DSpace at VNU: Human Rights and (Im)mobility: Migrants and the Statei nThailand

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SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia Vol 28, No (2013), pp 216-tO DOI: 10.1355/sj28-2b © 2013 ISEAS ISSN 0217-9520 print / ISSN 1793-2858 electronic Human Rights and (Im)mobility: Migrants and the State in Thailand Annuska Derks Migration and human rights stand in ambiguous relation to each other Different, at time contradictory, conceptions of human rights in the context of migrant labour in Thailand reveal the paradoxical role of the state and the law in the protection of migrants' rights The state is held accountable for the protection of the human rights of migrants residing in its territory, even as it at the same time creates the conditions that may result in those migrants' exclusion from protection Examination of this exclusion in the particular case of Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand and their efforts to enact what Hannah Arendt called "the right to have rights" reveals the chaos of human rights praxis in everyday migrant life Keywords: labour migration, human rights, "illegality", immobilization, resistance, Thailand The human rights of low-skilled migrant workers have in recent years become a central issue in the debate about migrants in Thailand The Thai government, its ministries and departments, human rights groups, international and local organizations and academics have called attention to the importance, limitations and violations of the human rights of migrant workers in the country Yet what are these rights? And how are they enacted? This article analyses the different ways in which human rights are conceived in the context of migrant labour in Thailand in order to draw attention to the penetration of the rhetoric of human rights into local parlance, governance and migrant advocacy (Messer 1993, p 241) Differing, at times contradictory, conceptions of human rights reveal Human Rights and (Im)mobility: Migranfs and the State in Thailand 217 the paradoxical role of the state and the law in the protection of migrants' rights: the state is held accountable for the protection of human rights of migrants residing upon its territory, and at the same time it creates the conditions for the exclusion of those migrants fiom protection While most analyses of this exclusion focus on laws, issues of state sovereignty and the political realm, this article highlights more basic processes Examining the manifestation of exclusion in the lives of Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand and, in particular, the ways in which they seek to enact rights in a situation of apparent rightlessness, it aims to unveil the "chaos of human rights praxis" in everyday migrant life (Goodale 2006, p 491) I argue that the rights or rightlessness of migrant workers relate not, as is often thought, to migrant "(il)legality" but rather to processes of control and immobilization of migrant labour The case study of Cambodian migrant workers on the eastem seaboard of Thailand reveals the ways in which, in the context of these processes of immobilization, migrants seek to defy unfair treatment and exploitation through practices, strategies and choices that are, like the migrants themselves, outside the law These practices, strategies and choices at once challenge and reaffirm migrants' state of exclusion in Thai society The data regarding the human rights rhetoric and praxis presented in this article are drawn from a range of sources, including interviews with representatives of intemational and non-governmental organizations, government policy documents and research reports and newspaper articles on migrant workers in Thailand Most importantly, the article draws on ethnographic material collected in 2007 and 2008-9 during six months of field research among Cambodian migrant workers in Rayong province, on Thailand's eastem seaboard, and in their home villages in Cambodia The fieldwork combined participant observation of migrant workers at their work sites and in their living quarters with both informal interviews and in-depth interviews with migrant workers and their families, their employers, local authorities and representatives of migrant-worker support groups 218 Annuska Derks The Idioms of Migrant Rights In his speech at the launch of the United Nations Development Programme's 2009 Human Development Report on Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development (UNDP 2009), former Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva stated Migration is an expression of the freedom and desire of each individual to seek better opportunities in life, mostly through the exercise of basic human rights, the pursuit of peace, education and employment As "Thailand" means "the land of the free", it is our Government's policy to ensure that migrants can enjoy their freedom and social welfare in Thailand while their human rights are duly respected (Abhisit 2009, emphasis added) These words reveal some interesting dimensions of the way in which former Prime Minister Abhisit and the Thai government conceive of the rights of migrant workers His statement draws upon the idea of human rights as "given" in two contradictory ways On the one hand, by referring to the "basic human rights" of each individual, he invokes the idea of human rights as "those rights [that] one possesses simply by being a human being" (Dembour 2010, p 2) This idea of human rights based on "nature" underlies the dominant thinking about the universality of human rights (ibid.) On the other hand, by referring to the role of government policy, Abhisit shows that these rights are actually "given" by the host state They are, that is, rights that the host state — in this case Thailand — grants non-citizens who are working on its'territory (Noll 2010, p 243) Furthermore, by referring to their human rights, he unwittingly makes a distinction between the human rights of migrants and those of others — of, that is Thai citizens