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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (3 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UCLA Previously Published Works (2020)
    Cover page: State capacity and opportunistic governance: the causes and consequences of regulatorybrokerage in Thailand’s guestwork formalization process
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    Program on International Migration (2016)
    How do refugees establish social networks and mobilise social capital in different contexts throughout a multi-stage migration process? Migrant social network literature explains how migrants accumulate social capital and mobilise resources in and between origin and destination but provides limited answers regarding how these processes unfold during refugee migrations involvingprotracted stays in intermediate locations and direct interaction with state agents. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with Kachin refugees in Kuala Lumpur and Los Angeles, I address these gaps by comparing refugee social networks in two sites of a migration process. Distinguishingbetween networks of survival and networks of integration, I argue that differences in their form and functions stem from their interactions with local refugee management regimes, which are shaped by broader state regulatory contexts. In both locations, these networks and regimes feed off each other to manage the refugee migration process, with key roles played by hybrid institutions rooted in grassroots adaptation efforts yet linked to formal resettlement mechanisms. Considering the refugee migration process as a whole, I show that Kachin refugees demonstrate their possession of socialcapital gained during the informal social process of migration to advance through institutionalised political processes of resettlement in each context.
      Cover page: Survival and integration: Kachin social networks and refugee management regimes in Kuala Lumpur and Los Angeles
      • Thesis
      • Peer Reviewed
      UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2022)

      This dissertation is a comparative ethnography of labor migration governance in Thailand. Drawing from 17 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork between 2015 and 2019, a period of intensified guestwork formalization, the study explores a puzzle unexamined in migration governance literature typically focused on the global North: why does one state advance divergent regimes to regulate and reproduce the same type of migrant labor? While migration regime models based on national immigration policy frameworks would point to regulatory differences by skill category, I examine the contrasting ways a state governs low-wage, “low-skill” migrant workers between sites. I use a multiscalar framework to compare subnational regimes of labor migration along three key dimensions: developmental (political economic influences on policy), regulatory (governance relations and practices), and reproductive (structures of social reproduction).

      Findings are based on participant observation in migrant rights organizations and in-depth interviews with migrant workers from Myanmar, Thai state officers, employers, and documentation brokers in Samut Sakhon, a site hosting guestworkers with labor rights and benefits in the seafood supply chain, and in the Tak border zone, where garment and agriculture workers are contained at the country’s periphery with limited rights. I argue that the state reacts to multiple external pressures on how it governs guestwork with limited control capacity and in relation to local circumstances, resulting in varied policies and subnational governance practices that differentially regulate and shape the social reproduction of labor in different locations. I show that the state’s responses to concurrent pressures reinforce distinct regimes exhibiting varying emphases on temporal and spatial logics of control.

      Following a global trend toward temporary migrant labor systems, the Thailand case illuminates labor migration governance in migrant receiving contexts of the global South. The dissertation theorizes such governance by identifying the developmental determinants of guestwork policies, the sources and outcomes of informal brokerage as a regulatory institution in migration infrastructures, and the divergent structures of social reproduction that supply precarious migrant labor for production. More broadly, the project makes contributions to the understanding of state power and the “many hands” of the state in a changing and varied development context.

        Cover page: Reactive Control: Development, Governance, and Social Reproduction in Thailand’s Regimes of Labor Migration
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