The Asian Diaspora Build-Out
The Asian Diaspora Build-Out
WRITTEN BY ARIJIT MAZUMDAR
18 September 2026
On 30 June 2026, India’s home minister, Amit Shah, launched a fully digital card for overseas Indians, replacing paper booklets and consular queues with a system closer to online banking. The card, known as the electronic Overseas Citizen of India (e-OCI) card, gives people of Indian origin abroad the right to live, work, and travel in India without a visa, though not to vote. A decade ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi offered the most visible example of diaspora diplomacy, addressing stadium crowds of overseas Indians in New York, Sydney, and London as the country’s unofficial ambassadors. Those rallies, however, rested on thin foundations. Consular missions have long worked from incomplete records, and Indian embassies have drawn complaints about high-handed treatment and inefficiencies — long queues, unreturned calls, and opaque processing times — as recently as this year. The outreach has been long on enthusiasm and short on follow-through.
The new e-OCI system is designed to close that gap. It arrives at the same moment South Korea and Vietnam are strengthening their own diaspora institutions. Taken together, these reforms suggest that Asian governments are turning diaspora outreach into permanent administrative infrastructure, built to capture investment, skilled labour, and political goodwill.
A shared reform agenda
Between mid-February and mid-May 2026, South Korea issued 36,561 F-4 visas, its main status for overseas Koreans. The rise came after a simplification of rules that used to scatter overseas Koreans across confusing residency categories. For the first time, the government is funding diaspora support centres directly through a dedicated budget line, rather than leaving them to private donors, growing the network from four sites to 37. That is a striking shift for a country that has historically treated its overseas community with some ambivalence, torn between pride in a globally successful diaspora and unease about diluting a strongly ethnic idea of national belonging. The new funding suggests the pride has, for now, prevailed.
Giving diasporas a working system, proper funding, and, in Vietnam’s case, an actual address turns a sentimental tie into a resource a government can use, whether the goal is investment, skilled return migration, or simply a more organised constituency willing to speak well of home.
Vietnam moved on a similar front in January 2026, when the Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) issued Resolution 80, naming culture a pillar of national soft power and explicitly calling on overseas Vietnamese to help promote it abroad. Weeks earlier, Hanoi had held a national conference reviewing two decades of Resolution 36, its founding diaspora policy from 2004, with Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh describing overseas Vietnamese as “an inseparable part of the Vietnamese nation”. The economic logic behind this narrative is clear. Vietnam has received more than USD 190 billion in remittances over the past decade, and Ho Chi Minh City alone took in over USD 10 billion in 2025, a sum the city is increasingly steering into technology and infrastructure investment rather than household spending. One visible product of the new thinking sits in the Thai city of Udon Thani, where Vietnamese diplomats and Thai officials have jointly built Vietnam Town, a branded district celebrating a Vietnamese community that has lived there for generations. It is a small, physical expression of a much larger ambition to formalise a relationship that used to run on remittance flows and family visits alone.
The numbers involved are large enough to matter. India’s diaspora runs into the tens of millions. South Korea’s is smaller but concentrated in places — the United States and parts of the former Soviet Union among them — where an organised community can shape how a country is spoken about in parliaments and boardrooms. Vietnam’s overseas population has grown steadily in wealth and standing for decades without much state machinery built to make full use of it, until now. All three governments are writing new rules for diasporas that have existed for generations.
A digital citizenship card, a funded network of diaspora support centres, and a Politburo resolution naming culture a strategic pillar are not sentimental gestures. They are the kind of initiatives governments deploy when they expect returns, whether as remittances, skilled workers willing to return, friendlier lobbying in foreign capitals, or a community reinforcing national soft power. That reasoning is rarely stated outright, though Vietnam’s resolution comes closest, naming culture and diaspora goodwill as explicit strategic aims. It is impossible to know from the outside whether officials in New Delhi, Seoul, and Hanoi are responding to a shared calculation or arriving at similar answers independently. But three governments with little in common politically, converging on a similar approach in the same few months, is a pattern worth watching.
Openness with strings attached
A card, a visa category, or a resolution functions as infrastructure only if the issuing state can trust the system behind it. Loosening eligibility while tightening verification is how a government institutionalises its diaspora relationship, with defined entry criteria and enforceable rules replacing embassy discretion and personal goodwill.
The trade-off is explicit: broader eligibility comes at the cost of tighter scrutiny of who qualifies. India’s new rules include a fine for cardholders who fail to update their passport details within three months, and prohibiting children from holding both an Indian and a foreign passport simultaneously. South Korea now requires new F-4 applicants to complete a settlement programme and has tightened exclusions for serious criminal records, even as eligibility for the visa widened this year. India frames its changes as a deterrent to misuse, while South Korea frames its reforms as a matter of public safety. Neither government presents its changes as a retreat from openness, though neither framing is easy to verify independently. A government that wants a closer relationship with its diaspora also wants a more accountable one, since the benefits on offer — visa-free travel, banking access, in some cases a route to residency — only work if the issuing government can vouch for who holds them. Making the relationship official means the state can track it, and a warmer embrace comes with a sharper interest in who is entering.
A pattern to watch
Expect this pattern to spread further across Asia, home to many of the world’s largest historic diasporas and to governments increasingly equipped with the digital infrastructure to track and serve them. Digitisation has made that infrastructure far cheaper to build than it was a decade ago. Governments across the region already have what they need: millions of their own people, and their children and grandchildren, living abroad. The Philippines has invested in institutions for its overseas workers for decades, building an entire administrative architecture, from labour attachés to dedicated banking products, around a diaspora whose remittances amounted to about nine per cent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2023. Other governments may well examine what India, South Korea, and Vietnam are building and draw similar lessons, particularly smaller states without the leverage to compete on trade agreements or military alliances but with sizeable communities of their own citizens settled abroad.
This does not require a treaty, a summit, or another capital’s cooperation. It does require a government both willing and able to pay for the systems, confident the return will justify the expense. Giving diasporas a working system, proper funding, and, in Vietnam’s case, an actual address turns a sentimental tie into a resource a government can use, whether the goal is investment, skilled return migration, or simply a more organised constituency willing to speak well of home.
New Delhi, Seoul, and Hanoi built these reforms for reasons of their own. India was responding to years of documented service failures. South Korea was addressing demographic pressure and a fragmented visa system. Vietnam was formalising a diaspora relationship it had never fully organised. The specifics differ, but the underlying logic is the same: a diaspora is not useful to a government until that government builds the infrastructure to organise it.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent those of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Arijit Mazumdar is Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Studies Program at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, USA.
He is the author of Indian Foreign Policy in Transition: Relations with South Asia (Routledge). His research focuses on Indian foreign policy, soft power diplomacy, Indo-Pacific affairs, and South Asian politics. Image credit: Unsplash/chuttersnap.