Obviously, not everybody is equally human This example illustrates well the ways in which human rights are linked to the nation-state While we may often say that human rights are innate and inalienable, states create people's actual entitlements to those rights (Tumer 2006, p 2) Following Hannah Arendt, Agamben (1998, p 126) writes that "[i]n the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to Human Rights and (im)mobility: Migrants and the State in Thailand 219 lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state." As Agamben thus suggests with the greatest clarity, a paradox dominates the relationship between human rights and migration: on the one side, there is the dominant view that all humans have human rights simply because they are human, but on the other side there is the recognition that not all humans enjoy human rights (see also Dembour 2010), in particular the so-called non-citizens Among the different types of non-citizens, those who are what Nash (2009, p 1078) has called "un-citizens" and lack a recognized legal status in the countries in which they live or work find themselves in the most precarious position "Illegality" or "irregularity" is commonly seen as the main cause of the rightlessness and the other problems of low-skilled migrant workers Therefore, as former Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva (2009) formulates it, "the most effective way to protect these migrants is to legalize their status and bring them into the formal labour market." In line with this reasoning, the Thai government has developed several policies aimed at the legalization of undocumented migrant workers and the promotion of regular migration As is often the case, provisions for the legalization of undocumented migrants have been coupled to new and more aggressive measures to control borders and suppress, arrest, prosecute and deport "alien workers who are working underground" (Order of the Prime Minister's Office No 125/2553; see also De Genova 2009, p 446) While introduced in the name of protecting migrants' rights, registration policies have in fact served to enhance control, by "controlling the number of migrants, controlling their movements and controlling any perceived damage they might to the Thai workforce and national security" (Pearson et al 2006, p 9) Instead of guaranteeing more protection, registration actually has become a means to tie migrant workers to their employers and to prevent themfi'omcirculating fi'eely and fi'om changing employers at their own will (Derks 2010è, pp 926-27).' The fact that registration does not provide more protection has been illustrated in reports on migrants' lack of access to basic labour rights (Supang 2007, p 9) Migrants lack access to official 220 Annuska Derks complaint mechanisms and the possibility of collective bargaining (e.g., Vitit 2005) An Intemational Labour Organization (ILO) study found that migrants working in Thailand's fishing, agricultural sector, manufacturing and domestic-service sectors face violations of their labour rights and substandard working conditions, including underpayment of wages, forced overtime, long and irregular working hours and a lack of rest days It found a small number of migrants in conditions equivalent to forced labour (Pearson et al 2006, pp xxii-xxiii) The report argues that "laws and policies play a significant role in how employers treat workers" and that the exploitation of migrant workers is directly linked to the absence of laws to protect the rights of workers (p xxiv) Taking a so-called "rights-based approach" to migration, the ILO has called upon the Thai government to adapt the intemational standards of protection to which it has committed itself as signatory of major human rights conventions and other agreements on labour and human rights (see e.g., Pearson et al 2006, pp 6-8) For the ILO, human rights are, in other words, not "given" or "based on nature" They are moral and social standards and principles that societies have "agreed upon" and "chosen to adopt" When translated into good laws, implemented through sound procedures, these standards and principles will guarantee the protection of rights (Dembour 2010, p 8) But how pertinent is a conception of human rights which takes the law as central in the realization of fair processes and good govemance to the case of migrant workers in Thailand? As a Human Rights Watch report points out, "many types of abuses are either embedded in laws and local regulations or perpetrated by officials" in the country (Human Rights Watch 2010, p 2) Human Rights Watch notes "widespread violations of migrant workers" who are "effectively bonded to their employers and face rights violations from police, soldiers, immigration officials, and other government officials who threaten, assault, and extort migrant workers with impunity" (ibid., back cover) In the Thai context, then, it is impossible to see the law as central to the protection of rights Rather, the operation of the law there seems to betray the idea of human rights (Dembour Human Rights and {lm)mobiiity: Migrants and the State in Thaiiand 221 2010, p 11) The state and state authorities are part of the country's human-rights problem Accordingly, human-rights organizations like Human Rights Watch, not conceive of human rights as "natural" or "agreed upon", but rather as something that has to be continuously "fought for" (Dembour 2010, p 3) In fact, legal frameworks designed to enhance the protection of migrant workers provide Thai employers and local authorities with instriunents of control over those workers Human-rights abuses are related not only, as is often argued, to the absence of the law (that is, the lack of rule of law, weak state structures and corruption) but also to the actual workings of the law (Derks 2010a, p 846) International and non-governmental organizations have called upon the state to take measures against human-rights abuses but have at the same time found themselves faced with laws and policies that create conditions