Irregular and Forced Migration within Asia: Governance,Marginality,and Labor

Introduction

Irregular and forced migration are increasingly politicized and mediated as “Northern” problems, belying the empirical reality that most undocumented and forcibly displaced migrants travel between countries of the Global South. Though estimating the extent of irregular migration is methodologically fraught (Kierans and Vargas-Silva 2024), available data indicate a greater prevalence across Asia than in North America or Europe (Spencer and Triandafyllidou 2020). For example, it is estimated that 3.3 million irregular migrants reside in Malaysia and Thailand alone (Yi et al. 2020; Barber and Sciortino 2024), more than the combined total of undocumented migrants across 12 of Europe's largest economies and at a higher per capita concentration than in the United States (Kierans and Vargas-Silva 2024). Similarly, emerging economies accommodate about 75 percent of refugees and other people in need of international protection (UNHCR 2023) ¹ . As of 2024, Iran, Türkiye, Pakistan, and Bangladesh together hosted more refugees than North America and the European Union combined (World Bank 2026). For this reason, our special collection focuses on Asia, the continent with the largest intra-regional migration flows of all kinds (Asis, Piper and Raghuram 2019), where these irregular and forced migrations are routine features of transnational life and migration governance. Despite restrictive COVID-19 policies, tighter border controls, economic downturns, and political crises, irregular and forced migration are showing no signs of decreasing within Asia. It is therefore unsurprising that receiving and sending governments, policymakers, and human rights organizations in the Global South are increasingly involved in the management and governance of growing numbers of irregular and forced migrants who are entering high-risk and costly pathways in search of stability and security (Castles et al. 2012; Zewdu 2018; Khattab and Mahmud 2019).

In this special collection, we showcase research that grapples with key social, cultural, historical, and political dimensions of irregular and forced intra-Asian migrations—all of which bear upon the human migrant. Spanning diverse frameworks, approaches, and time periods, the articles collectively demonstrate how irregular and forced migration constitutes a negotiated, contested, fragmented, and changing process. Some migrants experience a range of discriminatory, dehumanizing, and life-threatening outcomes. Others resist in different ways, including embarking on dangerous boat journeys in search of a better life elsewhere, concealing their identities, and forging new networks to mobilize against exclusionary logics of the host state and society. These developments emerge under specific conditions of heightened political and economic instability, leaving irregular and forced migrants in perpetual states of uncertainty even several years after resettlement. How these lived experiences play out is therefore not self-evident and must instead be understood through careful reflection and analysis (Triandafyllidou 2022), a common departure point for the articles in this collection.

While there are important distinctions between irregular and forced migration, these differences, too, have been overstated in the context of Global North migration regimes that bifurcate migratory aspirations into reductionist categories of “asylum seeker” and “economic migrant.” Purkayastha (2018) has argued that migrants seek human security—broadly defined—and, in doing so, are enmeshed in a continuum of structures, processes, and legal statuses that confer greater or lesser freedoms. The lines separating irregular migration (connoting choice) and forced migration (connoting a lack of choice) are, in practice, more blurred than policy rhetoric would suggest. Perhaps the most central commonality between irregular and forced migration flows, though, is their incompatibility with the Northern migration governance paradigm of “regularity”—which reifies the border and the exercise of state power in controlling who crosses it and under what circumstances. Across the Global South, however, “irregularities” have been, and continue to be, a commonplace feature of migration regimes. In this sense, our collection explicitly contributes to efforts to move away from Northern preconceptions and categories that hem in diverse migration patterns (Raghuram 2020; Arias Cubas and Mudaliar 2024), and instead responds to calls to produce conceptual understandings of migration “starting from Asia” (Kathiravelu 2023)—where more migration occurs than anywhere else (IOM 2024).

In doing so, the special collection broadly engages with two key scholarly interventions. First, Asia is characterized by diverse migration patterns and experiences, and, in turn, has become a site of innovation in migration governance as countries adopt policies and practices aimed at managing irregular and forced migration, often with fewer resources to enforce border controls than Global North countries. Both state and non-state actors are involved in responding to irregular migration, often leading to dilemmas shaped by differing objectives—many NGOs, for instance, tend to be less concerned with the governance of irregular migration than with the promotion of the human rights of irregular migrants. Between these expressions of migration governance “from above” and “from below” emerge distinctive understandings of Asian migration regimes as contested sites of policymaking (Rother 2022). One feature of the special collection thus showcases knowledge about the interplay between formal and informal migration governance actors in a diversity of Asian contexts.

