Status Brokers and the Regularization of Irregular Migrants in Thailand

Literature on the migration industry has begun to move beyond a limited focus on illegal activities facilitating irregular migration to more multifaceted conceptions of industry functions relating to authorized labor migration and state migration control. This paper adds to this literature by introducing the case of “status brokers” in Thailand, whose activities, spawned from state efforts to regularize undocumented migrants, serve to link irregular flows with formalized migrant labor schemes. While Thailand has signed bilateral agreements to regulate temporary migrant labor from Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, the vast majority of migration into the country is still unauthorized. In response to the estimated one million irregular migrants in the country, the Thai government sporadically opens registration periods in specific industries and provinces, requiring migrants to complete a nationality verification process in order to obtain documents and avoid deportation. Capitalizing on migrant needs to navigate state bureaucracies in an unfamiliar language, employer desires to hold onto cheap migrant labor, and state efforts to manage a large undocumented workforce, a variety of brokers have emerged to facilitate this regularization process. Based on fieldwork in three provinces of Thailand, this paper examines the integral role migration industry actors of varying formality play in state efforts to manage migrant work and irregular migration flows. I argue that these actors and the services they sell serve to sustain migrant labor in several industries throughout the Thai economy in need of labor while also helping to manage a previously unauthorized and undocumented migrant population, thus serving both facilitation and management functions. Finally, I analyze the Thai case in comparison with more formalized migrant labor recruitment schemes in Malaysia and Singapore in order to characterize the varied role of the migration industry in infrastructures of migration management in Southeast Asia.