Much of intra‐Asian labour migration is regulated on the basis of governing tools that aim at managing cross‐border movement of workers on a strictly temporary, employer‐tied basis. The key elements ...involved in the operationalization of strictly temporary migration are recruitment, remittances and return; these three ‘Rs’ are also central to global policy discussions around the migration‐development nexus. The core premise of this paper is that this strict framework results in a particular form of migrant precarity which in turn shapes migrant transnationality, leaving migrants with severely circumscribed labour agency. This leads to the argument that temporary migration paradigm as practiced in much of Asia constitutes involuntary transnationalism. The paper ends by arguing that based on proactive migrant rights activism, the involuntary character of transnationalism is being challenged by bringing a different set of ‘Rs’ into the discussion derived from global social policy and global justice perspectives: regulation, redistribution and rights.
This paper suggests that digitalisation fills the protection gap between labour policies and practices on migrant rights. Digital technologies have shaped how the Malaysian state views its migrant ...protection policy. Malaysia has tapped into the potential of migration technology (migtech) and financial technology (fintech) to address various challenges faced in its labour migration governance. Malaysia, a migrant-receiving country in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has improved its migrant protection policy by digitalising migration management governance, wage payments, and financial services for migrant workers. This paper thus contributes to ongoing debates on fair migration by looking at how technology interventions could bridge the long-standing protection gap resulting from states' institutional limitations, defective migration systems, unethical recruitment by intermediaries, and implementation gaps (i.e. discrepancies between labour legislation and implementation by state and non-state actors). Digitalisation addresses migrant protection gaps through preventing unethical recruitment, offsetting barriers to regular migration, monitoring labour law infringements, and ensuring employer compliance with immigration and labour laws.
Responses to COVID-19 have been characterized by rapid border closures that have transformed the pandemic from a crisis of health to a crisis of mobility. While Canada was quick to implement border ...restrictions for non-citizens like refugees and asylum seekers, exemptions were made for some migrant groups like temporary workers. The pandemic marked a departure from who is considered worthy of admission to Canada. In fact, the border through restricted and securitized measures has filtered desirable versus non-desirable migrants, creating a hierarchy among migrants within Canada’s immigration system by categorizing groups into those deserving versus non-deserving of admission. Deeply embedded societal discrimination and structural inequalities means that COVID-19 has exacerbated the vulnerabilities of migrant groups more than others. COVID-19 has placed an uneven burden on refugees who face increased border restrictions, significant health and safety risks, and limitations in accessing human rights. This paper documents the challenges, social and economic impacts, and exacerbated vulnerabilities border closures have imposed on refugees, asylum seekers and temporary migrants. We assess the many challenges that COVID-19 has created at the intersection of border studies, security resilience and human rights. We employ the conceptual frame of security resilience to critically analyse the dynamics of how and why border strategies have restricted migrant groups in times of crisis and amounted to an unjustified weakening of refugee rights. Finally, we argue that social resilience, which is rooted in rights-based strategies, not only ensures that societies are prepared to meet external shocks and disruptions, but that policy responses mitigate societal discrimination and inequalities. We highlight these strategies as effective mechanisms for reconciling both public health concerns and the rights of migrants to create more cohesive societies in times of crisis.
Temporary migrant workers in Southeast Asia are subject to various abuses in recruitment, work and repatriation. A decade ago ASEAN governments committed to developing an Instrument governing migrant ...worker rights, but a series of deadlocks have stymied this agreement. Prevailing accounts explain this impasse as the consequence of incompatible national interests, norms of non-interference and consensus, a lack of institutional capacity and the limits of rights advocacy in ASEAN. Conversely, utilising a political economy framework, this article demonstrates this impasse in regional governance reflects societal-level conflicts among migrant workers, civil society organisations, business groups and state-based actors, generated by the latter's adoption of migrant labour as both a livelihood and development strategy.
