GMS Development Series, 2. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012, xxi, 416 pp. (Illus., maps.) US$54.90, cloth, ISBN 978-981-4345-33-0; US$29.90, paper, ISBN 978-981-4311-89-2.
The GMS refers to the Greater Mekong Sub-region, comprised of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. It’s part of the Greater Mekong Region (GMR) that includes the four countries and Myanmar. The GMS is also part of another broader and less formal regional partnership with Yunnan Province of the People’s Republic of China. Cooperation among the GMS countries and Yunnan is facilitated by the Development Analysis Network (DAN). It includes research institutes from each GMS country including the Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI) that oversees the functioning of the DAN. The CDRI assisted Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) in preparing Jalilian’s volume for publication. He previously served as the CDRI’s director of research, a responsible position that enabled him to become acquainted with an ensemble of impressive scholars, some of whom he recruited to become contributors to his edited volume.
The book’s timeliness is confirmed by the contents of a report by the International Labor Office (ILO) that recently estimated that there are approximately 200 million migrant labourers who working abroad. The ILO further estimated that half of them are women. It reported that migrant labourers often lack sufficient everyday protections and are often systematically deprived of basic worker rights. The most egregious lack of sufficient protection affects women and children, who all too often fall victim to human traffickers who use them for illicit and/or illegal purposes. Unfortunately some of the most inhumane aspects of labour migration worldwide continue to take place in some GMS countries.
Jilian’s edited volume analyzes problems associated with these practices and treats them as serious depravities but on the whole it deals with practices that are legal and generally socially acceptable. The book focuses on the human dramas that play out daily throughout the GMS when some 200,000 people cross borders in search of “better lives.” Their analysis starts off by offering these key definitions. “International migration refers to the movement of persons from one state to another, with the intention of settling temporarily or permanently in a state other than the state of which the persons are nationals. Emigration refers to the exit of the migrant from the source country while immigration refers to the entry of the migrant into the destination country” (6). There are several types of migration: “regular, irregular, legal, illegal, voluntary and forced (e.g. trafficking)” (6).
With these definitions in mind, the study focuses on Thailand as the primary country of destination across whose borders workers from three source countries move: Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The volume examines the patterns of costs and benefits that flow from GMS migration, particularly their distribution among migrant communities, source countries and the key country of destination. The book points out that migrant communities are made up of three types of people: first, cross-state workers who are motivated to move and work elsewhere as a response to individual aspirations, or “dreams”; second, others who do so as a matter of inherited tradition; third and most significantly, migrants driven to cross state borders out of economic necessities and/or better employment opportunities. It analyzes the GMS’s migration experience in these six chapters: the first chapter deals with winners and losers generated by migration throughout the GMS generally; chapters 2 through 5 focus on the economic costs and benefits generated specifically in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam; and chapter 6 summarizes the lessons learned and how they can provide bases for better public policy making.
The chapters contain so much empirical, historical and theoretical materials that they defy brief descriptions. However, the volume’s basic theme is stated succinctly: “In this state-centric system, the possession of legal citizenship has been the core basis for awarding a person with full state recognition and the protection of such rights as life, liberty, security, movement, expression, and a standard of living enough to guarantee his or her well-being. Where these rights do not or only partly get fulfilled in their countries of origin [or source], some people venture abroad in the hope of improving their economic, political, and social circumstances” (1). However: “Lacking citizenship in their host [destination] countries migrants in general tend to end up grappling with even greater uncertainty regarding the status of their rights” (1).
They grapple in order to gain rights as well as to maximize benefits and minimize costs. On the cost side they leave home to enter an environment where destination country residents are often hostile to them. They leave behind families, traditions, communities and social familiarities and native languages and enter a land where custom and language are different. However, on the benefit side as documented aliens they have workplace and other rights and in the workplace they earn more income that they can use to consume a broader range of products, save for future consumption and/or investment, and remit to the families they leave behind.
On the positive side, Thailand has made grappling easier for most migrants via an institutionalized process of gaining documentation that offers protection to some migrant labour. With proper documentation migrant workers can “lodge complaints to labour protection offices in the courts; however, immigration enforcement has undermined the process” (393). In cases where “undermining” has occurred a worker can take her/his complaints to higher courts. A deported worker has the right to continue pursuing a legal matter even after an “order of deportation” has been executed. There’s a lesson in all of this: failing to grant a migrant labourer workplace rights an employer runs the risk of being encumbered by legal fees, court time and possibly less favourable access to important migrant labour markets.
Jalilian and his associates go on to specify in great detail the range of economic, legal, social and political costs and benefits that impact the individual migrant, the source countries and the primary country of destination. They offer an interesting, well-presented, content-laden, superbly researched, scholarly yet readable book on an important and timely topic. The human story they “tell” makes the book a “natural” for inclusion in university-level courses ranging from anthropology, economics, geography that contain study units on Asia specifically and development generally. General readers will also find the book useful as it offers insights into the nature of GMS migration.
Robert Curry
California State University, Sacramento, USA
University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Honolulu, USA
pp. 181-183