Second, if we acknowledge irregular and forced migration as dynamic phenomena involving political, social, cultural, legal, and historical dimensions, then we are inclined to argue that interdisciplinary perspectives are vital to advancing our understanding of them. An interdisciplinary approach can bridge knowledge gaps by drawing on a range of sources and methodologies—such as ethnographic research, policy analysis, archival materials, interviews, and statistical analysis—that together contribute to a more nuanced understanding of heterogeneous migration patterns and the diverse human experiences they shelter. Collectively, the nine papers in the issue reinforce growing calls for migration researchers to pay greater attention to the methods of conducting irregular and forced migration research in the Global South. This is especially important given that these types of migrations can occur outside legal frameworks and are characterized by confounding limitations, including hidden enforcement practices, unreliable data, and limited access to data (Mohan et al. 2023). By engaging with these limitations, the contributors offer important approaches to migration in highly politicized and fraught contexts. In some instances, their research methods point to the importance of engaging with complex migrations that move beyond what is researched to consider how and why, bringing their positionalities to the foreground and making clear the public benefits of their research (Maharjan et al. 2024). As several contributors show, how researchers engage with their field sites and the broader impacts of their research are important to developing meaningful findings and discussions that critically engage with key policy and social challenges. Put differently, the findings and knowledge produced carry the potential to have real-world implications for the millions of irregular and forced migrants across the Global South who continue to face the brunt of rapidly changing policies and politicized contexts.

The rest of this introduction provides important background on the roots of the special collection and a culminating workshop held at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in 2024. We hope that similar initiatives are undertaken by scholars who are interested in unravelling the distinct features of migration in the Global South, and that such efforts are accompanied by actions for equity and collaborations that prioritize the intellectual strengths of junior scholars during current times of employment precarity and exploitation, diminishing funding opportunities, and institutional gatekeeping.

The Roots of the Special Collection

We see this special collection as a unique collaboration and political act to resist some of the myriad power structures and pressures that pervade contemporary academic practice, particularly in institutions of the Global North. These pressures tend to compel early career researchers to prioritize the production of knowledge that complies with the expectations of output-focused universities and “white-lens” publishing structures (Bhambra et al. 2018). The same publishing structures curtail Global South researchers’ access to prestigious international journals, while lopsided access to research funding frequently positions Southern researchers as gatherers of data to be theorized by Northern collaborators (Hountondji 1997). In such a system of knowledge production, the value of meaningful and equitable collaborations tends to be overlooked. Such partnerships and projects take time if we are to work towards eroding barriers between Global North and South scholarship (see Collins 2022). This concern became a goal of our project: to enable new and reciprocal connections among early-career scholars working in or from countries of the Global South.

The three editors met through their research into aspects of migration from Sri Lanka, and shared frustration at the lack of interest in, and opportunities for, research relating to South Asia in the Australian context. We discussed how research on migration from South Asia to other parts of Asia received less attention in high-ranked journals than migration to Northern countries, partly because researchers who undertook these inquiries were based in Asian universities themselves and did not necessarily have access to the resources and privileges afforded to scholars in Global North universities (see Piccoli, Ruedin and Geddes 2023). We saw value in leveraging our institutional advantages to create a forum through which other early-career researchers could showcase research of this kind to international audiences. Aware of its standing in the field, we purposively approached International Migration Review and—following a heartening reception from the editor, Holly E. Reed, to whom we are indebted—committed to working with contributors to prepare their manuscripts for review.

We soon realized that an online meeting of participating researchers would be challenging, and that there would be much to gain from the contributors meeting in person. Knowing that most participants would not have access to travel budgets, we were fortunate to secure funding from Withers’ research budget, provided by the Research School of Social Sciences, and a small grant from the South Asia Research Institute, both at the Australian National University. Dr. Atika Shafinaz Nazri, based at the Institute of Ethnic Studies (KITA), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, eagerly offered her center as a venue for the two-day workshop, given that Kuala Lumpur would be a relatively central location for most of the participants. We are grateful to Atika and her colleagues at KITA for their generous support, without which the workshop would not have been possible.

