Governing Migration and Migrant Labor in Malaysia

• In Event: Governing Migration in Asia

Abstract

Foreign labor has been and continues to be a critical component in the economic growth of many late developing countries. The rising importance of foreign labor in the Global South, however, takes place against a backdrop of recurring xenophobic and hyper-nationalist moments. Research on the causal relationship between migration and these tendencies focuses heavily the interests and behaviors of state actors, economic elites, and racially/ethnically dominant voters. An emergent body of work, however, is investigating how migrant persons themselves affect the politics of immigration control as they respond to anti-immigration laws, policies, and sentiments. This paper contributes to this growing literature by examining how migrant persons shape a country’s migration regime – the laws, policies, and practices governing migration – during these moments of hyper-nationalism. Through a case study of a major labor-importing state in the Global South, Malaysia, I ask: What are the different tactics migrant persons deploy to respond to and/or to transform restrictive immigration policies and practices and why do they vary across migrant populations? How do these different regime-migrant interactions weave together to form a regime governing migration and migrant labor?
Through a subnational comparison of three migrant communities – Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Filipino – as well as participant observation and in-depth interviews with migrant workers, employers, state actors, and members of civil society, I demonstrate that migrant persons play an important and overlooked role in shaping migration regimes. I identify four tactics – internalization, evasion, engagement, and rejection – that migrant persons pursue to facilitate the production, reproduction, and disruption of a migration regime, and argue that different groups of migrants have varying capacities to deploy these tactics. Different histories and patterns of migration and varying perceptions of each group by the Malaysian public shape the set of tactics migrant persons deploy. These varying tactics, in turn, have distinct effects on the migration regime. This study breaks new theoretical ground by showing how an overlooked set of actors – migrant persons – can shape a country’s migration regime during moments of hyper-nationalism despite their precarious position within Malaysia’s political economy.

Author

• Oanh Kim Nguyen, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities