Migration and statelessness: Turning the spotlight on Malaysia

International Journal of Public Law and Policy, 2016

The paper analyses the plight of four minority groups in Malaysia that have stateless persons in their midst. They are the Orang Asli residing in West Malaysia; the Indians of West Malaysia; the street children of Sabah and the Rohingya who have habitual residence in Myanmar but are currently residing in West Malaysia. The first three groups are de facto stateless whereas the Rohingya who are doubly marginalised due to their status as refugees and stateless persons are de jure stateless. The paper evaluates the factors that lead to the cause of de facto statelessness and its underlying problem as well as the clear and direct cause of de jure statelessness borne by the Rohingya population residing in Malaysia. Consequences of statelessness in Malaysia are indeed grave and analysed in this paper. This allows for greater appreciation of the breadth and depth of the problem of statelessness within the State.

Anti-Trafficking Review

The corridor linking Indonesia with Malaysia is particularly rife with transborder mobility, including large-scale labour migration. While irregularity has long been a major feature of these flows, much of the movement now falls under the migration regimes adopted by Malaysia and Indonesia. Long-established casual migration flows collide with recently codified norms and, as a result, oscillate between regularity and irregularity. This paper explores the following questions: How does the regulatory state view and handle undocumented migrants? How does it interact with established social networks that have facilitated irregular labour migration? Particular attention is given to the distinction between the categories of deportable criminals and victims deserving protection, as ascribed by state actors to certain groups of migrants. Based on interviews with twelve deported Florenese migrant workers, the paper discusses how the Indonesian-Malaysian migration regime seeks to shape mobilit...

Tilburg Law Review. Special Issue on Statelessness. 19: 26-34., 2014

This article explores issues involved with researching statelessness 'on the ground' during ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia with the children of migrants and refugees.

UNHCR’s current #IBelong campaign presents stateless people as uniquely excluded, emphasizing the need for legal solutions to their situation. Such approaches to statelessness sidestep both the complexities of lived experience and the wider politics of state recognition. In response, this article utilizes ethnographic data from Sabah, Malaysia, and theorizations of the gray areas between citizenship and statelessness to argue for the fundamental connection between statelessness and irregularity. Such a connection is central to understanding both the everyday lives of potentially stateless people and Sabah’s public discourse on statelessness as a mirage obscuring the problems of “illegals” and “street children.”

The issue of migration is often precariously situated between politics and security. Recourse to a ‘foreigner’ threat in security discourse is common, and individuals categorized as outsiders are often portrayed and perceived as a source of insecurity, while individuals categorized as locals, and their collective national identity, become objects of security. This paper focuses on the securitization of migration in Malaysia. Drawing on securitization theory and critical approaches, a framework is developed for understanding how elite-driven security politics uses images of migrant threat to shape identity for political ends. Investigation of Indonesian migrant workers’ addition to, and continued inclusion in, an insecurity discourse in Malaysia progresses an understanding of the facilitating conditions, political actors involved, and humanitarian consequences. Discourse analysis is contextualized in relation to policy to demonstrate that the Malaysian case is one of (in)security politics, identity policy; the Malaysian political elite, with the Barisan Nasional at its core, have ensured perpetuation of shared identity and privilege for Malays, and regime security for itself, at the expense of the rights of migrants.

This two-part Special Issue has examined the migration–sovereignty nexus in the context of intra-regional migration in Asia, with specific focus on Southeast Asia ('Special Issue'). The sub-region represents the perfect laboratory for teasing out the complexities involved in (actual and rhetorical) attempts made by states to control and regulate migration in what has become a space characterised by increasing diversity of (collective and individual) actors operating at various levels. The diversity, complexity and breadth of migratory movements discussed in this Special Issue thus constitute one of the policy fields where the sovereignty norm clashes with the need to manage interdependence. The seven empirical studies in this Special Issue have examined current political, economic, social and legal dimensions of migration in Southeast Asia from an interdisciplinary perspective, linking the discussion of the migration–sovereignty nexus to 'regional migration regimes' , 'the transnational–national intersection' and 'grass-roots responses'. The common message that emerges from the papers in this issue—that state sovereignty in the area of migration is being challenged from multiple levels—leads us to argue for a future research agenda which would align the study of sovereignty more closely with governance studies as well as studies on norm diffusion. Such an agenda would contribute new insights into emerging forms of sovereignty beyond the confines of the state.

European Journal of East Asian Studies, 2017

This two-part Special Issue has examined the migration-sovereignty nexus in the context of intra-regional migration in Asia, with specific focus on Southeast Asia ('Special Issue'). The sub-region represents the perfect laboratory for teasing out the complexities involved in (actual and rhetorical) attempts made by states to control and regulate migration in what has become a space characterised by increasing diversity of (collective and individual) actors operating at various levels. The diversity, complexity and breadth of migratory movements discussed in this Special Issue thus constitute one of the policy fields where the sovereignty norm clashes with the need to manage interdependence. The seven empirical studies in this Special Issue have examined current political, economic, social and legal dimensions of migration in Southeast Asia from an interdisciplinary perspective, linking the discussion of the migration-sovereignty nexus to 'regional migration regimes' , 'the transnational-national intersection' and 'grass-roots responses'. The common message that emerges from the papers in this issue-that state sovereignty in the area of migration is being challenged from multiple levels-leads us to argue for a future research agenda which would align the study of sovereignty more closely with governance studies as well as studies on norm diffusion. Such an agenda would contribute new insights into emerging forms of sovereignty beyond the confines of the state. challenging state sovereignty in the age of migration 119

Asian Journal of Social Science, 2012

Social theorists examining the impact of globalisation on state power argue that sovereignty is being respatialised and rescaled and that it is no longer adequate to understand state sovereignty as operating evenly on a national scale over a population within a bounded territory. Nevertheless, ASEAN states continue to adopt such a national framing of people and place, particularly in the construction of immigration control regimes. I argue that in order to understand the localised and spatialised exercise of graduated sovereignty and the selective introduction of neoliberal practices, it is necessary to recognise the signifijicance of the immigration status of individuals and examine how the dividing practices of immigration control regimes permit the selective allocation of rights to non-citizens. This paper examines Malaysia's approach to international labour migration, noting that it makes diffferent biopolitical investments in diffferent types of noncitizens on the basis of a calculation of their potential contribution to the 'nation'. Malaysia creates a hierarchy of rights, giving greater rights to skilled workers, while restricting those of 'unskilled' workers. Malaysia punishes those who breach immigration laws severely. However, Malaysia's modernist approach to immigration control fails to achieve intended results and I highlight a number of reasons why.