Rightless rurality: the illegalization of Myanmar migrant laborers in Thailand’s agro-industry

ABSTRACT

This paper explores relations of production in contemporary agrarian capitalism through the case of rural-rural migration from Myanmar to Thailand. It focuses on the often-overlooked rural proletariat, in this case, illegalized migrant laborers. It shows how migrants live and work in precarity, and argues that their social position is a result of practices of illegalization deployed by state authorities, local police, and farmers, which control and immobilize migrants socio-economically, spatially and politically. The paper adds to debates on the agrarian question of labor, stressing capital and (il)licit law enforcement as co-constitutive in shaping exploitation in the agro-industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Illegalization
• immobility
• agrarian question of labor
• agrarian capitalism
• Myanmar
• Thailand

Introduction

In an agricultural labor camp, two 10-year-old Myanmar migrant children are playing shopkeepers, using leaves, earth and water to make cakes, ice cream, and fried rice. They ask me to join and as I make my ‘order’, their slightly older brother walks up to the stall. He presents himself as the Thai police, and, acting as if it is a completely normal thing to do, asks for a bribe. The two ‘shopkeepers’ start to argue that they have already bought the monthly protective police card for irregular migrants, and refuse to pay again. Unsatisfied with this explanation, ‘the police officer’ looks over the ‘shop’ and notices the basket of ‘money’. Without hesitation, he reaches out for some and then turns to explain the action: ‘the police always steal from us’.¹

As Bernstein (2004; 2006) claims, the agrarian question today is increasingly a question of labor. Following the widespread dispossession of rural populations, the agrarian question not only pertains to struggles over land but also to how increasingly fragmented classes of labor can reproduce their labor power in insecure and oppressive labor markets (Bernstein 2006). The Thai agro-industry provides a good case. Understanding the conditions under which laborers reproduce their labor power, however, is not simply a matter of relations of production but also, as the above vignette alludes to, a matter of illegalization. Indeed, the intensification and seasonality of agriculture in Thailand, and globally, rely on a cheap and flexible migrant labor force, which demands attention to how this is regulated differently from the domestic labor force (Kilkey and Urzi 2017; King, Lulle, and Melossi 2021; Preibisch 2010; for Thailand see ILO 2022; Mekong Migration Network 2020).

The role of migrant regulation and illegalization, though, does not receive much attention within debates on the agrarian question (for recent debates, see e.g. Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010a; 2010b; Shattuck et al. 2023). For example, there is no specific focus on migration in the recently published Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies, and the chapter focusing on labor does not refer to migration or illegalization (Akram-Lodhi et al. 2021; Pattenden 2021). In addition, the agrarian question of labor is mostly posed within an urban context (Araghi 2009; Pattenden 2021; Shattuck et al. 2023). In doing so, it obscures that capitalist development in rural areas has created an agrarian proletariat wholly dependent on agrarian wage labor (Pye 2021). Consequently, knowledge about the effects of institutional and regulatory practices, and the potential collective agency of the rural proletariat to challenge these practices, remains limited (Li 2011; Pye 2021).

Within migration studies, rural-urban linkages also receive the bulk of attention, with rural areas perceived as being senders rather than recipients of migrants (King, Lulle, and Melossi 2021). While studies are lacking from the Thai agricultural sector (however see Saltsman 2022; Thetkathuek and Daniell 2016), migrant conditions in the fisheries sector have received much attention, especially focusing on forced and illegal labor relations (see e.g. Marschke and Vandergeest 2016). Evidence from other agrarian contexts also shows how migratory regulations produce precarious, illegal and disposable subjects to supply temporary agricultural labor (Harrison and Lloyd 2012; Preibisch 2010; Proglio et al. 2021; Rye and O’Reilly 2021). This has been well studied within the factory sector in Thailand stressing how illegalization is ‘“successful but entrapping” – successful, that is, in allowing migrants to live and work without costly documentation, while entrapping them in conditions of “superexploitation”’ (Campbell 2018, 84). Indeed, as one of the most powerful actors in Mae Sot, the local police can easily extort money from illegal migrants in exchange for no arrest, and through that maintain a precarious workforce for the employers (Arnold and Pickles 2011; Campbell 2018). In this paper, I combine these perspectives on migrant labor regulations with the agrarian question of labor to understand how relations of production and other forms of exploitation are conditioned by practices of illegalization in the Thai agro-industry. By illegalization, I refer to the practices, both in accordance with and outside the law, deployed by different state authorities including the local police, and farmers to control Myanmar migrant laborers as a means to extract surplus value from their labor.

