treated as discrete economic subsystems for too long, and that researchers have ignored the links between tourism and structural, economic, social and cultural dimensions of capitalist accumulation (see also Zukin 1990). By studying tourism as a production system that builds and markets ‘places and people as a package’, researchers have begun to problematize the status of ‘authenticity’ (Hughes 1995). From this point of view, the commodification of culture in tourist sites and spectacles is part of a social construction of reality and place, and is characterized by racialized representations that are the product of uneven power relations. This logic has also motivated new interpretations of urban cultural landscapes, such as ‘Chinatowns’ in North American and European cities (e.g. Anderson 1995; Oakes 1993). Key to this work is the idea that sites do not come to be valued by tourists ‘naturally’, but instead are given meaning through cultural practices.

The ‘commodification of culture’ is an important concept here. We hope to develop an understanding of tourism that not only takes the production and the consumption of touristic experiences into account, but also the interaction between these processes (see also Ateljevic 2000). We will therefore elucidate the role of migrants in circuits of international tourism both as international tourists and as part of the local production of cultural resources. But we emphasize that these developments are mutually constitutive.

Our second analytical theme focuses on the interplay of human agency and structural forces in tourism, and we situate our analysis within a broader context of political economy. This leads us to consider the structural conditions that enable the utilization of cultural capital on different scales, both global and local. Some commentators accept the premise that nation-states have become powerless in the context of irreversible global market forces (Ohmae 1993). We see the opposite. The relationship between the regulatory practices of the state and the development of markets now seems tighter than ever in many ways (Freeman and Ögelman 2000; Kloosterman 2000). In the most general terms, we agree with the view that markets are hardly ‘free’ at all, and that they instead exist within – and are defined by – a plethora of regulations that govern employment relations and trade systems, that distinguish between legal and illegal products, and so on (Engelen 2003). We focus on more specific matters, of course, and we seek to show that the opportunities embraced by Korean entrepreneurs in Vancouver’s tourism and educational sectors are created, or at least supported, to a large degree by activities of the Canadian and South Korean states.

Thirdly, following the lead of critical scholarship (whether arising out of feminism, post-structuralism or anti-racist research), we want to show that taken-for-granted categories frequently conceal important social processes. While we emphasize the role of government in creating a welcome environment for the development of export education, it is equally important to note that many aspects of the emerging system defy the categories – and the regulatory practices – of the state. Ironically, the very regulations that enable this type of entrepreneurship are sometimes circumvented by it. This point has been made by scholars studying transnationalism since the pioneering work of Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton (1992, 1995; see also Vertovec 1999), and it is made most emphatically by Bailey (2001), who argues that traditional dichotomies and categories such as forced versus voluntary migration or temporary versus permanent migration are invalid in the face of the flexible strategies employed by migrants – and, we would add, by states. We examine the ways in which immigrants, students and tourists acquire and utilize cultural capital. We also demonstrate how individuals develop complex trajectories of migration based on their assessment of changing economic opportunities.

Finally, our analysis is guided by an important question that animates scholarship in another field. In the study of immigrant entrepreneurship so far, research has focused mostly on immigrant participation in traditional, low-level, economic activities, such as restaurants, laundries, garment production, taxi operations and the like (Collins et al. 1995; Light and Bonacich 1988; Rath 2002; Waldinger and Lichter 2003; some exceptions are Li et al. 2002; Lo forthcoming; Wang 1999; Zhou 1998). Instead, we explore immigrants who are developing opportunities at the heart of the knowledge-based economy, in tourism and international education. We can thereby observe the active agency of immigrant enterprise in the ‘branding’ of Vancouver as a gateway city. We ask whether the recent shift of immigrant enterprise into these sectors represents a real departure from the rather limited opportunities for immigrant entrepreneurship in more traditional fields. More particularly: does the shift from low-level to high-level service provision generate more stable opportunities for immigrant entrepreneurs?

As is increasingly common in contemporary migration studies, we have pursued several forms of information to make our case. We have assembled both census data and administrative data on landings in Canada to build a portrait of the Korean-origin group in Greater Vancouver. Second, we interviewed 17 key informants in the Korean Canadian community. These include three social workers who provide counselling to Korean immigrants and temporary residents in Vancouver, two representatives of Korean Canadian community associations, ten Korean Canadian immigrant entrepreneurs in tourism and international education sectors, one Korean Canadian real estate agent and one investment advisor. All the interviews were carried out in Korean (by Min-Jung Kwak) and translated and transcribed into English for use by both researchers.

Korean immigration and visits to Canada and Vancouver

During the long period of racialized immigration policy in Canada, until the mid-1960s, very few Koreans were admitted. The first period of Korean settlement thus began in the 1960s and involved the entry of skilled workers and their families. Changes in family reunification policy in 1976 led to a lull in immigration from Korea for the next ten years – a time when Koreans migrated instead to the USA in large numbers (see Light and Bonacich 1988). Many Koreans entering Canada during the early two decades quickly turned to entrepreneurial activities, establishing a pattern of economic incorporation still relevant today. The third and still current period began in the mid-1980s, when the Canadian government doubled its immigrant targets and put heavier emphasis on attracting business immigrants (notably by creating a new class of ‘investor immigrants’). In recent years (1999–2001), Korea has become the fifth largest source of immigrants to Canada. Since the late 1990s, Canada has become a more important destination for Korean immigrants than the United States.

The growth in Korean immigration to Canada has been more than matched by increases in the numbers of Koreans coming to Canada as tourists, visitors and temporary residents. In 2002, according to the agency Tourism British Columbia, South Korea accounted for the fourth largest number of individuals cleared through customs in British Columbia (after USA, Japan and UK). This is a remarkable statistic, considering the high degree of transnationalism associated with the overseas Chinese (e.g. Ong 1999; Yeung and Olds 2000), and the fact that the Vancouver Korean population is far smaller than its Chinese- and Indian-ori...

Table of contents

• Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Immigrant entrepreneurs
• Part II Immigrant workers
• Part III Ethnic diversity in urban place promotion
• Index