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CHAIRPERSON

Prof Michele Ruth Gamburd, Portland State University, USA, and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In June 2017 the Thai government introduced a new migration law with harsh penalties for undocumented workers and their employers. Fearing hefty fines, Thai employers began forcing Cambodian, Burmese, and Laotian migrant workers to obtain passports and work visas through a process called “national verification.” While this is not the first attempt to legalize Thailand’s estimated four million migrant workers, it has been arguably been the most far-reaching. By the end of 2017 nearly two million migrants had registered or begun the process.

This paper explores the quasi-legal routes that migrants negotiate to obtain legal documents, using these routes as a broader metaphor for the tensions inherent in legalization efforts. To become legal, migrants already working in Thailand are forced to make absurd journeys—paying legal recruitment agencies to smuggle them across the border with illegal brokers, while incurring impressive costs to “be recruited” into jobs they already had. These costs are generating new, long-term forms of indebtedness to employers, while removing the freedoms migrants previously had (while undocumented) to leave their employers, change jobs, and regularly return home. Taken together, my research suggests that the increasing costs and restrictions associated with “becoming legal” in Thailand are likely to diminish the potential for migration to contribute to development, while only marginally reducing the vulnerabilities migrant workers face on a daily basis.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Maryann Bylander is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lewis & Clark College and a Fulbright ASEAN Research Scholar (2017-2018). Her research focuses on questions of migration and development in the Global South, particularly Southeast Asia. Recent work has been published in International Migration Review, Development and Change, Migration Studies, Population Research and Policy Review, and Oxford Development Studies.

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