for abuse and labour subordination (Rudnyckyj 2004) This realization that the state and its laws are in actual fact not protecting migrants but rather excluding migrants access to the rights enjoyed by citizens underlies much recent scholarship exploring the link between migrant life and Agamben's concept of "bare life" (1998) Rightlessness and Innmobilization How these contradictions in the ways in which human rights are conceived in the migrant context as "given", "agreed upon" or "fought for" (Dembour 2010) relate to migrant workers' actual lived experiences of work and life in Thailand? How these workers perceive their rights? I not claim here to know migrants' views on human rights; they actually hardly refer to the term when asked about their work and life in Thailand Those who did would probably fit best Dembour's description of people who see human rights as something "talked about" (Dembour 2010, p 2) or, maybe more correctly, "heard o f — yet with little relevance for their lives For example, Thou,^ a Cambodian working as a deckhand on a Thai fishing vessel 222 Annuska Derks pointed at the disposability of his labour and that of his peers when he noted, "Living here means that we don't have rights We don't have much fieedom We have no clear timefiame When we work for them [fishing-vessel owners], it is all up to them When they want us to stop, for several months, for years, it's up to them."^ Sokhom, working on another Thai fishing vessel, explained that he has no chance to complain: "In Cambodia we have a law, but here in Thailand there is no clear law It is all up to the boss.'"* Lap, another migrantfishermanfi-omCambodia, linked this powerlessness to their "outsider" position within Thai society: "The workers on the [Thai] fishing vessels think that we Khmer [khmaei yeung] are in another country and have no right to complain."^ Lap's remark tallies with Prem Kumar's and Grundy-Warr's analysis of the structures that deny migrants the rights taken for granted by citizens (2004, p 57) Prem Kumar and Grundy-Warr base their analysis on Agamben's conceptualization of "bare life", which has become a popular concept among migration scholars seeking "to delineate the plight of refiigees and unauthorized migrants floating in the global economy" (Lee 2010, p 57) Bare life refers to a condition, a form of life, that is "stripped of every right" (Agamben 1998, p 183) It is a life that is excluded fiom the political order, and yet in continuous relationship with the sovereign power that produced it The popularity of the concept of bare life in migration scholarship has much to with Agamben's description of the ambiguity of the lives of those who are "neither fially recognised as members nor completely excluded as strangers" (Lee 2010, p 61) Prem Kumar and Grundy-Warr (2004) argue that the distinction between included and excluded forms of life, between those whom the sovereign will protect and those whom it will not — between, that is, the citizen and the migrant worker in the present context — is integral to the sovereign power and the continuation of the system of the nation-state It is, they stress, through the encounter with the "unruliness" of the irregular migrant that the norm is defined At the same time, that same distinction creates the conditions for making migrants into govemable and labouring subjects, because it is, as Human Rights and {lm)mobility: Migrants and the State in Thailand 223 De Genova (2010, pp 38-39) states, "precisely their distinctive legal vulnerability, their putative 'illegality' and official 'exclusion' that inflames the irrepressible desire and demand for undocumented migrants as a highly exploitable workforce" How is this "exclusion" manifested in actual migrant life? For Phirun, a construction worker from Cambodia, the line between inclusion and exclusion became evident soon after he first entered Thailand He had found work at a construction site in Bangkok where he was, after fewer than four months, caught in a police raid and taken to a detention centre He stayed in detention for fifty-seven days, sharing the crowded and dirty premises with some 500 other migrant workers from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar Eventually, he and his other "illegal" compatriots were taken to the Cambodian border at Poipet.^ Detention and deportation are the ultimate means of emphasizing "the borders demarcating the included" (Prem Kumar and GrundyWarr 2004, p 36) and of "perpetrating, embellishing and reinstating a 'threshold that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside"' (De Genova 2010, p 46, quoting Agamben 1998, p 131) What is less often highlighted is that this threshold is constantly crossed, and by people going in both directions After being deported without having eamed a baht, Phirun soon crossed the border again to seek work in Thailand This time he went to Chonburi, where he not only eamed a steady income in construction but also met his wife-to-be, a twenty-year-old woman from Battambang named Sey When I met the two of them, they had just retumed to Thailand — again — from their first trip together to Cambodia They were both working in Rayong for a subcontractor who employed a team of twenty-one constmction workers, among them Cambodians and Khmer-speaking Thai from Isan Cambodian migrant workers in Rayong have a saying: "In Thailand it is easy to find [eam] money, but difficult to live" (new srok Thai sroul rook luy, pibat ru 'eh new) Migrant workers made it clear that their motivations for coming to Thailand related to the fact they could "eam a lot more money in Thailand because there 224 Annuska Derks are hardly any jobs in Cambodia."^ Yet it also means having to live with the constant and random threat of extortion and detention on the part of the police While it was obvious to Phirun that in terms of earning an income Thailand "wins fiom us Cambodians" (can khmaei yeung), he was also well aware of his precarious position.