The workshop took place on February 3–4, 2024, with 25 scholars in attendance, including the paper authors, members of KITA, and two special guest experts who volunteered their time to provide detailed feedback on each paper presentation: Professor Laavanya Kathiravelu (then at Nanyang Technological University, now at University of Oslo) and Professor Michael McDonnell (University of Sydney). A key achievement of the workshop was creating an opportunity for each presentation and draft paper to receive a lengthy group discussion concerning their conceptual and empirical contributions, and guidance for improving overall arguments in light of the special collection. The success of the event was also evident in the camaraderie and relationship-building among the group members, who seized the opportunity to meet with international scholars conducting similar research. In fact, since then, participants have shared their own project and event opportunities with the group, and we foresee further collaborations arising.

Afer the workshop, we maintained contact with the participants and provided reviews of their drafts and resubmissions following the journal's peer-review process. This took nearly two years to complete. Not all papers made it to the special collection, and we see this, in part, as reflective of the increasing contingent and precarious nature of academic employment for early-career scholars. Apart from our time commitments, the cost of the workshop—including international flights and several nights’ accommodation—was approximately $10,000 AUD. For a relatively small financial investment, we achieved a lot. This affirmed our conviction that more Northern scholars could and should create such forums to facilitate dialogue, connections, and knowledge production that works against the status quo marginalization of Southern perspectives—we would be happy to share practical insights with anyone wanting to replicate such a model.

In the following, we outline the key contributions of the nine articles in this collection organized along three themes that developed from the workshop as relevant to emerging research on intra-Asian migration: governance from above and below, marginality, and labor market segmentation.

Governance from Above and Below

Although migration governance is unique to each context, the articles in this special collection point to the conceptual and operational elements that can either hinder or improve outcomes for irregular and forced migrants on the move across Asia (Gisselquist and Tarp 2019; Gazzotti, Mouthaan and Natter 2023; Carella 2024). Firstly, governance mechanisms operate at local, national, regional, and global levels. For instance, at a national level, states such as Malaysia and Thailand frame the arrival of forced migrants as a security problem, rather than a human rights issue. In turn, both states actively pursue restrictive legal admission policies based on deterrence, exclusion, and discrimination. Caught up in bureaucratic processes that leave migrants navigating fragile and unpredictable conditions, many turn to illegal routes to access basic needs such as housing, healthcare, and employment. Secondly, migration governance is multidirectional and involves interactions between a range of groups and individuals at all levels, including governments, non-government organizations, international organizations, and migrants. Importantly, viewing migration governance as a fluid process can help situate migrants as agents in this process. It can even reveal the emergence of alternative governance mechanisms that might, in turn, influence changes in state approaches and reorient concepts, meanings, and justifications toward more humane migration policies. “Governance from above and below,” particularly for those living, thus helps to capture the structural and everyday inequities that determine the trajectories of irregular and forced migrants in search of a better life.

By analyzing interviews with 21 urban refugees in Bangkok, Mary Rose Geraldine Sarausad and Sureeporn Punpuing (2025) examine how Thailand's migration governance and absence of a legal refugee framework have not only closed off legal routes to refugee safety and stability but also created and reinforced everyday experiences of irregularity, hopelessness, and marginalization. The paper delves into the consequences of restrictive refugee governance that affects all aspects of refugees’ lives in urban settings, depriving them of access to education, employment, and healthcare. The interviewees explain how people are forced into the informal economy by taking up illegal jobs in industries that thrive on conditions of precariousness, exploitation, and harm. Some are consequently arrested and regularly pay hefty fines that further entrench them in long-term disadvantage. It is through such deep insights that governance reveals itself as a hierarchical, multilevel process that reproduces refugees as excesses in society, thereby reinforcing their powerlessness, precarity, and unpredictable futures. Yet, this is not always the case, as local governance structures can upend the punitive approaches invoked by the state.

