Safe Migration and the Politics of Brokered Safety in Southeast Asia
Safe Migration and the Politics of Brokered Safety in Southeast Asia

Author: Sverre Molland

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-19

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 100043074X

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The book investigates how the United Nations, governments, and aid agencies mobilise and instrumentalise migration policies and programmes through a discourse of safe migration. Since the early 2000s, numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs), UN agencies, and governments have warmed to the concept of safe migration, often within a context of anti-trafficking interventions. Yet, both the policy-enthusiasm for safety, as well as how safe migration comes into being through policies and programs remain unexplored. Based on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mekong region, this is the first book that traces the emergence of safe migration, why certain aid actors gravitate towards the concept, as well as how safe migration policies and programmes unfold through aid agencies and government bodies. The book argues that safe migration is best understood as brokered safety. Although safe migration policy interventions attempt to formalize pre-emptive and protective measures to enhance labour migrants’ well-being, the book shows through vivid ethnographic details how formal migration assistance in itself depends on – and produces – informal asnd mediated practices. The book offers unprecedented insights into what safe migration policies look like in practice. It is an innovate contribution to contemporary theorizing of contemporary forms of migration governance and will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and human geographers working within the fields of Migration studies, Development Studies, as well as Southeast Asian and Global Studies. Chapters 1, 4, 5 and 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003185734

The Trade-Offs of Legal Status
The Trade-Offs of Legal Status

Author: Maryann Bylander

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2024-09-30

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0824898540

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The Trade-Offs of Legal Status explores the costs, risks, and unfreedoms produced alongside migrant regularization in Southeast Asia. In 2017, Thailand’s military government enacted a new migration law cracking down on unauthorized employment, coupled with an extensive regularization campaign seeking to grant legal status to migrants already working in the country. Between 2017 and 2018, more than a million migrants gained legal status. Based on multisited ethnography of that time, and informed by a decade of experience researching migrant communities in Cambodia, Maryann Bylander describes the experiences of Cambodians confronting Thailand’s intensifying migration infrastructure. In this evolving landscape, migrations are increasingly shaped by formalized documents, complex systems of brokerage, collateralized debts, and state control. Traversing across the Cambodia-Thai borderlands, the book covers a wide range: from deportation centers; to pop-up documentation sites; to safe migration trainings; to international policy meetings; and to migrant communities. Through vivid, accessible storytelling, the author describes the experiences of Cambodians as they navigate Thailand’s increasingly strict and costly documentation regime. While Cambodians want legal status for the protections they believe it will offer, Bylander shows that documentation has ambiguous and often unwanted effects—documents are easily invalidated, can create harsh constraints, and routinely lead to new debts. At the same time, documents do not always offer meaningful protection, or improve working conditions. Together, these stories challenge the discourses and programming of “safe migration” campaigns, which are a growing area of engagement for nongovernmental and international organizations. While safe-migration efforts assume that regular, orderly migrations will produce safer, more beneficial migrations, the experiences of Cambodians in Thailand suggest otherwise. The Trade-Offs of Legal Status is the first book to explore the lives of Cambodian migrants in Thailand, offering insight to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, development studies, geography, migration studies, and Southeast Asian studies. Through its grounded exploration of a case of migration, the book offers a rare ethnographic portrait of migration and development in Southeast Asia.

African Migration to Thailand
African Migration to Thailand

Author: Elżbieta M. Goździak

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-07

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13: 1000781704

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This book, based on exploratory ethnographic research, analyzes the experiences of African migrants in Thailand. Thailand has always been a regional migration hub with Africans being the most recent. Sitting at the intersection of race and migration studies, this book focuses on the challenges Black and labor migrants face trying to integrate into a society that has had very limited contact with and knowledge about Black Africans. Bringing together research from African, Thai, and European scholars, this volume focuses on forced migrants, such as Somali asylum seekers, and labor migrants, largely African men seeking better livelihoods in niche economies such as gem trading, garment wholesale, and football playing and coaching. The book also includes theoretical contributions to the understanding of precarity and human security, the concept of in/visibility to analyze the challenges African migrants face in Thailand as well as the concept of othering to understand discrimination against Africans. The book also analyzes the Thai migration policy context and the challenges facing Thai policy-makers, law enforcement representatives, and the migrants themselves. While not comparative in nature, this volume directly connects with studies of Africans in other parts of Asia, especially China. Addressing an important gap in migration research, this book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of migration and mobility studies, African Studies, and Asian Studies.