* As an unregistered migrant worker, he had to be on the alert for the police at all times He had had a registration card during his first year of work in Chonburi, but his boss missed the deadline for its extension He has since worked without documentation His current employer in Rayong told me that he did not even consider registering his migrant workers, because he was never sure about the next construction project Although he was very pleased with the work and meekness of his Cambodian workers, this employer knew that, as soon as he had no more work to offer them, they would move on to another employer He would lose any money invested in their registration Therefore, instead of registering his migrant workers, Phirun's employer paid a monthly sum to individuals fiom the immigration department, to the police and to a high-ranking local official In return, he was wamed in advance of police raids, in time for him to hide his undocumented workers.' About a month after telling me about these arrangements, Phirun's employer called to tell me that he had moved his Cambodian workers fi'om Rayong to Sattahip, in the neighbouring province of Chonburi The police in Rayong had been raiding his site too often, severely disturbing the working routines of the migrant workers When I visited Phirun and Sey at their new work site in Sattahip, they described how they had to run and hide in the nearby bushes whenever the police came In Sattahip, on the contrary, they felt much more at ease They lived in temporary shacks built on a bare piece of land, next to the construction site and out of sight fiom the main road The police had so far not bothered them They even went by themselves to the nearby market, whereas in Rayong their supervisor had always accompanied them Phirun's story illustrates well the constant threat of arrest and deportation that migrant workers face, their dependency on employers for income and shelter as well as for protection against the state and Human Rights and (Im)mobility: Migrants and the State in Thailand 225 the weaknesses of the registration system It makes clear that all these factors work together to curtail migrants' freedom of movement At the same time, it also illustrates some of the ambiguities that characterize the large presence of migrant workers in Thailand Certain sectors of the Thai economy, notably construction, fisheries, agriculture and domestic work face a labour shortage These are sectors that have been shunned by Thais, who have or think that they have more attractive employment altematives at home and abroad This shortage has created the conditions for the massive mobilization of labourers from neighbouring countries (Supang 1999, p 161) While constituting the backbone of Thailand's lowcost, labour-intensive industries, the estimated two million migrant workers in the country are seen at the same time as a threat to its social order, national security and even to the health of its people In such a context, the state attempts to tum migrant workers into a "captive and tractable workforce" whose mobility must be controlled (De Genova 2010, p 58) It practices, that is, what I have elsewhere called the immobilization of essentially mobile labourers (Derks 20106, p 916) Ahnost all Cambodian migrants whom I met during my fieldwork in Rayong had stories to tell about immigration officials arriving on motorbikes and entering their living compounds in order to hunt down undocumented migrants, about not daring to leave their working and living premises for fear of police arrest, about police taking migrant workers far away into the prey (forest, bush) and demanding exorbitant fees before letting them go, about the bad treatment and low-quality rice served in detention centres and about the fear of being deported to Cambodia without money It is subjection to such "quotidian forms of intimidation and harassment" (De Genova 2002, p 438), rather than actual detention and deportation, that serves to control and immobilize migrant labour These daily forms of intimidation and harassment are, however, related not only to migrants' status as documented or undocumented workers but also to the idea that migrants pose a threat to what in an "Announcement of the Province of Rayong on Determining the Measures to Control Illegal Alien Workers" is labelled "the Human Righfs and (Im)mobility: Migranfs and the State in Thailand 227 cross borders and seek work abroad, often with the connivance of local authorities in the destination country On site, documented, semi-documented" and undocumented migrants are engaged in the same activities alongside one another As the example of Phirun shows, undocumented migrants are not a separate, hermetically sealed community, but engage as neighbours, co-workers or customers on a daily basis with other migrants as well as with citizens of the countries in which they work (De Genova 2002, p 422) Although migrant workers like Phirun are everywhere, they have to remain invisible Although pronouncements of official policy in destination countries may claim a respect for the rights of migrant workers, they often have, as Lap said, "no right to complain" They enjoy, that is, no right to claim rights Although migrants have entered the Thai labour market on a massive scale, they are in fact, as Thou made clear, disposable workers These realties allow understanding of the "inclusive exclusion" that characterizes the position of migrant workers in Thailand While this ambiguity can be found in Agamben's description of the life of a person that "cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is already included" (1998, p 25), those applying his argument within the context of intemational labour migration have too often focused on the binary pairs of the included and the excluded, of "political life (legality, rights, citizenship) and bare life (illegality, no rights, nonparticipation)" (Lee 2010, p 63).'