Southeast Asia is currently home to some of the world’s most significant labour exporting nation-states. In the 1970s, the oil boom in the Middle East and Gulf states generated a huge demand for construction labour, which was largely met by recruiting migrant workers from South and Southeast Asian (i.e. the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand) countries. The Asian workforce was preferred for a number of reasons, including migrants’ acceptance of low wages and their political neutrality, important for safeguarding the political interests of the oil rich monarchies.
From the 1980s, international migration in the region gained further impetus as intra-regional labour migration increased in significance. The economic growth of newly industrialised economies in Asia began to generate a demand for low-skilled and semi-skilled workers to fill the lower rungs of the economy – that is, socially devalued jobs such as construction, domestic and care work – shunned by the citizen workforce. Within Southeast Asia, the labour-short destination states of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei imported workers largely from Indonesia and the Philippines, while Thailand became the main destination for cross-border migrant workers from countries through which the Mekong River flows, specifically, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
With the dawn of the twenty-first century, Southeast Asian migration gained further momentum as part of global migration-and-development discourses that foreground “triple win” benefits to all three parties involved – migrant workers, destination countries and origin countries. Bolstered by a new awareness of the size and importance of remittances flowing from migrants back to their countries of origin, there was growing consensus that “migration reduces poverty on an extraordinary scale, that well-managed migration is one of the most powerful enablers of development, and that migration should be more systematically included in national, bilateral, and international development strategies”.
In this context, this paper discusses the rise of a temporary migration regime in Southeast Asia before turning to two key issues of concern associated with such a regime: (1) compounding forms of migrant precarity; and (2) transnational families and gendered care practices.
Migration in Southeast Asia – Data at a Glance
In 2020, there were an estimated 23.6 million Southeast Asians living outside their country of origin. The Philippines was the country with the highest number of emigrants (6.1 million), followed by Indonesia (4.6 million) and Myanmar (3.7 million). Most Southeast Asian migrants remained on the continent (15 million). Of these, 7.1 million even stayed within the Southeast Asian region. The most important reason for migration is the search for work and/or better income. For many families, labour migration is an important poverty reduction strategy. Women make up a significant share of Southeast Asian migrants. For example, in 2020, 61 percent of migrants from Thailand were women, and more than 55 percent of those from Malaysia and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Many migrant women are employed as domestic workers.
Source: Externer Link: Migration Data Portal, Migration data in South-eastern Asia.
A Temporary Migration Regime
Large-scale migrations within the region started at a time when Southeast Asian countries were still in the process of consolidating projects of nation-building in the 1970s.
In this context, the migration regime that emerged in the region was premised on keeping migration temporary, and apart from creating a privileged pathway for highly skilled migrants to gain residency and citizenship, most Asian receiving nation-states “rule[d] out settlement, family reunification and long-term integration, including acquisition of citizenship, for less skilled migrants”.
The development of a temporary migration regime has also been accompanied by the rapid growth of a wide range of intermediaries – licensed recruitment agencies, transport providers, immigration lawyers, housing and placement agents, and informal recruiters – who play important roles in organising, facilitating and channelling migration flows. Precisely because labour migration policies are restrictive and complex, the demand for brokers with the expertise of navigating labyrinthine migration regulations has grown with the expansion of new markets.
Compounding Forms of Migrant Precarity
Under a temporary migration regime, low-waged migrant workers undertake considerable risks and endure continual precarity as they navigate a narrow path hemmed in by the ‘‘intractable antagonism between market demands for migrant labor and citizen demands for closure’’.
First, temporary labour migration is predicated on the principle of permanent temporariness where migrants are not expected or allowed to settle or integrate into the receiving society. Employment is based on time-limited contracts, with few (if any) pathways to permanent residency and with repatriation upon completion of service. As disposable labour, temporary migrants are often treated as an “antidote” to excessive nationalist fears of migrants as temporary migration allows for a highly controlled form of entry and exit into nation-states that can be calibrated in accordance with industry needs and the degree of social tolerance.
Second, immigration precarity that renders the temporary migrant socially and legally insecure in the receiving nation-state lays the foundation for employment precarity. Temporary migrants take on undesirable, dangerous, and socially devalued jobs such as construction, domestic, care and sanitation work shunned by the citizenry of receiving countries. As transient workers, they are frequently excluded or only partially incorporated into labour laws, with minimal access to the full range of rights available to citizens.
Third, migrant precarity is also compounded by the prevalence of commercial brokers in recruitment and subcontracting of migrant labour. While intermediaries facilitate and channel migrant mobility across borders, they also increase migrant indebtedness, down-source risks to migrants, blur responsibility towards migrants’ welfare, and exploit their vulnerabilities for profit.
Transnational Families and Gendered Care Practices
For many migrant-sending families in Southeast Asia, parental migration as a strategy of survival or social-economic advancement splits the family unit, often for long periods of time. Left-behind children grow up for part or all of their young lives in the absence of a migrant father, a migrant mother, or both, and under the care of a ‘single’ parent or other surrogate caregivers. In areas such as rural Indonesia and Vietnam where feminised out-migration streams predominate, established gender norms may either be challenged by changing social practices where women assume breadwinner roles, or continue to regulate traditionally scripted roles for men and women but in new ways.
When women become migrant breadwinners, gender ideals surrounding motherhood continue to prevail in a transnational context. Women ‘mother from a distance’ by employing (tele)communications regularly to transmit transnational circuits of emotional care and financial remittances to their families and children left in source countries. The care vacuum in the absence of mothers is often filled by female relatives such as grandmothers and aunts.
At the same time, a complex picture of more flexible gender practices of care in sending countries is also emerging. In place of the image of the delinquent left-behind man who is resistant to adjusting his family duties in the woman’s absence, some Southeast Asian men strive to live up to masculine ideals of being both ‘good fathers’ and ‘independent breadwinners’ when their wives are working abroad, by taking on at least some care functions that signified parental love and authority while holding on to paid work (even if monetary returns are low) for a semblance of economic autonomy.