The Thai agrarian sector continues to be dominated by small- and medium-scale family farms with an average of 3.1 ha of land. This should not obscure that they are highly integrated into global agribusiness value chains (Chiengkul 2017; Ingalls et al. 2018). Indeed, Thailand may be considered what Friedmann (cited in Watts 2009) termed an agro-industrial country due to its leading export role within durable foods, poultry, and bio-economic products, and the key role of agriculture in the current economic strategy ‘Thailand 4.0’ (Poapongsakorn and Chokesomritpol 2017). In addition, the use of non-family labor is widespread in Thailand’s agro-industry (Ingalls et al. 2018). Low labor costs are, therefore, central to ensuring the competitiveness in a global high-value food market (Watts 2009). Due to Thai labor shortages in the agricultural sector, international migrants, particularly from Myanmar, are important. In 2019, agricultural migrants constituted 317,996 legally registered laborers (ILO 2022), yet according to an ILO survey 30–50% of the migrants in the agricultural sector are irregular, and the number of migrants in the agricultural sector is substantially higher than those legally registered (Harkins 2019).

Although migrants play a key role in the Thai agrarian sector, their conditions remain under-studied. Studies on the Thai agro-industry, for example, tend to overlook the role of migrant labor (Chiengkul 2017; Podhisita 2017). The few reports (ILO 2022; Mekong Migration Network 2020) and studies (Saltsman 2022; Thetkathuek and Daniell 2016) that exist on agricultural migrant laborers find particularly adverse conditions, such as underpayment, lack of registration, insecurity, and isolation – yet they do not recognize the degree to which illegalization shapes these conditions. To close this gap, I draw on a detailed analysis of the conditions of Myanmar migrant laborers in a rural district in Tak Province.² I show that Myanmar migrant laborers are forced to live in extreme precarity, in squalid camps with severe mental and physical health impacts including the stress of making ends meet, exposure to toxic risks, threats from employers, and fear of deportation, alongside involuntary immobility. Migrants here are mostly of Bamar majority, and the paper thus also contributes to increasing our understanding of a group that receives less attention as compared to, e.g., ethnic Karen migrants from Myanmar. I argue that this precarity is produced through practices of illegalization that are a means for the police to extort money from the migrants, who are forced to pay illicit fees for basic protection, especially in order to stay, work, and move around locally. In doing so, I find that to understand the ever-increasing fragmentation of labor classes, practices of illegalization require attention.

I first provide an outline of the Thai agrarian context and the role of migrant labor within it. The next section outlines the key theoretical debates and concepts, first the agrarian question of labor and secondly illegalization. I then present the methods, study area background, and the precarity experienced by migrant laborers. Finally, I analyze how different actors tactically collaborate to confine migrants in precarity and immobilize them socio-economically, spatially and politically, and provide concluding thoughts on its relevance for our understanding of agrarian capitalism.

Centering labor in the agrarian question

Since its emergence in the late nineteenth century, the agrarian question has explored how capitalist transformation and accumulation in farming and agriculture, understood here as a mode of commodity production dependent on capitalist landed property, agrarian capital, agrarian labor, and the market (Bernstein 2004), have changed rural areas (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010a). With different foci, scholars have analyzed the role of agriculture in supporting industrialization, the ability of agrarian capitalism to develop, accumulation by dispossession and/or differentiation, including the following proletarianization of peasants, and lastly, opportunities for collective agency (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010b).

It is widely accepted that transitions of rural relations are non-linear and context-specific. The agrarian question today is, therefore, asked within the historical period of neoliberal globalization that emerged in the 1970s (Araghi 2009; Bernstein 2004; 2006).³ It is within this context that Bernstein argues that since capitalism dominates virtually all forms of rural production today, and as agriculture is no longer able to facilitate or constrain structural transformation, the agrarian question of capital may be framed rather as a question of labor. Since most former subsistence agriculture already is market-oriented, and that the means of production and labor in many places are separated, he urges us to focus on the increasing fragmentation (that is, informality) of labor and the resulting crisis of reproduction, which, he argues, prompts the agrarian question of labor (Bernstein 2004; 2006). In doing so he explores how scarcity of work generates struggles over land, and how this is shaped by a wide range of conditions including labor markets and patterns of reproduction in national and global economies (Bernstein 2006).

Sharing a similar focus on labor but with a different understanding of the agrarian question of capital, Araghi (2009) argues that the agrarian question today is inseparable from the ways in which the enclosure of rural areas through widespread accumulation by dispossession has resulted in global de-ruralization and global hyper-urbanization. Similarly, recent discussions raise the urban agrarian question, stressing how urban spaces are now important sites of agrarian and class struggles (Shattuck et al. 2023). Extending these claims, I show that the crisis of reproduction occurs not only among laborers in urban slums but also for the agrarian proletariat. The location here is important because it shapes the specific forms of control and fragmentation that condition laborers and their ability to resist (Pattenden 2021). When asking the agrarian question of labor in this paper, I therefore ask specifically how labor is reproduced under contemporary agrarian capitalism, which in turn helps shed light on the material conditions of rural production and the resulting precarity.

Guided by Schierup and Jørgensen’s (2017, 1) globally applied definition, I understand precarity as:

A multidimensional ‘weight of the world’, embodying ‘social suffering’ through degradation of work, a fractured and racialising citizenship, excessive human vulnerability and ‘unequal burdening of toxic risk’.

Precarity is a process of differentiation wherein class, gender and race, for instance, render some more precarious than others. The general subordination of women to men has resulted in the invisibility of the unpaid domestic work that women perform to ensure the reproduction of the labor force, and the devaluation of their reproductive and productive work (Federici 2014; Garrido 2020; Mies 1994; for agriculture see Doss 2018; Razavi 2003). Racialization, the process by which certain bodies are othered, further constructs certain bodies into races used for particular types of labor (Edwards 2020). Racialization, for example, is visible in present-day racialized divisions of labor, assigning certain groups to more precarious work, such as agricultural labor (Proglio et al. 2021; Pulido 2017). Capital accumulation indeed ‘requires inequality, and racism enshrines it’ (Gilmore 2022, 326). In doing so, racialized groups are exposed to different conditions, such as exposure to toxic risk, which follows Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as the ‘ … extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death … ’ (Gilmore 2022, 84). Here, as the definition refers to the extralegal aspect, it is important to draw in practices of illegalization.

Practices of illegalization

Referring to the contemporary implicit understanding of the world as composed of sovereign, spatially discontinuous units, Liisa Malkki (1992) famously explained how national borders have obtained a fetishized quality, in which citizens naturally belong. From that follows the conversion of ‘particular forms of human mobility into the bordered social formations that we come to know (only retrospectively) as “migration”’ (De Genova 2016, 48). The naturalization of state sovereignty and citizenship thus makes it reasonable that national borders are sealed off against people who do not belong (Malkki 1992) and legitimizes the categorization of some people as illegal and rightless (De Genova 2002; Fassin 2001). Indeed, without citizenship, or at least some form of regularity, migrants are deprived of the right to have rights (Arendt cited in Bloom and Feldman 2011). Borders, then, are not just mere territorial lines, but part of a social structure that is historically produced through various socio-cultural processes, practices, and discourses, including geopolitics and the micro-politics of everyday life (Brambilla 2015).

Consequently, the law plays an important role in creating illegality at several levels, stressing the importance of understanding both external and internal borders (Campbell 2018). Drawing on Falk Moore’s concept of semi-autonomous fields, law enforcement in Tak Province is shaped both by internal rules and customs, as well as rules and decisions at a national level (Moore 1973, 720). Under such conditions, there are different competing rules and laws. Hence, for analytical purposes, the law can be understood as the rules and practices defined and enforced by the most powerful and legitimate institutions in society (Anon cited in Hoffmann and Pouliot, forthcoming). Importantly, the enforcement encompasses illicit activities, which albeit made in reference to the law, is not de jure legal. Law enforcers such as the police, for example, refer ‘to law in creative ways to give their claims an air of legality’ (Lund 2022, 2), or practical norms, i.e. ‘the latent regulations of practices of civil servants when these do not follow official regulations’ (De Sardan 2015, 3). This use of the law allows certain actors such as the local police to evoke the powers of the state and rely on the state monopoly of violence to enable illicit enforcement. The law, indeed, allows local authorities to act and speak in the name of justice, while, paradoxically, enforcing unjust and illicit practices (Hoffmann and Pouliot, forthcoming). Consequently, state and non-state actors enforce migrant illegality both with and without reference to state law in everyday practices (Campbell 2018). I refer to these as practices of illegalization.

The law is as such mobilized and negotiated by different actors on their own behalf (Moore 1973). In Italy, for instance, Perrotta and Raeymaekers (2023) found that the mediation of illegal labor remains a central infrastructure in globalized agro-food production. Not only is illegalization enforced by state authorities but employers, by weighing the advantages and disadvantages of either recruiting migrants legally or illegally, are also found to use different regulatory schemes to their advantage (Johnston 2007). Following these findings, I explore the co-production of precarious work and precarious legal status (Anderson 2010). In doing so, I show how the law and illicit enforcement are used to re-figure and enforce migrant illegality (De Genova and Roy 2020), not within the aim of physically excluding certain groups, but rather to ‘socially include them under imposed conditions of enforced and protracted vulnerability’ (De Genova 2002, 429; see also Coutin 2005; Campbell 2018; Proglio et al. 2021; Sharma 2006). Consequently, migrants who are denied legal status live and work under conditions that are not acceptable to citizens, with ‘little, or no, de facto claims to the minimum wage and labor standards and protections available to the citizenry’ (Sharma 2006, 5). The law, indeed, is constitutive of the material relations of production. Further, law enforcement produces precarity of place: ‘the vulnerability to removal or deportation from one’s physical location’ (Banki 2013, 4). However, as Kilkey and Urzi (2017) show, illegalization is not only a matter of instilling a fear of deportation but also of confining migrants within a certain space, producing immobility.

Drawing on these perspectives, I explore the variegated practices of state authorities, local police, and employers that cultivate the conditions of migrant illegality, deportability, disposability, and precarity (De Genova and Roy 2020). In doing so, I add perspectives of illegalization to the agrarian question of labor to demonstrate how capital accumulation and (il)licit law enforcement are co-constituted.

Ethnographic and visual methods

The paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork in a rural area in Tak Province (see Figure 1), where I lived between December 2021 and January 2022, and October and November 2022, gathering data with local partners. I purposefully sampled the rural district due to its reliance on agriculture and migrant labor, and the lack of studies on it (Saltsman 2022) compared to the main urbanized town Mae Sot (Arnold and Pickles 2011; Campbell 2018; Dannecker and Schaffar 2016; Loong 2019).

Figure 1. Myanmar and Thailand. Author’s own construct.

To capture the subjective everyday experiences of migrant laborers I relied on participant observation and mapping, 100 life story interviews, and 40 photovoices (Wang and Burris 1997) with migrant laborers (see Table 1 for an overview and references). The latter is a training in photography and storytelling, after which the participants took photos. We then asked (1) what does the photo show, (2) why did you take and select it, (3) how does it make you feel, and (4) can you give it a title, followed by group discussions. For all activities, I sampled 50–50% women and men, which roughly represents the real distribution (ILO 2022), primarily focusing on the younger population between 16 and 35 years of age but including people up to 50 years of age. They mainly represent the Bamar ethnic group in Myanmar and are from the Bago Division, which dominates migrants in the area (Campbell 2018). While most interviewees had been in Thailand for several years, I included some that arrived after the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar.⁴ During interviews, I introduced my research and asked basic questions in Myanmar, but the main parts of the interviews were translated from English to Myanmar to English. In addition, I conducted interviews with migrant village heads, migrant schoolteachers, civil society organizations in Mae Sot, seven employers representing a mix of ethnic Thai and ethnic hill people (Hmong, Akha, Lisu), the District Agricultural Office, and the District City Hall Deputy. I iteratively coded the interviews following empirical and theoretical themes including salaries, dangerous work, emotions of precarity, domestic work, monthly budgets, racialization, documentation, fear of deportation, and threats from employers.

Table 1. List of interviews.

Interview	Reference	Dates
Migrant women and men life story interviews	MW or MM 1–100	December 2021–January 2022
Migrant women and men photovoices	PVW or PVM 1–40	December 2021–February 2022, August–October 2022
Migrant women and men participatory mapping	PMW or PMM 1–13	October–November 2022
Migrant village heads and school teachers	VH or ST 1–12	December 2021–January 2022
Thai and ethnic hill farmer interviews	TF or HF 1–7	January 2022
District Agricultural Department and City Hall	AD-1 or CH-1	January 2022

Note: I obtained free, prior and informed consent for all interviews, and all participants are anonymized.

The agro-industry in Tak Province

Attracted by a mild climate, fertile soil, and cheap land and labor (AD-1), ethnic Thai farmers mostly settled in the rural district of Tak Province after the end of the communist insurgency in the 1980s.⁵ Here, in contrast to the common idea of small-scale dominance, individual farmers acquired large pieces of land, between 50 and 300 rai,⁶ and grow high-intensity maize seeds, roses, and fruits. The area is also home to ethnic hill tribes including Hmong, Akha, and Lisu, who were relocated by the Thai state or themselves moved to the lowlands around the same time as the Thai farmers did. Reflecting systematic racialization of and discrimination toward hill people in Thailand (Morton and Baird 2019), they usually live in separation from Thai farmers, in smaller houses, farming smaller pieces of land allocated to them by the Thai state or rented from the Thai farmers.⁷ They engage in less irrigated but high-chemical-input production of maize, vegetables, chili, and marigold.⁸

Both groups of farmers rely on the migrant labor that also began to arrive in the 1980s (Decha 2015). Reflecting the different sizes of the farms, some employ a few migrant laborers and others more than 100. In Tak Province, an estimated 63% of migrants in all sectors are irregular, with the agricultural sector having the lowest percentage of legally registered labor migrants (IOM 2018). Due to this high percentage of irregular migrants in Tak Province, it is hard to know their exact number (IOM 2018). Earlier estimates claimed that between 150,000 and 300,000 migrants worked in the border districts of Mae Sot, Mae Ramat, Phop Phra, Tha Song Yang, and Umphang. The distribution ratio is 40:40:20 in industry, agriculture, and domestic work and services. However, in rural areas, the lack of industry and services means that the percentage working in agriculture is surely much higher (Campbell 2018).

The migrants I met were mostly landless farm laborers in Myanmar who migrated to Thailand with their families in order to save up enough money to return to Myanmar, buy land, and construct a house. As well documented, the law, market and violence are also used together in Myanmar to dispossess people from their lands and cause migration (Faxon 2021; Prasse-Freeman 2021). Concurrently with the worsening situation in Myanmar many new migrants arrived in the rural area in Tak Province during 2022, either due to the conflict or simply because it was no longer possible to put food on the table. Most of the interviewees crossed irregularly into Thailand via the porous border along the Moei River (see Figure 1). Those who arrived prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the military coup most commonly crossed with help from friends, relatives, and employers,⁹ and paid a few hundred Thai baht. Others migrated regularly through renewable border passes for seasonal laborers that some renewed and others overstayed.¹⁰ In reality, most enter and stay in Thailand’s borderlands on an irregular basis.

