Elusive Refuge

Madokoro shows that our grasp of the history of refugees is woefully incomplete unless we take proper account of the international response to those who fled mainland China in the wake of the Chinese Revolution. Her beautifully written book also demonstrates how people ‘on the move’ negotiated all manner of constraints. Innovative in conception and execution, Elusive Refuge makes a very significant contribution to our understanding of the modern world’s response to refugees.
-- Peter Gatrell, author of The Making of the Modern Refugee

Elusive Refuge is pathbreaking in its subject matter. Its interrogation of the history of refugee policy is bold and original, demonstrating the limits of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the consequences of the many shifts—legal, political, and moral—in the meaning of the term ‘refugee.’ Moreover, its concern with asylum seekers, refugees, and immigration policy could not be more timely. An extremely important work.
-- Marilyn Lake, coauthor of Drawing the Global Colour Line

[Madokoro’s] account is valuable for its details and for its demonstration of how the use of the refugee label has sometimes been apt, sometimes misguided, and almost always shifting and ambiguous in its implications. U.S. readers should brace themselves for a framework that regards the U.S. as only one example of ‘white settler societies,’ but they will thereby gain useful perspective on how the U.S. compares—sometimes favorably and sometimes not—with other countries that have similar English origins and sharp racial categorizations. Madokoro duly notes the enormous progress that has been made in recent decades regarding race, but she remains pained by the long history of rejection of Asians as refugees and as migrants more generally.
-- D. W. Haines Choice