Co-Sponsored with the UCLA Asian American Studies Department

Abstract: Thailand officially sends under 130,000 workers abroad and receives over 3 million migrant workers from neighboring countries. While much of the focus of Thailand's wavering Tier level in its anti-trafficking efforts has been on Thailand as a destination of trafficking of migrant workers, this project examines Thailand as an origin of debt bondage, in which, the focus is on Thai transnational migrant labor. Thai migrant workers in many receiving countries experience a high degree of labor exploitation and human rights abuse that have also been characterized as labor trafficking and debt bondage. While the processes of migrant labor advocacy and state control in the US are at times aligned to mitigate labor abuse and human trafficking, at other times, they are at odds in the case of South Korea when severe deportation enforcement threatens enforcement of labor and human rights. The project uses a combination of ethnography among migrant workers and interviews of Thai migrant workers, their families, government agencies in Thailand, and interviews with US and South Korean NGOs and labor organizations in order to understand the forms of legal and spatial precarity of Thai migrant workers’ experiences. When Thai migrants become victims of labor trafficking as a legal category, it ensures the right to remain in-country for prosecution in the US. Short of this, many undocumented Thai workers like many other undocumented workers are subject to deportation. In South Korea, however, both the right to territorial presence and right to housing reveal how legal status and housing rights become extractive categories, hence migrant workers become even more vulnerable and easy to control.

Please email duranasaydee@ucla.edu for the zoom link.

Sponsor(s): Center for Study of International Migration, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Department