Within and across Southeast Asian national borders, there has been a growing circulation of labour, capital, people, and goods. Meanwhile, urbanisation, agrarian changes, and liberal economic restructuring have been drawing a large section of the rural population into mobile economies and trade networks. This special issue explores the linkage between mobility and the growing precaritisation of labour resulting from neoliberalised development policies, nationalist citizenship regimes, and discourses, and arbitrary state power. Arguably, the consequent insecurity and uncertainty have profound implications for the social and economic life of migrant labourers. Although these conditions engender dangers and risks, they also hold possibilities for crafting translocal livelihoods and social relations. In this introduction, we investigate the diverse trajectories of labour migration in Southeast Asia through a critical discussion on the concept of ‘precarity’ that underscores the resilience of labour migrants despite the precarious conditions of their lives. The special issue suggests that, while precarious labour has long been part of regimes of control and exploitation in the region, precarity today is shaped by the blurry boundaries between the legal and the illegal, between local and global lives, and between different worlds of belonging.

In past and present Vietnam, the dialectic of precarity and resilience shapes the everyday lives of mobile labourers. Vietnamese labour mobility is characterised by an interplay between precariousness ‘at home’ and the uncertainties of migration. The paper aims to highlight continuities and contingencies in the longue durée of Vietnamese work migration through a historical contextualisation of precarious labour relations. Both colonial ‘coolie’ workers and present-day labour migrants share similar experiences, for example socioeconomic marginalisation in the regions of origin, opportunity and risk, and emerging translocal identities.

This article discusses the everyday practices of a mobile network of migrant waste traders originating from northern Vietnam, locating them in an expanding urban waste economy spanning across major urban centres. Based on ethnographic research, I explore how the expansion of the network is foregrounded by the traders’ dealing with the precarious nature of waste trading, which is rooted in the social ambiguity of waste and migrants working with waste in the urban order. Characterised by waste traders as a “half-dark, half-light zone”, the waste economy is unevenly regulated, made up of highly personalised ties, and relatively hidden from the public. It is therefore rife with opportunities for accumulating wealth, but also full of dangers for the waste traders, whose occupation of marginal urban spaces makes them easy targets of both rent-seeking state agents and rogue actors. While demonstrating resilience, their practices suggest tactics of engaging with power that involve a great deal of moral ambiguity, which I argue is central to the increasing precaritisation of labour and the economy in Vietnam today.

This study probes the relationship between legal precarity and transborder citizenship through the case of the Karen from Myanmar in Thailand. Collected through ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork between 2012 and 2016, interconnected individual life stories evolving across the Myanmar-Thailand border allow the critical interrogation of the political and legal categories of ‘migrancy’, ‘refugeeness’, and ‘citizenship’, teasing out their blurry boundaries in migrants’ experience. Following the recent critical research in legal ethnography, this study demonstrates that legal precarity is not simply an antithesis to citizenship. The social and legal dimensions of citizenship may diverge, creating in-between areas of not-yet-full-citizenship with varying levels of heft (Macklin 2007). The article consists of three parts. First, it offers a theoretical framework to reconcile the Karen legal precarity (even de facto statelessness) and citizenship, even on both sides of the border (legally impossible). Second, it presents the three groups of Karen in Thailand, produced by the interaction of three major waves of Karen eastward migration and tightening Thai citizenship and migration regulations: Thai Karen, refugees, and migrant workers. All three face varying levels of legal precarity of temporary status without full citizenship. However, the last part demonstrates the intertwined nature of those groups. A grassroots transborder perspective reveals the resilience of the Karen networks when pooling together resources of the hubs established on Thai soil by the three waves. Even the most recent arrivals in Thailand use those resources to move from one precarious legal status to another and even to clandestinely obtain citizenship.

The invisibility of migrants has been widely analysed in relation to states’ policies and practices. I argue in this article that emphasising the role of states and institutions in marginalising vulnerable populations by rendering them invisible throws a shadow over the multifaceted ways in which migrants interpret and relate to invisibility. Among Myanmar migrants in Thailand, as we shall see here, the notion that invisibility provides a protective shield to migrant bodies is in fact widespread. While invisibility is at times perceived as a threat to the future of these people, conceiving of invisibility solely as a tool of domination precludes us from fully understanding the complexity of Myanmar migrants’ experiences in Thailand and, more specifically, the many forms of empowerment that shape these experiences. Privileging the discourses and practices of Myanmar migrants in Thailand about their sartorial choices reveals that migrants appreciate invisibility for its capacity to create control over their own bodies. Further, it reveals the complexities of negotiating and expressing diasporic sartorial conventions.

During the last two decades, rural-urban migration and government programs have improved livelihood conditions in Javanese villages and brought down levels of poverty considerably. This article, based on two extended surveys in nine villages in Central Java, aims to understand the nature of change in rural Java by focusing on gender and precarity. As a result of migration, old forms of precarity have not completely disappeared: Families without children, elderly and people unable to work continue to live precarious lives. For those who work in the cities, dependence on single-source, low incomes, predominantly earned by men who work in construction, continues to keep families and especially women vulnerable for livelihood shocks and stresses. Increasingly, women from poor families work in low-paid agricultural jobs or keep the family farm running.

Migration to the cities makes it possible for many families to stay in the village and live the ‘good’ village life. The village is generally perceived, socially and ideologically, as a ‘better’ place. The flip-side of this preference is a reproduction of traditional family values and limited room to maneuver for women. Very few interesting and suitable jobs for educated women exist in rural areas. Women from poorer families need to work in agriculture. Their dependence on working men with single sources of income, continues the risk to end up or fall back into living precarious lives.

In the labour brokerage state of systematic recruitment and export for the maximisation of labour, development, and profit, the Philippines continues to simultaneously fashion migrant workers as temporary, yet heroic and sacrificial. As the largest migrant-sending country in Southeast Asia and the third largest remittance recipient in Asia, the Philippines’ discourse of migrants as modern-day heroes and martyrs reveals the interplay of nationalist myths and cultural values, alongside the neoliberal favouring of finance and flexible labour, to craft filial migrants and celebrate mobile, capitalist subjects over migrants’ welfare and well-being. The article explores the contemporaneous institutionalisation of migrant labour and migrants’ institutionalised uncertainty lived every day to investigate how this profound precariousness in the Philippines is perpetuated historically to shape the resilience and realities of migrants and their left-behind children today. Drawing from news reports and films on migrant lives and ethnographic fieldwork in the Philippines, this article considers how the formation and deployment of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) turns from a focus on sustaining the nation to supporting migrant families and developing translocal communities. Through this examination, the paper seeks to uncover who profits and is indebted from the precarity created and sustained by the larger economic system built on transnational labour migration.