The banana village and other migrant settlements in Tak

At the edge of a banana field, and behind a row of large Thai houses fenced off by lustrous golden gates, a narrow row of crowded shacks appears. In sharp contrast to the colorful concrete and traditional wooden houses of Thai neighbors (Figure 2), the shacks are made of bamboo, old fertilizer bags, and corrugated iron (Figures 3 and 4). Garbage fills the uneven dirt road, and in the far corner water leaks from one of the few shared toilets (Figure 5). As the sun rises, a smell of smoke spreads from the wood stoves where women prepare breakfast. A lonely light bulb spreads light in one of the houses, where children are waking up on a pile of blankets, protected by a mosquito net. Carrying the day’s lunch in white plastic buckets, women, men, and young children walk up to the main road shaded by their cotton-brim hats. Some wear flip-flops, others rubber boots, as they climb into the pick-up truck that will take them to the field where they will be working for the day.

Figure 2. Khine Ye. ‘Huge gap in living standards’ (a Thai house).

Figure 3. Maung Zar. ‘The reality of the community’ (migrant housing).

Figure 4. Win Aung. Ko Naing. ‘Current life conditions of Myanmar migrant laborers.’

Figure 5. Pyae Ko. ‘Not enough toilets.’

The banana village, as it is referred to by the migrants, is one of the many labor camps for Myanmar migrants scattered along the Provincial Highway, which connects the rural border district to Mae Sot – an industrialized city which is the market-gateway (Saltsman 2022). While the highway connects rural populations to the city, the migrants’ mobility is strongly restricted due to their irregular status and lack of access to motorized transport. The land of the settlement belongs to a Thai agricultural employer. He has granted the migrants permission to construct houses on his land at their own cost. Those who work for him only pay for water and electricity, but others must rent the land. As you enter the village you see a big poster with his face on it, signaling his position as village head of the area. Dressed in jeans and a cowboy shirt, he walks around with a big golden watch and sparkling rings on his fingers. He has good connections with local police, whose cars are regularly parked at the entrance. This creates fear among the many irregular migrants living on his land even though he tells them not to worry.

The banana village resembles other migrant settlements in the area, and whilst they do vary in size and location, and belong to different employers, the living and working conditions, as now explored, are more or less the same.

Precarious life

The easy access to cheap migrant labor is, according to an officer at the District Agricultural Department, one of the key advantages of agricultural production in the area (AD-1). The price of labor is, therefore, highly controlled in regular farmer meetings to ensure that everyone pays the same low salaries (TF-1, 2). As explained, ‘it can cause issues of control over the labor if there are different salaries so if other employers pay more, the laborers surely will go and work with them’ (TF-1). Daily salaries range between 140 and 250 Thai baht,¹¹ usually for an 8–9 hour workday. Women commonly earn 20 Thai baht less per day (MIW-2, 7, 25, 26; PIM-41), and children, who are common in the fields, as little as 70–80 Thai baht per day. These salaries are significantly lower than the minimum wage of 315¹² Thai baht for an 8-hour workday¹³ as guaranteed under the 1998 Labor Act (Ministry of Labor 2023). Yet due to the seasonality of their work, agricultural migrants are regulated under the Ministerial Regulation concerning Labor Protection in Agricultural Work B.E. 2557 (2014), which denies basic rights such as a minimum wage, normal working hours and rest time, overtime pay, paid annual leave, and severance pay. Thus, while many migrants work under the same employer for years and, therefore, should be protected under the Labor Act, they are hired on a daily basis (see also Mekong Migration Network 2020; Rattanaprateeptong 2020).

In combination with low salaries, irregular work during the low season, particularly during COVID-19, pushes migrants into debt (MIW-34, 51; MIM-61M; PVW-64). Than Ko experienced this: ‘Due to the lower salaries, the expenditure and income doesn’t meet. But the reason we came here was to get more savings’ (MIM-33). As this reflects, some of the migrants end up living from hand to mouth, exactly what they tried to escape in Myanmar. As Zaw Ko Ko stated: ‘In reality, my life cycle is not really different from Myanmar. It is very tough in Thailand and we get very low salaries’ (MIM-26). Women especially experience stress from low salaries. According to Myanmar traditions (see e.g. Than 2003), women are responsible for managing the monthly household budget. In a group discussion, women agreed: ‘It is easier for men. They just have to work outside and return the money but not really think about how the money is used. It is a huge responsibility for us’. Generally, women complained about the gendered division of labor within households and their domestic tasks, which many do alongside agricultural work. Thus, it was expressed how domestic work is harder, and more frustrating because it is unpaid, in comparison to agricultural work (MIW-2, 4, 7, 10, 13, 17, 19, 23, 27, 30, 34, 40, 42, 46, 53, 54, 63, 65; PMW-4, 9). Women consequently carry a disproportionate ‘weight of the world’ that extends beyond the productive and into the reproductive sphere (Federici 2014; Schierup and Jørgensen 2017).

Migrants are also exposed to toxic risk, as they are required to spray and apply inorganic pesticides and fertilizers.¹⁴ Many of the migrants report receiving neither training nor protection (MIM-1, 3, 11, 20, 26, 31, 36, 41, 55, 60, 62; MIW-5, 9, 12, 19, 23, 65). Some migrants are concerned about the work. May Zin for example elaborated: ‘I do not want to do it but if I look at my family situation, I have to’ (MIW-22). The forced spraying of chemicals without training and protection points to Gilmore’s (2022, 84) concept of racism as exposure to premature death. Indeed, migrants report many health issues such as dizziness, itching, and skin burn, which stem from hazardous work with chemicals (PIM-21, 31, 38, 41, 57, 60; PIW-56; PVM-5, 16). The construction of migrants as an inferior ethnic group to be used for low-wage and dangerous agricultural work is further exemplified by the use of threats (Edwards 2020). In several instances, this involves the employers point guns at them (MIW-5, 23; MIM-6, 31; VH-1, 5, 7). This happens especially if the migrants complain about unfair salaries or work conditions. Hsu Oo explained:

He is not kind on the employees. He forces us to work too much and does not understand our situation. For example, some work takes two days to finish, but he wants it to finish in one day. It is impossible. If we do not finish in one day, he cuts off our salary. If we complain, he shows us a gun. (MIM-6)

Thandar San also noted this: ‘Even putting seeds in the ground, you have to be careful … sometimes they scold us, and point a gun at us’ (MIW-5). Scolding includes racialized othering and de-humanization. Htet Min reports: ‘They compare us with animals and it hurts’ (PIM-44). Corroborating this statement, one of the ethnic Thai farmers explained how the ethnic Myanmar majority group of Bamar people, i.e. those featured in this study, are dishonest and dirty in comparison to the ethnic Karen group from Myanmar (TF-2).¹⁵ These views are felt by the migrants, and a woman expressed how ‘basically they [Thai people] look down on us, it is not appropriate for them to interact’ (PMW-35). A group of women explained how intermarriages are out of the question because Thai and ethnic hill farmers only view migrants ‘as laborers’ (PMM-10). Such dehumanization of Myanmar migrant laborers exemplifies the construction of an inferior ethnic group to be used for low-wage and dangerous agricultural work (Edwards 2020).

As these accounts show, migrants in the area embody social suffering through degrading work and exposure to toxic risk, which together with their illegal status enables particular forms of exploitation. These challenging conditions are expressed in two photovoices titled ‘Workplace’ by Bo Hthu (Figure 6):

The job I am doing is hard, tiring, difficult and stressful. Some people in Myanmar still think that when we work in Thailand, we work under flexible and comfortable conditions. They may not know that we must work under difficult, stressful and anxious conditions in the agriculture sector to get a bit of money. (PVM-70)

The regular meetings to ensure low salaries, the lack of training and protection in handling chemicals, and the threats received deepen our understanding of relations of production in the Thai agro-industry. Yet the precarity of migrant laborers is not only shaped by relations of production within the farm but is further conditioned by practices of illegalization deployed to the benefit of both employers and the local police.

Figure 6. ‘Workplace.’ Bo Hthu.

Practices of illegalization in a rural district in Tak Province

In this section, I show how practices of illegalization, both in reference to and outside of Thai immigration law, shape rural relations of production in the rural district in Tak Province.

‘It is really expensive to be legal’

Thai state law and regulations favor illegalization, particularly due to the high cost of obtaining legal status. When entering irregularly, Thailand has provided short-term amnesties for migrants to register semi-annually since 1992 (Harkins 2019). Registration takes place under the National Verification (NV) process, which grants a 2-year legal status through a visa and a work permit that in principle grants freedom of travel. The migrants usually bear the costs, which, according to ILO (2020), range from 7.280 to 10.480 Thai baht including a visa, a work permit, medical insurance, an ID card, and deposit fees, as well as costs for a medical check-up. Further, migrants are required to obtain a passport in either Thailand or Myanmar. A combination of high costs and time-demanding requirements, however, means that many migrants are unable to meet the NV requirements (Gruß 2017).¹⁶

In the area, the questioned migrants reported the price for obtaining a passport, work permit and visa, including fees to brokers, to be around 10,000 Thai baht. Less than a fifth are regular migrants, most commonly due to the high price. In an interview, Thein Win, a migrant working on one of the farms, told us: ‘It is really expensive to be legal … There is really a gap between our daily income and the cost of becoming regular’ (MIM-21). Indeed as Franck and Anderson (2019) show, the notion of cheap migrant labor is in sharp contrast to the high cost of legality. Thus, despite the opportunity to register, the migrants’ responsibility of bearing the costs in an area with particularly low salaries means that most remain illegal.

