Many countries in the region received their first nationality law while
still under colonial rule.108 After gaining independence, Asian states had
to undergo a dynamic process of (re)formulating these citizenship
regimes, which was sometimes influenced by inter-communal hostility
and prejudices that had taken root during colonial rule.109 The new
circumstance of statehood, which also often gave political power to
majority communities, provided the conditions for social and political
exclusion to take on the form of ‘statelessness’. Formal proof of belonging
to a state became imperative in many new Asian nations, leaving those
who failed to secure such formalities at risk of non-recognition. For
instance, when Singapore became independent in 1965, a group of
persons who had been born in pre-independence Singapore became
stateless as they had no documents to prove their place of birth, despite
having lived nowhere else but within the modern borders of
Singapore.110 Rectification of their status requires access to legal mechanisms. Such frictions between identity, belonging, and nationality in
post-colonial Asia, and the sometimes paucity of legal solutions, are
discussed in the chapters throughout this book. The issue of borders
and mobilities in general, as part of but also beyond colonial legacies will
be discussed further in the next sub-section.
Second, many colonial projects in Asia involved migration across the
empire, with lasting effects on historic migrant populations and permanently changing demographics. For instance, the British Empire facilitated
migration between India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia and other states
in the region to fill labour needs on plantations, in mines, for construction, and in administration, while the French enabled Vietnamese migration across their Indochinese territories of Cambodia and Laos. Labour
migrants also came from China, mainly into Southeast Asia, where they
joined long-established flourishing Chinese merchant and minority
108
See for instance Christopher Goscha, Going Indochinese: Contesting Concepts of Space
and Place in French Indochina (NIAS Press 2012); and Kalyani Ramnath, ‘Histories of
Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation’ (2021) 45(1) Itinerario 152. See also
Tendayi Bloom, ‘Citizenship and Colonialism’ (2018) 67 Soundings 114.
109
Michelle Ann Miller (ed), Ethnic and Racial Minorities in Asia: Inclusion or Exclusion?
(Routledge 2013).
110
See ‘Head P – Ministry of Home Affairs’, Singapore Parliamentary Reports (12 March 2004).
See also Xue Jianyue, ‘90% of stateless applicants obtained S’pore citizenship between 2003 and
2012’ (Today Online 14 August 2013) <www.todayonline.com/singapore/90-stateless-appli
cants-obtained-spore-citizenship-between-2003-and-2012> accessed 13 September 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009399555.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press