UCLA

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.