Protecting the Rights of Women Migrant Domestic Workers
Protecting the Rights of Women Migrant Domestic Workers

Author: Sophie Henderson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-02-09

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1000539695

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Migrant women across Asia disproportionately work in precarious, insecure, and informal employment sectors that are subject to few regulations, pay low wages, and expose women to harm, of which domestic work is among the most prevalent. This book uses the cases of the Philippines and Sri Lanka to develop a comprehensive, intersectional, rights-based approach to better protect women migrant domestic workers against exploitation. As accounts of exploitation, gender-based violence, torture, and death among migrant domestic workers increase, the recognition and defence of their human and labour rights is an urgent necessity. The Philippines and Sri Lanka are two of the leading labour-sending states of women domestic workers in Asia, and their economies have become increasingly dependent on the remittances they send back home. Drawing on extensive original research this book argues that these two sending states are guilty of structural violence by sustaining a network of institutions, policies and practices, which serve to systematically disadvantage and discriminate against women migrant domestic workers. The research covers the entire migration process, from pre-departure, through to overseas employment, followed by return and reintegration. This book’s innovative application of structural violence theory as a way to investigate the role of state institutions in labour-sending countries in the Global South will be of interest to researchers from across the fields of migration studies, gender studies, human rights law, and Asian Studies.

The Criminalisation of People Smuggling in Indonesia and Australia
The Criminalisation of People Smuggling in Indonesia and Australia

Author: Antje Missbach

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-04-21

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1000577287

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This book offers an ethnographically informed critique of the hyper-politicised debate on the facilitation of irregularised migration for people seeking asylum between Indonesia and Australia. While state authorities decry such facilitation as “people smuggling” and push for its criminalisation, the book’s focal points are the need for unsanctioned passages for people seeking asylum and the detrimental consequences of the criminalisation of “people smuggling” for both the facilitators and the people seeking asylum. Drawing on court verdicts and interviews with convicted facilitators and law enforcement officials in Indonesia, this book provides a unique and holistic picture of the causes, conditions, procedures and intricacies surrounding the facilitation of irregularised maritime journeys between Indonesia and Australia covering almost four decades. It scrutinises the micro-level operational and place-specific characteristics of people smuggling and the consequences of anti-people-smuggling policies in Indonesia and relates those consequences to changes in the macroenvironment, which include relevant legal, political, social and economic factors that determine the overarching conditions of irregularised mobility. Compared to other states in the Global North, Australia has claimed to be more “successful” with its comprehensive approach to eliminate unsanctioned migration at sea by combining punitive, communicative–reventive and interceptive measures. This book challenges key achievements and objectives in regard to criminalising the facilitation of irregularised migration by foregrounding the many negative side effects that have emanated from “stopping the boats”. The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of anthropology and sociology, law and criminology, Asia-Pacific Studies, Southeast Asian Studies and international migration.

From Borders to Pathways
From Borders to Pathways

Author: Matthew Zagor

Publisher: ANU Press

Published: 2024-09-05

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1760466603

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From Borders to Pathways: Innovations and Regressions in the Movement of People into Europe examines the evolution of European migration policy, offering a forward-looking analysis that extends beyond traditional border controls to innovative legal migration pathways. Contributors provide an in-depth exploration of the drivers shaping migration policies, including public opinion and the rise of populist discourses, the contrasting responses to various real and imagined migrant crises, and critiques of recent policy innovations such as refugee finance schemes, ‘safe legal pathways’, and migrant lotteries. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, the authors assess socio-political, legal, geo-political and cultural shifts to advocate for a more inclusive, humane and sustainable approach to migration. By challenging dominant narratives of deterrence, extraterritoriality and exclusion, this book advocates for policies that balance Europe’s myriad commitments, values and imperatives, highlighting the need for ethical frameworks that respect the dignity of migrants. Essential reading for policymakers, scholars and stakeholders, From Borders to Pathways offers a comprehensive reflection on the complexities of migration in Europe, signalling a paradigm shift towards cooperation, inclusivity, and shared responsibility in global mobility.