Farm employers further play a key role in illegalizing migrant labor. To control the mobility of migrant laborers, the farmers have a strong interest in preventing the migrants from becoming registered, as passports and work permits enable migrants to move to other places in Thailand where salaries are higher. Regular status indeed makes it ‘harder to control the laborers’ (TF-1, 2, 5). Consequently, the migrants lack support from their employers to provide supporting documents and loans to cover the costs. Supporting the farmer’s statement, the District City Hall Deputy stresses that, ‘The most common problem when the employer issues a work permit is that the laborer then runs away’. In 2012, the issue of migrants leaving the area prompted the Tak provincial government to issue a policy that blocked migrants from leaving Mae Sot, even if they held passports (Saltsman 2022). The local capture of migrants in border provinces was further supported by the then prime minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha, stating that the goal is not to prevent migration, but to ensure that it remains in border provinces (Saltsman 2022). Farmers additionally use the lack of legal registration to control the work of migrant laborers, and while not following the law themselves, they rely on it to control their labor. Indeed, several migrants express how their employers threaten to report them to the police or deport them back to Myanmar if they complain about their work conditions or fail to live up to their employers’ requirements. Kyaw Min Oo explains: ‘If we do something wrong or cannot finish according to their command they scold us and threaten that they will send us back to Myanmar’ (MIM-38). Thaun Aung shared a similar experience, showing how the farmers use the illegal status to ensure precarity:

I have experienced threats from my employer. One day at work, I was assigned work that I do not want to do. But we have to finish the work, if not they threaten … they say they will ask the police to arrest us. (MIM-41)

The farm employers, therefore, mobilize the high cost of official registration to ensure that they have a readily accessible and precarious labor force (Campbell 2018; Moore 1973). However, for such a large illegal labor force to exist, the farmers further rely on collaboration with the local police.

‘It is just another way for them to take money from us’

Migrant illegality in this rural district in Tak Province is not a secret. As expressed by the City Hall Deputy, ‘Here, we see a lot of illegal migrant laborers. In this area, even if they come illegally, we do not arrest them’. Yet, to control such a large illegal labor force, the local police force has created a system of regulation, which albeit enforced with reference to the law is illegal. Although outside of official norms, the migrants are, therefore, victims of highly regularized police extortion (De Sardan 2015), as the Thai police leverage their status as law enforcers to generate illicit revenues (Moore 1973). Consequently, while it is expensive to be legal, it is neither cheap to be illegal.

In the local area in Tak Province police extortion materializes through what migrants call ‘police cards’. Police cards are monthly purchased colorful cards the size of a finger, decorated with figures such as fish, cats and tigers that change every month to signify a new period. The police cards enable the migrants to travel within the local police administrative zone within part of the district without arrest from the local police. As this reflects, the police cards are both spatially and temporally bound. According to several informants, the police cards emerged around 2016. The idea came from the police station in one of the largest villages in the area. Subsequently, it spread to other settlements, as employers and Thai village heads announced that migrants now had to purchase what they termed ‘security cards’. Explaining their effect, Zin Yee Nu said, ‘For us without legal status, this card makes it easy to travel and live around here’ (MIW-19), and in another interview, Ko Zen added, ‘As long as I have the police card it is safe when the local police comes’ (MIM-35). The cards, operating within the semi-autonomous field of the agricultural district are not de-jure legal in reference to Thai state law, and yet, they are paradoxically enforced drawing on that same law. The local police are, for example, able to rely legitimately on violence through deportations if the migrants do not purchase the cards. The police cards thus have effectively assumed an air of legality (Lund 2022), and the practices of illegalization appear to be more effective in regulating migrants than the official immigration system, concurrently with ensuring profit both for the police and farmers (Moore 1973). Indeed, the police cards are an illuminating example of the proactive efforts of the Thai Police to simultaneously regulate illegality and extort money.

The price on the cards varies between 150 and 250 Thai baht pr. month, or 3600–6000 Thai baht per 2 years, which is considered very high. However, it is cheaper than obtaining legal status and it is paid on a monthly basis, which makes it more affordable to the migrants. The varying prices of the police cards depend on whether the migrants buy the cards from the police, Thai or Myanmar village heads, or employers, and on the employers’ relation to the police. In some areas, employers who are involved in local politics were able to negotiate the price down to 160 Thai baht when they sell them to their own laborers. In comparison, the police sell them directly to migrants for 200 Thai baht. Parts of the Myanmar migrant population are also able to benefit from the revenue stream produced through the illicit economy of migrants. For instance, there are so-called ‘police dogs’ who sell the cards for the police at higher prices to ensure profits for themselves (PMM-10; VH-5; MT-5). Some migrants find a level of security in the cards, yet others, such as Than Aung, are very angry: ‘[The card] does not really make me feel safe. I have already experienced to be arrested with the card, and I sometimes feel angry to pay 200 Thai baht every month, which is quite expensive, and still get arrested’ (MIM-44). Min Kyaw added that ‘the cards are for their [i.e. police] own business’ (MIM-57) and just another way to ‘take money from us’ (MIW-34). Still, to avoid fines of several thousand Thai baht in case of an arrest, most of the migrants buy the cards (MIM-9, 41, 62; MIW-13, 19). Thus, while the local police do not depend on official regulations, these regulations are not forgotten but rather replaced by alternative norms, here the police cards, and enacted in the practices of those same police (De Sardan 2015).

