Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024. US$75.00, cloth. ISBN 9780824897529.
Over the past decade, the international development sector has become increasingly engaged in migration management. In Southeast Asia, this engagement has taken the form of so-called safe migration interventions—policies and programs designed to make migration safer for migrant workers and support broader development goals, such as poverty reduction. Rooted within safe migration projects and discourse is the underlying assumption that formal legal migration channels produce safety. In The Trade-offs of Legal Status: Safe Migration, Documentation, and Debt in Southeast Asia, sociologist Maryann Bylander challenges this assumption.
Through a study of Cambodians living and working in neighbouring Thailand, Bylander investigates the trade-offs migrants experience by moving through so-called regular migration channels and obtaining legal documents. In the book, Bylander draws on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia and Thailand, as well as over a decade of research experience in Cambodia, to make three closely related arguments. First, she argues that regular migration and legal status are not necessarily safer for migrants than informal illicit migration pathways and a lack of legal status or a quasi-legal status. Second, she argues that greater regularity in migration dynamics is producing new forms of precarity for migrants. Finally, she argues that safe migration interventions promoting regular migration benefit states more than they benefit migrants.
These arguments are developed throughout the book’s five substantive chapters. Chapter 1, “Safe, Regular, Orderly,” describes how development actors have become engaged with state efforts to manage migration through a discourse of safe migration. Through a detailed account of migrant deportees passing through a migrant assistance centre in Cambodia, Bylander highlights how this site of migration infrastructure shares misinformation with migrants and conflates safety with legal status, while serving the agendas of development organizations and governments. Chapter 2, “The Networked and the Recruited,” compares the experiences of migrants who moved through regular and irregular channels, showing how people who migrated through regular channels are subject to greater restrictions and costs. In chapter 3, “Precarious Documents,” Bylander explains how Thailand’s ever-evolving documentation regime—“the processes, paperwork, fees, and bureaucracies migrants must navigate to gain and maintain legal status” (110)—is creating new forms of insecurity and dependency amongst migrants. Chapter 4, “Precarious Debts,” focuses on the expansion of microfinance institutions in Cambodia, the ways in which debt stress compels migration, and the many migrants who are forced to finance legal documents in Thailand with new microfinance loans from home. Finally, in chapter 5, “The Spectacle of Safe Migration,” Bylander returns to safe migration programs, describing how these efforts to educate migrants and promote regular migration are “more spectacle than substance, in part because they fail to grapple with how formalized documents, debts, and systems of migration management shape migrant precarity” (168).
Scholars and development practitioners familiar with Thailand’s labour migration policies will recognize and commend Bylander’s attention to a wide range of migrant experiences related to migration channels and legal documents, which nuance and strengthen her analysis of the trade-offs of legal status. Throughout the book, these differences are captured in ethnographic vignettes detailing, for example, Thida’s experience migrating through the formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) process (chapter 2); Vuthy’s engagement in the MOU process subsequent to his migration and employment—a process recruitment agencies refer to as “recycling” (chapter 3); Seak’s decision to obtain a border pass (chapter 3); and Lida’s experience regularizing her status in Thailand through the national verification process (chapter 4).
An additional strength of the book is its two significant contributions to understandings of the relationship between migration and development. First, by centering the role development institutions play in managing migration and producing migration infrastructure, the book not only brings attention to migration as “a site of development encounters” (35), but it also critiques dominant development discourse that problematizes informal actors and processes in migration, and it highlights the disconnect between development goals related to regular migration and their outcomes. Second, the book focuses on the role that microfinance—lauded as a development solution—plays in migration processes and the lives of migrant workers, which has so far been understudied by migration and development scholars. By doing so, it highlights how formal credit markets and collateralized loans have shifted the distribution of risk onto migrant borrowers and their families, heightening migrants’ precarity and extending this precarity across the border.
Furthermore, the book differs from some other critical studies in that, by way of a conclusion, it attends to possibilities for a way forward: a way towards a migration system that involves fewer trade-offs for migrant workers. Drawing on the study’s insights, Bylander proposes that states move towards a less-managed system of migration. While Bylander acknowledges that this may take different forms, she emphasizes the need to simplify migration and documentation processes and expand migrants’ freedoms. Doing so, she suggests, may allow “migration to succeed in enabling something we might call ‘development’” (209). This book will surely be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and political scientists working within the fields of migration and development studies, as well as critically minded development practitioners across Southeast Asia.
Carli Melo
York University, Toronto