Routledge Series on Asian Migration. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. vi, 219 pp. (Figures, B&W photos.) US$128.00, cloth. ISBN 9781032015439.
The post-1970s’ turn of national economies towards market-oriented globalization has coincided with large-scale movements of people. Decisions to migrate are often made in response to mounting socioeconomic inequalities, as well as desires to secure new economic opportunities. The mass migration of people in search of work is a defining feature of contemporary economies. Since the early 2000s—within Southeast Asia’s Mekong region—governments, United Nations (UN) agencies, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have adopted policies and programmes through a discourse of safe migration to manage the movement of labour migrants across international borders. Drawing on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork centred on Lao and Myanmar migration to Thailand, Sverre Molland investigates the emergence and allure of the concept of safe migration for certain actors, and how safe migration policies and programmes unfold in practice.
In Safe Migration and the Politics of Brokered Safety in Southeast Asia, Molland unpacks the contested and elusive concept of safe migration, defining it as a set of policies and programmes that seek to legalize labour migration, raise awareness amongst labour migrants of certain types of behaviours and social relations that are assumed to produce safe migration outcomes, and provide a range of support services during transit and in the destination country. Molland’s central argument is that formal safe migration interventions produce and depend on informal practices—practices that official safe migration discourse endeavours to eradicate. Supported throughout the book by rich ethnographic evidence, the author illustrates how assistance and exploitation are co-produced, often to the ignorance of aid officials who are socially and physically distant from the aid they provide.
Building on current anthropological studies on migration, the book focuses on migration infrastructure using, what Molland terms, “tandem ethnography,” that is “oscillating methodology between the domain of policy one seeks to investigate and the social world which the policy domain attempts to objectify” (15). While not a study of labour migrants per se, the author’s incorporation of data from interviews, interactions, and observations with over 100 Myanmar and Lao migrants effectively illuminates their experiences of engaging in formal and informal practices relating to safe migration and migrant assistance. The book also draws on interviews with over 80 individuals representing UN agencies, government bodies, NGOs, migrant assistance groups, and brokers.
The book is organized into three parts. Part 1, “Situating Safety in Migration,” documents the shift from anti-trafficking interventions to safe migration initiatives, which is attributed, in part, to internal structural changes within the Mekong region’s aid sector. Part 1 also contextualizes the different ways in which Myanmar and Lao migrants are integrated into Thai society, which is essential for understanding their incorporation, or lack thereof, into safe migration programmes. In Part 2, “Modalities of Intervention,” Molland explores how safe migration is operationalized through the provision of migrant training sessions and legal migration pathways, the regulation of formal recruitment agencies, and the delivery of safety net mechanisms, such as outreach services and hotlines. Finally, in Part 3, “Safety Mediated,” the author expounds on how these various interventions intersect with a wide range of local contexts and informal practices.
The primary strength of this book is its exhaustive examination of the role of brokers and brokering practices, which is explored in multiple chapters and used to illustrate Molland’s central argument. For scholars engaged in literature about the role of brokers in migration, his observations into how brokers act as intermediaries in labour migration processes, such as in the provision of legal documents, will seem all too familiar; however, Molland advances these understandings by arguing that informal brokering practices are constitutive of formal migration assistance. This is demonstrated through ethnographic vignettes detailing, for example, how migrant schools unintendedly produce brokers as participants seek to employ their newfound knowledge of documentation processes and Thailand’s labour law (chapter 1); how the Thai government’s attempts to regulate labour recruitment chains through policy reforms have led to a proliferation of brokers (chapter 5); how, at times, safe migration outreach workers explain to migrants how to select a “good broker” in order to cut through bureaucratic red tape (chapter 6); and how brokers have become migrant assistance outreach workers and vice versa (chapter 8). Put simply, Molland successfully reveals how “migration assistance and brokering are two sides of the same coin” (150).
Perhaps due to my own disciplinary bias as a human geographer, geographical insights are found consistently throughout the book and strengthen Molland’s nuanced analysis of the praxis of labour migration governance. The author argues that safe migration discourse, comprised of specific spatial and temporal logics, produces a range of spatio-temporal reversals in practice. For example, in chapter 5, he documents how formal labour migration status through the bilateral memorandum of understanding (MOU) system is in practice being achieved subsequent to migration. Rather than recruiting prospective migrants in countries of origin and processing MOU applications prior to migration, recruitment agencies are processing applications for migrants who are already working in Thailand and facilitating their return to their home country to pick up their visa and then partake in a post-arrival training. This practice, although seemingly contradictory to official policy, is well known to government officials. These types of informal, mediated practices, Molland argues, are central to how safe migration unfolds in practice.
By attending to the complexities and paradoxes of safe migration discourse and practice, Molland has produced an innovative contribution to the theorization of migration governance. This book will surely be of interest to anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and political scientists working within the fields of migration and development studies. It is also a must-read for critically-minded aid officials and NGO practitioners in the Mekong region.
Carli Melo
York University, Toronto