In the Malaysian state of Sabah, the emergence of Alternative Learning Centres (ALCs) provides a sustainable example of how local governance mechanisms have surpassed the state to support the children of irregular migrants. Omer Faruk Cingir's (2025) article shows how ALCs use a rights-based framework to uphold humanitarian standards and transform the social degradation faced by migrant families in Sabah. Cingir develops this analysis by emphasizing the role of educational institutions in shaping how children can overcome feelings of isolation and marginalization, and in fostering community development and economic empowerment. The article shows how ALCs operate as a positive form of governance that becomes a source of support and information for not only children but also their families. More specifically, through interviews, Cingir develops an understanding of how ALC structures, teachers, and learning materials transform the lives of irregular migrants in the absence of state support. By demonstrating how governance structures can support migrants, the article offers a critical example of a fragile hope that persists despite larger structural barriers, where children are protected and supported in their social, educational, and psychological well-being—in contrast to the painful realities facing their parents.

In both Malaysia and Thailand, governance mechanisms are determined by contextual factors—a point taken up explicitly in Rohini Mitra's (2025) study of Rohingya people resettled across India. Irregularity may have more to do with distinct political, administrative, and social realities in each state, thereby showing how broader factors at play always determine governance. Mitra asks, what does fragmentation and ad-hoc governance mean for the everyday realities of Rohingya people living in socio-culturally and politically distinct states in India? The paper reminds us that we should be centering place in conceptualizations of forced and irregular migration. These bring forward two interrelated points: first, Rohingya people's survival in India is contingent on distinct interactions among structural, discursive, and administrative dynamics; and second, recognizing that refugees themselves are agents in these negotiations. Through this configuration of place as a central feature of this process, Mitra points out that while fragmented governance generates anxieties around everyday life and long-term prospects for refugees, it has also provoked greater awareness and fragmented protections for them by advocates.

Marginality

In the context of the collection's papers, marginalization is a position imposed on migrant groups, who face structural and systemic barriers due to their lack of power and generally experience a lack of recognition and fulfilment of their basic human rights (Dennis and Dennis 2017; Hooi 2022). Social exclusion arising from marginality then leads to precarious existences for irregular and forced migrants (Cruz-Del Rosario and Rigg 2019), exacerbated by states’ negligence in protecting them, and especially exposed during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which further limited access to work and movement across borders (Shin et al., 2022). The three papers in this section explore how aspects of identity place already marginalized migrants into further precarity, or in other words, how marginalities intersect to create extreme risk. Lee and Piper (2013, i) argue that the feminist concept of “intersectionality” (see Crenshaw 1989) is applicable in such contexts to understand how complex identities and the “multiplicity of discriminatory mechanisms” lead to further subordination. Women migrants forced or trafficked for labor exploitation, asylum seekers living in refugee camps, and refugees whose ity makes them, at the same time, particularly vulnerable to harm but also invisible to support infrastructures, are some examples of the multidimensionality of marginality. However, the articles in this section also point out that vulnerability can contribute to adaptation and resilience and that a lack of agency, despite extreme marginality, is not to be assumed (Cruz-Del Rosario and Rigg 2019; Hooi 2022).

Working under the Centre for Migration Studies at North South University in Bangladesh, contributors Mohammad Jalal Uddin Sikder, Ishrat Zakia Sultana, Selim Reza, Sayed Nurullah Azad, and Hasan Muhammad Baniamin (2025) examine the connections between structural factors and individual agency that affect Rohingya people's decisions to flee a Bangladeshi refugee camp, after having already fled persecution in Myanmar. Sikder and colleagues investigate the key factors contributing to irregular migration flows aboard unsafe boats across the Bay of Bengal. Their interviews with Rohingya people who had unsuccessful boat journeys reveal the life of misery experienced in the camps where they were subject to restricted movement, extreme weather conditions, limited healthcare or options for work, the threat of murder or kidnapping by insurgent groups, and the psychosocial impact of prolonged displacement. Girls and women in the camps were disproportionately affected by societal pressure to marry, and left Bangladesh in search of marriage overseas without the demands of dowries. The authors argue that such decisions to leave represent a legitimate opportunity for the Rohingya migrants to reclaim personal security and autonomy.

