AbstractsLaw & Legal Studies

Low skilled migrant workers are at the bottom of the global hierarchies of mobility and experience borders and papers as a great hindrance. Not able to comply with immigration laws, many are forced to travel undocumented and are hence rendered “illegal”. Among these are Burmese migrant workers, who cross the border to neighbouring Thailand in search of better livelihood opportunities. Much literature on this issue has a tendency to depict such migrants as vulnerable and in need for care. Acknowledging the precariousness of a life in “illegality”, but at the same time moved by a desire to challenge the numerous preconceptions that portrait undocumented migrants as all-vulnerable, we have engaged in a research whose empirical foundation - fieldwork in the border town of Mae Sot - only confirmed the need for such an endeavour. This thesis is an empirically founded example of work-related struggles enacted by undocumented migrant workers in spite of a precarious position of “illegality”. We investigate how undocumented migrant workers in Mae Sot experience this “illegality”, and how we, in this light, can understand the nature and significance of their strategies to counter workplace exploitation. Applying the theoretical framework of Nicholas De Genova, we show how migrants are “illegalised” through incoherent (im)migration laws and turned into a disposable, compliant workforce. In this position, the migrants are seemingly stripped of their possibility for exercising political agency. Our analysis, however, shows that this alone would be a reductive account of their realities. The migrants engage in various political acts directed at working conditions – some of them paradoxically taking into use the legal system which can also be argued to reinforce the very same system which rendered them “illegal”. Applying Anne McNevin’s notion of ambivalence in migrant claims, we argue that even the strategies that engage directly in the rights regime can have a transformative potential. We show that while the migrants through this engagement clearly position themselves as those with a right to make a claim, they do so with sentiments of ambivalence. We show that through this type of engagement – as well as that enacted only within the work place - migrants come to realise their position as rights-bearing subjects as well as their potentials as political agents; this in a way that widens their perception of the limits of the possible. Hence, we suggest that a theoretical recognition of harsh and precarious conditions combined with an approach that stays open for agency and possibility for change, is what do most justice to the realities of many undocumented migrant workers in a precarious position.