Digital Borders and Bordering Along the Vietnam–Australia Migration Corridor

Research on borders and bordering tends to focus on state-society relationships as well as the distinctions between insiders and outsiders, thereby glossing over the social hierarchies and internal politics of belonging among those on the move. As social media and networking platforms are becoming integral to cross-border migration, it is highly likely the very first borders that migrants encounter are virtual and internal. Drawing on 71 life history interviews with Vietnamese migrants to Australia and ethnographic observations conducted online and offline between 2019 and 2023, I discuss how bordering practices are performed and experienced by migrants in cyberspace as well as the values underpinning their norms of inclusion/exclusion. Migrants actively engage in ‘border work’, and in so doing, they construct and reconstruct narratives of ‘deservingness’ while concurrently reinforcing the social demarcations between those perceived as ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’. The paper invites rethinking of both modern borderscapes and bordering and enriches the scholarly debates on migrant solidarity.