Criminalized and Vulnerable: Refugees And Asylum Seekers in Thailand and Malaysia
Criminalized and Vulnerable: Refugees And Asylum Seekers in Thailand and Malaysia

Author(s): Jera Lego
Subject(s): Labor relations, Migration Studies, Asylum, Refugees, Migration as Policy-fields
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Malaysian; labor and immigration policies; refugees; asylum seekers; governments; employ; migrant; migrant workers;
Summary/Abstract: This chapter examines Thai and Malaysian labor and immigration policies and their implications for the plight of refugees and asylum seekers. It argues that both the Thai and Malaysian governments employ incongruent and ultimately contradictory programs that, on the one hand, aim to utilize and optimize migrant labor for economic gain, motivated by a biopolitical imperative, and, on the other hand, aim to marginalize and criminalize those migrant populations, as motivated by a sovereign compulsion. Migrant labor is thus rendered a transient and disposable resource while serving as a site for performing and asserting the state’s sovereign power. In the absence of national asylum frameworks, refugees and asylum seekers become indistinguishable from undocumented migrant workers upon which the Thai and Malaysian states exercise the right to punish, detain, imprison, and deport. Moreover, refugees and asylum seekers, having no state to be returned to and seek protection from, are at risk of being returned to the same dangers they were fleeing from in the first place.

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