^ In actuality, it is not so easy to draw a simple line between citizens who enjoy juridical-legal rights and the "bare life" of migrant workers (Ong 2006, p 9) Many Thais not enjoy fiiU access to rights in their own country, despite their citizenship And migrants resist immobilization and exploitation despite living in a context of apparent rightlessness, as the next section makes clear Dignity and Everyday Fornns of Migrant Resistance Hannah Arendt famously introduced the notion of "the right to have rights" (1968, pp 297-98), by which she meant the right of 228 Annuska Derks every individual to belong to humanity, to some kind of organized community in which human dignity is guaranteed through political action Arendt did not believe that rights are given, but rather that they are enacted She showed that those who are most in need of protection — the refugee, the stateless individual and, one may add, the undocumented migrant — and who live outside a political community and without political status are in no position to claim rights They are deprived of "a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective" and thus also of "the right to action" (ibid., p 296) This state of deprivation does not, of course, mean that they not act, but that they are denied the capacity to act collectively in the public realm Yet if the right to have rights cannot be enacted in the public realm, then, I would argue, it is all the more important to uncover the ways in which it is enacted through a variety of actions and practices performed beneath the surface Recent scholarship has addressed the question of how refugees or (undocumented) migrants enact, despite their outsider position and situation of rightlessness, the "right to have rights" in ways that capture public awareness It has focused, for example, on protests on the part of migrant workers in the United States in 2006 (De Genova 2009) and the activities of the sans-papiers movements in France and elsewhere in Europe (Krause 2008) Such public acts, in which officially rightless and deportable migrants render themselves visible and articulate political demands, offer rare examples of the ways in which migrants in certain places and at certain times collectively defy exclusion and become political beings that refuse to accept their "bare life" (Lee 2010, p 65; De Genova 2009, p 451) Other studies have directed attention to how others claim "the right to have rights" on behalf of migrant workers Ong (2006) and Elias (2008; 2010), for example, explore the role of non-governmental organizations in making claims on behalf of "underpaid, starved, and battered" migrant workers (Ong 2006, p 195) These kinds of activism, instead of calling upon universal human rights, tend Human Rights and (Im)mobility: Migrants and the State in Thailand 229 to Stress the importance of the "biowelfare" and dignity of female migrant workers whose protection is not only the responsibility of the state but also of those who employ migrant workers in informal and irregular settings In Thailand, political actions in which migrant workers publicly enact "the right to have rights" have been limited Whereas a range of organizations, civil-society movements and academics address the issue of migrants' rights, their impact has been small-scale and often limited to specific work places or specific issues (for example, health and education) (Piya 2009, p 22) The absence of headline-grabbing protests and demonstrations by migrants in Thailand might create the impression that migrant workers silently acquiesce to what Human Rights Watch (2010, p 1) describes as an "atmosphere circumscribed by fear, violence, abuse, corruption, intimidation, and an acute awareness of the many dangers posed by not belonging to Thai society" This impression is, however, misleading Events and activities occurring beneath the surface mean that, for a comprehensive analysis of hiunan rights praxis in Thailand in everyday migrant life, we must look beyond the public political space, beyond claims made through official channels and collective protests We must explore the everyday practices through which migrants subvert existing arrangements without openly confionting power If we are to identify the ways in which migrants act to defend their interests and dignity in a context of rightlessness, we need to examine the practices, discourses and choices of migrants for the various forms of "offstage" dissent and "everyday forms of resistance" (Scott 1990, pp 4-5; Scott 1985) that they reveal These everyday forms of resistance consist of subtle strategies that rely not on abstract legal understandings of rights, but rather on understandings of faimess rooted in the "locally meaningful terms" of morality and dignity (Ledgerwood and Ung 2003, p 546) Migrants' concem with faimess and dignity is implicit in words and actions that are "oriented toward short-term, rather than systemic change individualised, rather than collective fought by means that present an indirect, rather 230 Annuska Derks than direct, challenge to state power" (EUermann 2010, p 410) In the case of Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand, the strategies adopted are not about challenging but more accurately about evading state power, as migrants seek to defend their interests by means of escape, withdrawal, boycott and falsehood In a regime that seeks to render migrant labour a "manageable and tractable object" (De Genova 2009, p 446), mobility is probably the most palpable form of resistance Indeed, the sheer autonomy of migration, "especially 'unauthorised' migration, remains a permanent and incorrigible affront to state sovereignty" (De Genova 2010, p 39) I have described above how migration policies, provinciallevel regulations and working conditions play a role in controlling and immobilizing migrant labour in Thailand But the continuous movements of migrant workers challenge all these means of control and immobilization Dara came to Thailand from Cambodia with a guide-cumsmuggler from his native village Dara crossed the border with a temporary border pass and was subsequently taken to Pathum Thani Dara worked for eight months on a banana plantation, eaming 3,600 baht (US$106) per month.'