Description
This volume interrogates how informal economies, precarious citizenship, and the governance of mobility are reshaping the landscape of migration across Asia. While much scholarship continues to emphasise South to North flows, the chapters foreground South to South migration between neighbouring countries such as Bangladesh and India, Myanmar and Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as wider movements involving China, the Philippines, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.
At the heart of the volume lies a central paradox: migrants are indispensable to the growth of Asian economies and cities, yet they are denied secure residence or pathways to citizenship, caught in regimes of temporary contracts, restrictive policies, and conditional legality that generate an enduring state of permanent temporariness.
In response, migrants forge informal infrastructures of survival and solidarity through kinship ties, ethnic associations, community markets, and entrepreneurial niches that embody resilience and autonomy while revealing the structural failures of governance.
Contributions traverse diverse contexts: India’s extractive landscapes and industrial corridors where coal driven urbanisation collides with displacement and ecological precarity, Japan’s housing markets where discrimination, rent costs, and bureaucratic barriers shape migrant retention, the Philippines and Indonesia where seafaring and care work anchor transnational households, China’s rural to urban migrants whose mobility is constrained by systems such as hukou registration, and the Rohingya crisis which epitomises protracted displacement without durable solutions.
Gender remains a recurring dimension, evident in the experiences of women migrants engaged in domestic service, caregiving, and transnational marriage, whose contributions to both host and origin households highlight the often-overlooked dynamics of social reproduction. Bringing together conceptual insight and empirical depth, Migrant Asia situates migration as a transformative force that is remaking societies from within, and asks whether states can move beyond temporary migration regimes, how migrants’ informal practices reshape urban and regional futures, and whether more inclusive forms of governance can be imagined that recognise migrants as integral members of diverse and evolving polities.
Dr Priya Singh is an IDRC Endowed Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre on Gender and Forced Displacement (CGFD) within the Gender and Development Studies programme at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok.
Dr Lydia Potts is EMMIR (the European Master in Migration and Intercultural Relations) Primary Coordinator at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany.
Professor Paula Banerjee is IDRC Chair and Founding Director of the Centre on Gender and Forced Displacement (CGFD) at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok.
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