International labour migration is inherently a transnational phenomenon that reflects the changing composition of labour markets and labour systems and has resulted in the rising presence of ...non-citizens in places of work. While the transnationalism literature has made important contributions by shifting empirical attention beyond national boundaries, so too has it overstated migrant agency while downplaying the relevance of state power. This paper draws on the concept of protracted precarity, as it applies to temporary labour migration within key migratory corridors in Asia, to develop an alternative paradigm of forced transnationalism that better accounts for transnationalism in the absence of meaningful agency. Three prominent features of cross-border labour migration are examined: temporary employer-tied contracts, commercialised recruitment, and feminised migration. This leads on to a discussion of the specifically transnational dimensions of the curtailed economic and political rights that produce migrant precarity and precarious livelihoods.
The multi-directional nature of labour migration flows has resulted in an increasing number of countries having become both senders and receivers of regular and irregular migrants. However, some ...countries continue to see themselves primarily as senders and so ignore their role as a receiving country, which can have negative implications for the rights of migrants in their territory. Using the example of Indonesia, which is State Party to the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families, this article demonstrates that irregular migrant workers in this country have the legal right to protection against labour exploitation even when they work despite the government's prohibition on employment. The article discusses the 'right to work' and how international human rights law has translated it into the 'right to protection from labour exploitation' for irregular migrants in Indonesia. By way of two case studies about the Indonesian government's handling of irregular migrants, it shows how it prioritises enforcement of the immigration law over labour and employment laws much like countries that have not ratified the ICRMW. It also draws attention to legal protection gaps that emerge for asylum seekers when they are recognised to be genuine refugees.
This paper analyzes the work of the powerful migrant rights organization Migrant Justice, as they exemplify ways in which migrant activists in the U.S. today are challenging the socio-political ...confines of bordered state territory and are pushing the landscape of rights access in new directions. This work utilizes a year-long ethnography conducted with Migrant Justice as they faced intense targeting and surveillance from immigration authorities, including the use of a covert informant, in response to their successful labor and human rights organizing in the state of Vermont. This work in particular details Migrant Justice’s First Amendment rights lawsuit against the federal government in response to this targeting. Here, Migrant Justice directly challenged the federal government in a groundbreaking lawsuit that saw federal immigration authorities forced to acknowledge constitutional rights for undocumented migrant activists. In this confluence of opposing forces, we of course see egregious abuses against migrant actors, but we also see exemplifications of new and progressively powerful forms of resistance that are posing a specific challenge to the state’s bordered and territorially based limitations on human and civil rights. This work utilizes Stuart Elden’s conception of territory—as a process and a praxis of control—to understand migrant resistance to state-sanctioned exclusion and exploitation and the ways in which these challenges to state power are creating new spaces for political belonging. An analysis in this way allows us to see the work of Migrant Justice as that which increasingly deterritorializes relationships between residents and state power—an undoing of spatial limitations on rights and belonging. Throughout this work, the concept of deterritorialization as a form of migrant resistance is unpacked and defined to understand the full potentials of migrant activism today.
We use historical data on union density and new historical data on policies toward migrants to study the long-run relationship between the strength of trade unions and the social and economic rights ...of migrants in the Global North. In countries with strong trade unions, there was, for a long time, a widening distance between the rights of migrants and the rights of citizens, probably because the rights of citizens expanded sooner and more quickly than the rights of migrants. Over time, however, the differences between countries with strong and weak unions have diminished, and in more recent years, the ‘rights gap’ between citizens and migrants has in fact been smaller in countries with strong unions than in countries with weak unions.
Despite their strong humanitarian reputations abroad, Norway and Canada have adopted domestic immigration policies that produce permanently precarious residents. These policies affect ...individuals—including refugees, permanent residents, and naturalized citizens—who have traditionally enjoyed secure legal statuses. Adopting the analytic lens of ‘probationary immigration’, this article explores the legal mechanisms behind three interrelated developments in both countries: 1) the fragmentation of protection regimes in terms of access, rights and duration; 2) stricter/less predictable requirements for permanent residence and citizenship; and 3) intensified practice regarding the revocation of citizenship.
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