Tamara Megaw's (2025) study on the inclusion of and gender minority refugees in Indonesia uncovers the intersectionality of gender identity, orientation, and displacement, which can render stateless migrants particularly vulnerable. Socially, Indonesia is a conservative society where sex outside of marriage is a criminal offence; there is documented social stigma against LBTIQ + people, a presence of Islamic nationalism which is averse to refugees of other religions, and the presence of gender-based violence. At the governance level, Indonesia's framework for the management of refugees and its enforcement of anti-discrimination laws is weak. Thus, for refugees, who may have fled source countries due to persecution based on their diverse sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression (SOGIE), there is no guarantee of protection from similar persecution in Indonesia. These conditions mean that diverse SOGIE refugees may not feel secure in identifying as such and may miss out on the already limited support that only a few humanitarian organizations can offer them in the Indonesian context. Based on focus group discussions and interviews with key stakeholders, including representatives from global humanitarian and refugee-led organizations, Megaw reveals the enablers, barriers, and impacts of social inclusion from their perspectives.

Whereas international NGOs are seen as enablers of social inclusion in Megaw's study, Raksha Gopal (2025) problematizes their role in the lives of Rohingya mothers in India, as one force that can further alienate these women in need of similar social support. The study adopts a feminist International Relations lens to ethnographically explore how migration governance intersects with motherhood as a way to strengthen control over women's lives in an “illegal” settlement in Delhi. Through displacement, Rohingya women are subject to particular gender-based violence, including child marriages and teenage pregnancies, which means they often give birth and raise children away from their home country. Forms of migration governance dictate restricted access to essential infrastructure, including education and reproductive healthcare. In addition, women face strict surveillance of their movements and misguided support in the form of humanitarian interventions, which push mothers into further precarity. Gopal affirms that it is the mothers and women who are integral to the survival of the stateless Rohingya community, but several aspects of their critical role are rendered invisible. For example, women also take on security roles, making sure their children are kept safe from dangers in the settlement. They are also the main source of cultural socialization for their children, meaning they must pass on their traditions in exile. In these duties, Gopal points out how the mothers display agency in carving out a sense of security for their families.

Labor Market Segmentation

Although the causes of forced and irregular migration are many and varied, they are rarely divorced from the need to work to survive. A third key theme emerging from the workshop was the way in which intra-Asian migrations, though only sometimes driven by economic compulsion, are inextricably linked with processes of labor market segmentation in countries of transit and destination (Ngeh 2022). The vulnerability associated with possessing a precarious legal status—a liminal classification that can slip, arbitrarily or intentionally, between authorized and irregular designations (Parreñas et al. 2021)—is seen to be instrumental in regulating and conditioning differential access to local labor markets, such that the most vulnerable migrants are frequently clustered in the most devalued industries and occupations (Deshingkar 2019; Sunam 2022). This occurs because a confluence of state and non-state actors, including migrants themselves, mutually constitute political economies of belonging whereby the security of regular status or citizenship is often restricted to those with desired financial and embodied capital (Akıncı 2024) while, conversely, irregular status may be tolerated contingent upon it serving an explicit economic function in the provision of low-wage labor. This gives rise to different categories of practice (Triandafyllidou 2022), in which relatively more privileged migrants or those able to comply with imperatives of destination states can “belong” (albeit under prescribed terms), while others navigate the insecurity of living and laboring under informal circumstances and the threat of deportation. Yet, as the articles addressing this theme demonstrate, actual experiences of migration rarely mirror the reductionism implied by the category fetishism of migration status, and there can be advantages associated with becoming “irregular,” particularly in contrast to adherence with the rigid migration regimes of guestworker states.

Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul's (2025) contribution examines the lived experiences of statelessness among Shan youth living in Chiang Mai to demonstrate how neoliberal values have permeated the governance of belonging in Thailand, resulting in differential inclusion predicated on an economic basis. Whereas Thailand's migration regime once categorically excluded Shan populations displaced across the Thai-Myanmar border, policy changes over the past two decades have created new pathways to legal inclusion that have been heralded as a humanitarian success. However, Cheva-Isarakul's analysis reveals this to be a process of selectively resolving statelessness for some and not others, stratifying the Shan population based on “deservingness” coded as the possession of social and cultural capital desired by the Thai state. For the youth participating in the study, citizenship became an aspirational project strategically pursued through investment in vocational education, a careful performativity of “Thainess,” and self-responsibilization as legally savvy but politically muted subjects. While many succeeded in achieving legal inclusion, often at great cost, others with fewer resources did not—and were thus confronted with the prospect of eking out an existence in the precarious low-wage labor markets that previous generations of Shan refugees were confined to. In tracing these dynamics through rich longitudinal research, Cheva-Isarakul makes clear that the extractive logic of a neoliberal political economy of belonging (Mavelli 2018) is not confined to the Global North contexts in which it is most frequently discussed, but is deeply ingrained in the governance frameworks overseeing Thailand's much-celebrated drive to eradicate statelessness. It is a powerful demonstration of how destination states in Asia use the mechanism of citizenship and the stability it confers to leverage situations of vulnerability as opportunities to discipline labor at the bottom and middle rungs of the economy.

