Migrants and the mobility of their economic culture

By Ooi Kee Beng. Penang Monthly editorial for July 2026

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN culture and economics is a fascinating one. Staying alive is much easier to do as a group than alone. Interweaving functions, connecting roles and sharing the benefits of teamwork; all these are the building blocks of society. And of culture.

I chase and hunt, you skin and cook; I watch the door, you watch the young ones; I do the laundry, you sweep the floor. Sometimes we switch roles. Diversifying functions clearly makes for efficiency and bonding. By mastering different skills, our abilities become organically resilient and collaborative.

Culture derives from the languages, rituals and habits that we cultivate in order to function in this basic economy. These traits constitute our identity, stimulate our concepts about the world and congeal into our value system.

This economic-cultural ecosystem can be very immobile, as with agricultural villages or cities, or quite itinerant, like those of fisherfolk, or highly mobile, as seen among the horsemen of the Eurasian Steppes.

But just how itinerant can culture be?

What if mobility involves a small group of people moving with haste into an alien ecosystem? How well can their economic-cultural system travel? Does it have resilience? How adaptive is it?

When you move to a new place, you can be either a tourist, foreigner, expatriate, student, immigrant or refugee… You belong somewhere along this spectrum, but might sometimes occupy more than one position. How you fare depends upon individual mental strength and social skills, on how wide the economic-cultural gap between home and away is, on whether there are enough of your fellows to recreate and generate bits of the old ecosystem to keep all of you comfortable.

While tourists stay in hotels, students on campus, expatriates in condominiums; refugees end up in camps while migrants move to places which are hopefully close to work. The least fortunate end up in sleazy parts of town.

Now, how mobile can economics be?

Upon finding yourself in an alien economic-cultural ecosystem, staying alive is most practically done by adopting occupations that satisfy basic human needs, rather than those that are culturally defined by the local inhabitants of the new home. It would be hard for you to find work that requires local economic-cultural knowledge, which often includes mastering some local language. Even highly educated migrants or refugees have great difficulty entering high-end professions that require delicate understanding of terminologies and subtle cultural communication.

Thus, you might become a floor-sweeper or busboy in a foreign-run restaurant, or work in a laundromat and clean windows. Red-light districts always beckon to some. If you have some capital on hand, perhaps you can start a hole-in-the-wall takeaway restaurant.  In many cases, holding multiple jobs and maintaining multiply social functions keep options open.

This is the lot of the immigrant, in most cases, in most cases, anyway.

Today, in a relatively globalised context, this basic condition that a migrant suffers may not be obvious or evident. In the early days of globalisation, when few could travel far and host populations had little understanding of foreign things, how did they survive?

Intercontinental interactions at the advent of modern times did not happen under happy conditions. Piracy and thievery, not to mention colonisation and invasion, were common conditions. The development of Western capitalism and global trade took place on the backs of falling kingdoms and failing economies. Human mobility in the form of refugee streams and migrant flows was driven by cultural and economic implosion, warfare and famine, and accompanied by chaos and confusion.

Malaysia’s history offers us much to study of the human sufferings of early modernity. “ Chinatowns” and “Little Indias” often appeared in colonial settlements. Today, these are valued as heritage sites. But they were often built out of desperation and destitution, and many things about them are better left unsaid.

Regardless, they chart a journey of resilience and character-building. The Malaysian Chinese clan associations are a prime example of how an economic culture can reconstruct itself elsewhere, its bare bones and strained bonds supporting community members while they hastily adjust to new lives. Migrant adaptation can take generations, but the results are not always reputable. Criminality and prostitution can become the basis for a new “culture”. In general though, with the security and support that migrant communities could muster through clan houses, “secret societies” and the replanting of economic-cultural bonds, habits and communication, a sufficiently strong sense of pride and identity could be retained and opportunities created for the attainment of a better life.

Chinatowns, clan associations, secret societies and school systems chart a tradition of continuity among Chinese migrants over the last two centuries. These institutions played key roles in adaptation to a novel economic culture, even to the point of adopting new notions of nationhood.