^ The work was exhausting, involving long hours and no days off Dara therefore eagerly followed a fellow migrant worker who claimed that he knew about a more rewarding opportunity for him in Suphanburi Afraid that his current employer would not let him go, Dara escaped in the middle of the night His friend took him to a factory producing construction materials But Dara soon found that conditions in this factory were hardly better than those on the banana plantation He felt deceived when he received his salary after a month of hard work because it was less than what he had eamed before, and less than half the promised amount Exasperated, he called a native of his home village who worked in Rayong in the hope that she could help him She encouraged him to go to Rayong in order to work for her employer in seafood processing Facilitated by recruiters, needy employers and extensive networks of migrant workers, mobility like that demonstrated by Dara's story Human Rights and (Im)mobility: Migrants and the State in Thailand 231 is above all an individual strategy to escape from conditions of hard work and low or even no pay and to search for better alternatives It seldom contributes to an improvement in the migrants' basic situation; frequently, he or she is quickly re-immobilized in the new work situation Dara eventually found a job in seafood processing that did not involve extremely hard work or long hours, but it did not pay much and restricted his freedom of movement to the work site and the occasional visit to a nearby market Migrants like Dara not move alone They rely on others from their native villages and on family members who are or were themselves migrant workers and are embedded in what are, often mistakenly, portrayed as "criminal" networks of smugglers and traffickers In Thailand, migrants can rely on a growing community of migrant workers for shelter and information about job opportunities and also — as in the case of Phirun — to forge family life These networks allow migrants to move across borders, between work sites and from employer to employer — and thus to undermine structvires of oppression and exploitation (Papadopoulos et al 2008, p 191) Mobility, withdrawal and escape can thus be seen as strategies of breaking away from abuse and exploitation, of effecting "departure from the given regime of control" (ibid., p xvi) In a few cases, withdrawal may take more collective forms I encountered instances of collective action mainly among migrant fishermen who "all stood up, took their clothes, their belongings and left the boat".'" Choeun, a Cambodian migrant fisherman, described how he and his fellow workers collectively staged a labotir boycott after the owner of the fishing vessel on which they worked refused to pay them As is common in the fishing sector, the ovraer had promised his workers to pay them in the form of a profit share after one year of work.'^ Yet his employer did not keep his promise When it was time to "close the account books" {kat banchii), he told his workers that he would pay them a few months later and that they should continue working But after two more months, he still did not pay Unwilling to work any longer without payment, the workers decided to leave As Choeun said, "The boss lied to us He first 232 Annuska Derks said he would give this month, then that month He did not speak truthfiiUy with us.'"* With these workers gone, the fishing vessel was left idle in the harbour, and shortly afterwards the owner sold his fishing vessel Yet, walking away without receiving anything was not easy As Choeun said, "the time I had worked there was lost time Lost time to eam money, the money I needed to build a house I was heartbroken and started going out I went out even though I had no money I had no money to send home I did not go home in three to four years."" Such rare cases of spontaneous collective action illustrate at once the power and ineffectiveness of a labour boycott Although the workers themselves not gain anything fiom the action (and although they may even lose, as Choeun did), they know that this action may — temporarily — hurt their employers In this case, the owner of the vessel relied, after all, on his deckhands to go out fishing While migrant fishermen are well aware of their weak position when it comes to claiming their rights, as new workers can easily replace them, they nevertheless sometimes take initiatives to challenge exploitative labour relations Besides these individual and collective forms of withdrawal, there exists another realm of resistance, one that is more shadowy and oblique (Scott 1985, p 265) It includes theft offish and other goods as well as registration under false names For obvious reasons, theft is not an activity that migrants openly admit Workers involved in sorting fish who retum to their accommodations with some fish would say that it is "waste fish" that the boss allowed them to take Dha, a middle-aged migrant fi-om Cambodia was more open about her activities when she complained about the low pay that she received for long hours spent sorting fish She contended that, in secretly taking fish and rice from the company that employed her, she was simply taking her rightfiil share to complement her meagre income As she spoke about how she stuffed her bags while she sorted fish at night and her boss was asleep, she proudly pointed at the fish being dried infi-ontof her neighbours' house, which had come fi-om her pilferage of the night before.'