By contrast, Arokkiaraj Heller and Laavanya Kathiravelu (2025) turn their attention to the prevalence of irregularity within what are otherwise some of the most regimented labor markets in Asia: those of the Gulf Cooperation Council economies. Here, where the highly restrictive kafala system has become a byword for the exploitation of guestworkers employed in devalued occupations like construction and domestic work, the structural conditions of migration are often narrated as overwhelming the possibility of migrant agency. By foregrounding the experiences of Indian men migrating to the Gulf from Tamil Nadu, Heller and Kathiravelu contest the determinism of this perspective, instead showing how the “regularity” of employer-tied contracts frequently lapses into under-examined situations of “irregularity” that heighten precarity but also confer opportunities to exercise greater agency. Strikingly, the authors show how the practice of khalluli labor (i.e., working outside of visa conditions) is not only thoroughly institutionalized by Gulf employers as a means of securing labor under more flexible conditions, but is co-produced by migrant workers who actively take on the risks associated with irregular status to reclaim autonomy in resistance to the constraints of the kafala system. In rich ethnographic detail, the accounts of Tamil returnees who had previously engaged in khalluli show how these decisions were often premeditated and socially normalized acts—informed by community knowledge, facilitated by institutional familiarity, and plied with emotional labor—to circumvent the social and economic pitfalls of regular pathways. The findings thus challenge commonplace binary delineations between regular and irregular status, showing that the line between the two is not only blurred and co-produced by a knot of power-imbalanced actors, but that the latter is by no means unilaterally more insecure or exploitative.

Looking back to one of the most significant forced migrations in history, Ekata Bakshi (2025) highlights the impact of India's Partition in the longue durée, addressing the nexus between caste and class during and after upheaval. Emphasizing intersectional factors often rendered invisible in the telling of Hindu migration from (formerly) East to West Bengal, Bakshi examines how the prevailing disadvantages of refugees from so-called “Scheduled” and “Other Backward” castes, and particularly of women, were reproduced through Partition itself. Bakshi details how members of the Namasudra caste could not readily leave East Bengal at the time of Partition, due to their agrarian livelihoods and limited resources tied to such existences, allowing the upper-caste Hindus who fled first to secure social and economic advantages by narrating their plight as one of proletarians rather than elites. What emerges is an account of selective inclusion and labor market segmentation, in which upper-caste arrivals successfully found patronage in Left politics and had their citizenship claims affirmed. At the same time, lower-caste refugees became mired in “quasi-citizenship” and relocated to areas like Asansol (the site of Bakshi's ethnography), where their employment opportunities were restricted to devalued work on the informal fringes of the industrial economy. This entailed the de facto reconstruction of a caste-based division of labor, by then outlawed in India, in which gender-based discrimination heaped further disadvantage on women confined to the most stigmatized margins of informal employment. Driven by critical feminist and anti-caste approaches to ethnography, Bakshi makes a bold contribution to the history of Partition by showing how the path-dependent trajectories of refugee families in Asansol are emblematic of how caste relations were redrawn along class lines to cement disadvantage across generations.

Conclusion

This special collection is the product of a three-year project that, from its inception, was borne of an endeavor to promote the work of early-career researchers working in and from Asia to expand our understanding of the diverse cross-border migrations across the world's most populous continent. Collectively, these contributions situate experiences of forced and irregular migration as troubling the category fetishisms of theory produced through a Northern lens and implicitly make a case for positioning Asia as a starting point—rather than a testing ground—for migration theory. The studies in this special collection highlight the complexity and urgency of the issues faced by irregular and forced migrants in Asia. We hope this collection provokes further introspection about whose voices are being heard and whose knowledge is valued in the pursuit of truly international migration research.