The trade-offs of legal status : safe migration, documentation, and debt in Southeast Asia / Maryann Bylander.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bylander, Maryann, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cambodians--Legal status, laws, etc--Thailand.

Cambodians.

Emigration and immigration law--Thailand.

Emigration and immigration law.

Thailand--Emigration and immigration.

Thailand.

Cambodia--Emigration and immigration.

Cambodia.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 243 pages) : illustrations

Other Title:

Safe migration, documentation, and debt in Southeast Asia

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press, [2024]

Summary:

"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, over a million migrants gained legal status. Based on multi-sited ethnography that took place during this time, and informed by over a decade of experience researching migrant communities in Cambodia, this book 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. The book travels across the Cambodia-Thai borderlands: from deportation centers; to pop-up documentation sites; to safe migration trainings; to international policy meetings; and to migrant communities. Through vivid, accessible story-telling, author Maryann Bylander 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 non-governmental 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, and will offer 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 within the Global South, the book offers a rare ethnographic portrait of migration and development in the Global South"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Safe, regular, orderly

The networked and the recruited

Precarious documents

Precarious debts

The spectacle of safe migration.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (De Gruyter Brill, viewed on April 29, 2026).

Other Format:

Print version: Bylander, Maryann. Trade-offs of legal status

ISBN:

9780824898540

0824898540

9780824898557

0824898559

OCLC:

1428451630

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license