* Human Rights and (Im)mobility: Migrants and the State in Thailand 233 A subtler act of resistance against the technologies of state and employer control is the use of false names on the registration cards that migrant workers receive after completion of the registration procedure, thus obstructing accurate identification of the migrant workers involved The use of different names in different contexts is not uncommon in Cambodia For example, the official name of the woman whom I — like her neighbours in Thailand — knew as Oun was in fact Ouk Channary As the name on her registration card she chose, however, "Noun Chanthy" Some migrants choose a Thai name in order to make it easier for their Thai employers to remember their name and to prevent confusion with other migrants bearing the same name Many migrants leaving for Thailand not possess official Cambodian identification documents In such cases and others, the process of migrant registration — let alone deportation — is based on migrants' own statements regarding their name and origin rather than on official documents Even when entirely innocent in purpose, migrant workers' use of false names may directly undermine the Thai government's registration and verification process This process seeks systematically to control migrant workers by subjecting them to thorough verification of their identity, a task made impossible if migrants register under names other than their own Through what Papadopoulos et al (2008, p 217) call "dis-identification" or "becoming imperceptible", migrants resist subjection to a regime of regulation and control Similarly, Ellermann (2010, p 414) claims that "the exercise of sovereignty is ultimately contingent on the state's knowledge of the individual's identity".'^ While the role of identification documents is arguably a more important "marker of exclusion and inclusion" in a state like Germany, on which Ellermann based her analysis, than in Thailand, the creation of a national verification policy shows that the Thai government is increasingly interested in controlling migrant workers through official documents It has involved the authorities in the migrants' countries of origin — Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia — in its efforts to verify the nationality of migrant workers Yet the fact that the deadline for completion of the national verification 234 Annuska Derks process was extended for three years demonstrated that determining migrants' identities — and thus their movements — is much more complicated than foreseen (see, for example, Pracha 2010, pp 19-23; The Nation 2013) These examples of everyday forms of migrant resistance show that the potential for migrant workers to defy exploitation and claim rights —fi'om,for instance, their employer — depends on their efforts to evade the state, the very power that claims to be the protector of migrants' rights By moving "illegally" across borders and without documentation fi'om employer to employer, walking en masse off fishing boats, stealing fiom employers and using false names, migrant workers use forms of resistance that are, like themselves, squarely outside the law In the eyes of those ostensibly charged with their protection, these forms of resistance render the migrants ineligible "legally" to claim rights Migrants' efforts to enact "the right to have rights" are best captured by relocating our focus fiom sovereign power and the public political space to mobility, withdrawal and escape It is through everyday practices like those highlighted here that migrant workers in Thailand circumvent, overcome and subvert control and exploitation (Papadopoulos et al 2008, pp xii-xiii) Although not the kind of collective action in the public realm that Hannah Arendt found a crucial precondition to enacting the right to have rights, repeated recourse to such altemative practices may eventually prove the basis for a new public space, a new kind of political action (Owens 2009, pp 577-78) Conclusion Violations of the human rights of migrants form, as Taran (2000, p 9) concludes, "a defining feature of intemational migration today" This realization has led to increased calls to bring human rights into the debate about immigration Yet the relationship between human rights and migration is fraught with contradiction The general problem is, as Noll (2010, p 234) summarizes, that "[w]hile it is uncontroversial for many that migrants are generally entitled to Human Rights and (Im)mobility: Migrants and the State in Thailand 235 hviman rights by virtue of their humanity, it remains patently unclear how this entitlement relates to the state's power to exclude by virtue of its personal and territorial sovereignty." Migrants like Lap, Thou and Phirun are very well aware that, the rhetoric of rights notwithstanding, they are "outsiders" and subject to severe restriction of their freedom to move and to police harassment, harsh labour conditions, low pay and disposability In this context, it is not surprising that moral understandings of faimess and dignity, rather than definitions of intemational conventions and national laws, implicitly guide migrants' efforts to defy abuse and exploitation (see also Ledgerwood and Un 2003, pp 544, 546) Within the narrow limits determined by their "outsider" position, they make use of their state of exclusion as they seek to defy unfaimess and humiliation, using everyday forms of resistance (Scott 1985, p 304) that are, like them, outside the law Their acts may have little in common with the regularizing policies, legal obligations, monitoring mechanisms and organized action that the Thai government or intemational and human-rights organizations seek to promote, but they are shaped by the logic of exception that characterizes their migrant life In this context, one may wonder, who benefits from human rights? Dembour and Kelly (2011, pp 10-11) suggest that "[h]uman rights have been so co-opted by states that they are a resource for the powerful rather than the powerless." As a result, it makes sense to look beyond the state means to protect migrants' rights Hannah Arendt took this approach, when she suggested that global institutions were necessary to remedy "the crisis of human rights" (Isaac 1996, p 68) A more recent plea for such a supra-national body comes in Castles' exploration of the possibilities for enhanced global migration govemance to ensure migrants receive protection and access to human rights (2011) On a sub-national level, Elias (2008; 2010) and Ong (2006) focus on ways in which civil