New Chinese Immigrants in New Zealand
New Chinese Immigrants in New Zealand

Author: Liangni Sally Liu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-28

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 1000474550

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This book focuses on new immigrant families from the People’s Republic of China to New Zealand and investigates how these families have adapted to New Zealand immigration policy regime, which does not accommodate their cultural preference to live as multigenerational families easily. The book analyses a three-generation framework: First-generation adult immigrants, their children and older parents. It examines how migratory mobility and intergenerational dynamics configure migratory trajectories of individual family members and shape their family lives and sense of identity. The book sheds light on how different family generations pursue their own interests and goals while maintaining family unity and cohesiveness in contexts of increasing transnational mobility opportunities and constraints. It also investigates how familial ties, transnational connections and a sense of identity and belonging are defined and redefined during the process of transnational migration. This book can serve as a heuristic reference to and meaningful comparative parameter for studying transnational family migration in other contexts. As a significant theoretical contribution to the theory of transnational family formation in contexts where restrictive immigration policies result in members of multigenerational families living across different countries, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of sociology, anthropology, race and ethnic studies as well as Asian and Chinese studies.

Transit States
Transit States

Author: ʻUmar Hišām aš- Šihābī

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 9781783712205

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The states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar) form the largest destination for labour migration in the global South. In all of these states, however, the majority of the working population is composed of temporary, migrant workers with no citizenship rights. The cheap and transitory labour power these workers provide has created the prodigious and extraordinary development boom across the region, and neighbouring countries are almost fully dependent on the labour markets of the Gulf to employ their working populations. For these reasons, the Gulf takes a central place in contemporary debates around migration and labour in the global economy. This book attempts to bring together and explore these issues. The relationship between 'citizen' and 'non-citizen' holds immense significance for understanding the construction of class, gender, city and state in the Gulf, however too often these questions are occluded in too scholarly or overly-popular accounts of the region. Bringing together experts on the Gulf, Transit States confronts the precarious working conditions of migrants in a accessible, yet in-depth manner.

Return
Return

Author: Biao Xiang

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2013-10-10

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0822377470

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Since the late 1990s, Asian nations have increasingly encouraged, facilitated, or demanded the return of emigrants. In this interdisciplinary collection, distinguished scholars from countries around the world explore the changing relations between nation-states and transnational mobility. Taking into account illegally trafficked migrants, deportees, temporary laborers on short-term contracts, and highly skilled émigrés, the contributors argue that the figure of the returnee energizes and redefines nationalism in an era of increasingly fluid and indeterminate national sovereignty. They acknowledge the diversity, complexity, and instability of reverse migration, while emphasizing its discursive, policy, and political significance at a moment when the tensions between state power and transnational subjects are particularly visible. Taken together, the essays foreground Asia as a useful site for rethinking the intersections of migration, sovereignty, and nationalism. Contributors. Sylvia Cowan, Johan Lindquist, Melody Chia-wen Lu, Koji Sasaki, Shin Hyunjoon, Mariko Asano Tamanoi, Mika Toyota, Carol Upadhya, Wang Cangbai, Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh

The Borderlands of Southeast Asia
The Borderlands of Southeast Asia

Author: James Clad

Publisher: NDU Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1780399227

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As an academic field in its own right, the topic of border studies is experiencing a revival in university geography courses as well as in wider political commentary. Until recently, border studies in contemporary Southeast Asia appeared as an afterthought at best to the politics of interstate rivalry and national consolidation. The maps set out all agreed postcolonial lines. Meanwhile, the physical demarcation of these boundaries lagged. Large slices of territory, on land and at sea, eluded definition or delineation. That comforting ambiguity has disappeared. Both evolving technologies and price levels enable rapid resource extraction in places, and in volumes, once scarcely imaginable. The beginning of the 21st century's second decade is witnessing an intensifying diplomacy, both state-to-state and commercial, over offshore petroleum. In particular, the South China Sea has moved from being a rather arcane area of conflict studies to the status of a bellwether issue. Along with other contested areas in the western Pacific and south Asia, the problem increasingly defines China's regional relationships in Asia, and with powers outside the region, especially the United States. Yet intraregional territorial differences also hobble multilateral diplomacy to counter Chinese claims, and daily management of borders remains burdened by a lot of retrospective baggage. The contributors to this book emphasize this mix of heritage and history as the primary leitmotif for contemporary border rivalries and dynamics. Whether the region's 11 states want it or not, their bordered identity is falling into ever sharper definition, if only because of pressure from extraregional states. This book aims to provide new ways of looking at the reality and illusion of bordered Southeast Asia.