Supporting data for ‘(In)visible, Illegalised and Deportable: Constructing Immigration Detainees in Hong Kong as the Crimmigrant Other’
This thesis is amongst the few sociological and qualitative studies of immigration detention in Hong Kong. Immigration detention is an administrative practice of confining non-citizens for immigration-related objectives, including identification and removal. This thesis studies the evolution of immigration detention in Hong Kong since 2005, and how it emerged on the public agenda from relative obscurity in the 2020s. It also documents immigration detainees’ accounts of their migratory journeys to Hong Kong. It examines their motivations to travel, how they became illegal in the Hong Kong community and deportable in immigration detention, and how they reacted to their removal from Hong Kong. It analyses how social actors contested seeing immigration detainees as dangerous, undesirable and excludable in public discourses, and how this contestation shaped detention practices and migrants’ experiences inside immigration detention. This study draws on 26 interviews with former immigration detainees (n=18) and civil society organisation members serving detainees in Hong Kong (n=8). It also relies on documentary research on sources like policy discussions, court rulings and media reports.
This dataset contains: 1) Interview questions. It shows how I structured my interviews with my research participants. 2) Metadata of individual interviews. I agreed with all interviewees at the written consent form that only I, the principal investigator, have access to data records. The demographic information and interview dates are recorded in this metadata.