society and activist groups strategically adopt the language of rights to the everyday struggles of migrant workers The question remains, however, to what extent these initiatives manage to connect definitions 236 Annuska Derks of intemational conventions and national laws to migrants' own moral understandings of faimess and dignity — understandings that will continue to guide their everyday practices Acknowledgements The research presented here was part of a larger research project on "Contemporary Forms of Bonded Labotir in Southeast Asia", supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation during 2006-10 This project continued research on labour, migration and trafficking undertaken by the author in Cambodia since 1997.1 am very grateful for the research assistance of Chonthicha Srisuk, Krit Wiwanthyothin, Lim Sidedine and Chen Sochoeun An earlier version of this paper was presented at the workshop on "Globalization, Human Rights and Mobility: Exploring the Gender Trope" at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, in November 2010, and at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Bem University, Switzerland, in December 2010 I am also grateful for the helpful comments received at these occasions and for those offered by Ronald Skeldon, Olivia Killias, Michael Montesano and two anonymous reviewers Annuska Derks is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and a Visiting Lecturer in the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University-Hanoi, 336 Nguyen Trai, Thanh Xuan, Hanoi, Vietnam; email: annuska derks@gmail.com NOTES Migrant workers who lose their jobs or are discovered working for an employer other than the one who officially registered them are liable to immediate arrest and deportation (Human Rights Watch 2010, p 79) Also, etnployers fear losing the investment that they have made in registering their migrant workers As a result, they either refrain from registering their workers or, if they do, tend to keep the original identification documentation This latter practice means that even some registered migrants fear arrest and extortion if they leave the workplace without their identification documents (Pearson et al 2006) The names of all informants quoted in this article have been altered to assure anonymity Human Righfs and (Im)mobilify: Migranfs and the Sfafe in Thailand 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 237 Interview, 25 September 2007 Field notes, 16 September 2007 Interview, October 2007 Interview, 26 September 2007 Interview, 23 August 2007 Interview, 26 September 2007 Interview, 26 August 2007 Field notes, 23 August 2007 To prevent losing (undocumented) workers in police raids, employers in Rayong have set up an informal registration scheme in cooperation witb tbe local immigration police and fisberies association, involving so-called monthly cards (see also Human Rights Watch 2010, p 77; Robertson 2011) Witb this monthly card, migrant workers are allowed to stay and work undisturbed in tbe port area — though not outside of it — in excbange for a monthly fee As soon as migrants leave their employer and stop paying the fee for their montbly card, their employer will cease standing as guarantor for them They are again subject to tbe constant threat of police extortion, detention and deportation Agamben himself does not speak of rigid binaries between tbe included and tbe excluded, but ratber argues that "exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction" (1998, p 9) In 2007 tbe minimum wage in Patbum Tbani was 191 babt per day, wbich would amount to 4,970 babt (USD 147) per month for a six-day working week Interview, October 2007 Tbese payment modalities contribute to tbe immobilization of migrant fisbermen, as tbey tie migrant fisbermen to their vessels until payment of their profit sbare is due (see Derks 201 Oè) Interview, October 2007 Interview, October 2007 Field notes, 16 September 2007 EUermann (2010) focuses on migrants facing deportation wbo, by destroying their identification documents, prevent liberal states (like Germany) from exercising tbeir sovereign powers REFERENCES Abbisit Vejjajiva "Keynote Address" Global Launcb of UNDP Human Development Report 2009, Bangkok, October 2009 Agamben, Giorgio Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 238 Annuska Derks Arendt, Hannah The Origins of Totalitarianism San Diego: Harcourt, 1968 Castles, Stephen "Bringing Human Rights into the Migration and Development Debate" Global Policy 2, no (2011): 248-58 De Genova, Nicholas "Migrant 'Illegality' and Deportability in Everyday Life" Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 419-47 "Conflicts of Mobility, and the Mobility of Conflict: Rightlessness, Presence, Subjectivity, Freedom" Subjectivity 29 (2009): 445-66 "The Deportation Regime Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement" In The Deportation Regime Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, edited by Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010 Dembour, Marie-Bénédicte "What Are Human Rights? 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Muntarbhom Employment and Protection of Migrant Workers in Thailand: National Laws/Practices versus International Labour Standards'? Bangkok: Intemational Labour Organization, 2005 Copyright of SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia is the property of Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use .. .Human Rights and (Im)mobility: Migranfs and the State in Thailand 217 the paradoxical role of the state and the law in the protection of migrants' rights: the state is held accountable for the. .. central to the protection of rights Rather, the operation of the law there seems to betray the idea of human rights (Dembour Human Rights and {lm)mobiiity: Migrants and the State in Thaiiand 221... relationship between human rights and migration: on the one side, there is the dominant view that all humans have human rights simply because they are human, but on the other side there is the