The practices of illegalization show how the border is not just something the migrants must cross to enter into Thailand but rather something that continues to shape their everyday life and relationship with public authorities (Brambilla 2015; Campbell 2018; De Genova and Roy 2020). For instance, the migrants regularly face the police at checkpoints and when the latter carry out patrols (PMM-3, 10, 12; PMW-4, 9, 11). In one area, the migrants told of how the police usually patrol when there are market days, ‘to get some pocket money’ (PMM-3); in another, of how the police often hide behind a bamboo bush on the main road out of the village (PMM-1). They also patrol in some of the larger settlements (PMM-10). As for the women who stay home with children, some decide not to buy the police cards because they rarely go out (MIW-4, 17).

The systematized but illicit private-public illegalization of migrant labor by farmers and the local police greatly affects the conditions under which migrants live and work in the rural district of Tak Province. Indeed, these local practices of illegalization exemplify the co-production of precarious legal status and precarious work (Anderson 2010), and the importance of understanding how illegalization facilitates particular forms of exploitation both on and outside of the farm. Furthermore, as I show below, these local practices produce a precarity of place (Banki 2013), as the police cards do not grant protection from the immigration authorities and the sector police.

‘When the sector police comes, I have to run’

While the police cards effectively regulate migrants in the agricultural district, the semi-autonomous field does not exist in a vacuum and is indeed affected by the wider dynamics of Thai law-making regulations (Moore 1973). Immigration authorities, who do not accept the police cards, usually raid the migrant settlements once a year. Without protection from the police cards, the migrants often receive warnings from their employers about imminent raids and hide in nearby plantations or forests. As the Agricultural Department Officer reported, ‘It depends on the farmer; whether they make legal documents for their migrants or let them run away. Mostly the migrants are afraid of the police and try to hide in the farm’ (AD-1). Stressing the fear, May Zar explained:

Here, our employer ensures our security in relation to the local police, but they cannot do so for the sector police. When the sector police comes, our employer warns us and lets us hide in the plantation. We have hidden in the plantation two times already. I was scared and so worried of being arrested and deported to Myanmar, as we cannot come back easily to Thailand. Usually, they come around 9 and 10pm. That is when people start to sleep. (MIW-56)

The threat from immigration authorities and the sector police, therefore, plays a crucial role in ensuring a fear of deportation. Indeed, if migrants are arrested, immigration authorities rarely accept migrants paying for their release. In this case, migrants are detained for up to 45 days in Mae Sot and then deported back to Myanmar. If payments are accepted, they are usually high, reportedly up to 20,000 Thai baht, and many migrants would prefer to obtain a visa and work permit if they could afford it.

Altogether, the combination of Thai law and regulations, employer demand for cheap and precarious labor, illicit local regulations and law enforcement, and immigration raids significantly shapes the conditions and experiences of the rural proletariat in the Thai agro-industry. Both the legal and extralegal regulations and violent enforcement, as such, have immediate impacts on the migrants as they work on the farm, and as they are subject to police extortion to gain minimum protection to live, work, and move around locally. Yet, while instilling this fear of deportation, the aim of the farmers and the local police is to ensure that they stay, and as a result, the migrants experience both spatial and political immobilization.

Confined in precarity

The agrarian question today is both a matter of labor and land. For the interviewed migrants, the struggle over land prevails, as the purpose of migration for many is to save up in order to buy land back in Myanmar. However, due to the extreme precarity they face in the Thai agro-industry, they now also face a struggle over labor conditions. Further, illegalization facilitates one of the key aims of both farmers and the police: to ensure that the migrants continue to provide cheap labor and pay illicit fees. As Campbell (2018) clearly showed in the factory sector, migrants in the agrarian sector are similarly entrapped in conditions of ‘superexploitation’, stressing the importance of internal border work such as the police cards. The migrants are, through the practices of illegalization, in effect immobilized and prevented from traveling further into Thailand or returning to Myanmar. Thus, without registration, the migrants cannot pass the many checkpoints leading further into Thailand. Migrants, for instance, cannot go to Mae Sot where prices for food and other goods are lower, or to Bangkok where higher paid jobs are available. At the same time, low salaries also mean that expensive, irregular routes to Bangkok are also unaffordable to many. Thus, Min Kyaw mentions that whilst work in Bangkok provides better salaries, it is not an option: ‘Even though I have worked here for a long time, I don't have any savings to go to Bangkok’ (MIM-57).

The low salaries, enabled by illegalization, also mean that it is very difficult for the migrants to save up for their dream of acquiring land and setting up a livelihood back in Myanmar. This is compounded by both previous and current waves of dispossession in Myanmar, and the current disastrous situation in Myanmar (Mekong Migration Network 2023; Prasse-Freeman 2021). As this reflects, conditions in both Thailand and Myanmar combine to prolong the precarious lives of migrants in Thailand, contrasting with the idea of migration as a way to improve life conditions. Indeed, the very low salaries ensured through the practices of illegalization mean that this remains a far-reaching dream for many. As Nyi Mar expressed: ‘We came here with the expectation to get a better salary. But when we arrived the salaries did not cover the expenses and we have to live here for a long time’ (MIW-34). Many therefore end up staying in Thailand for decades, confined in precarity. Thun Win captures this well in his photovoice ‘Beautiful blue sky’ (Figure 7), ‘The clouds move from place to place. They are free. It is the opposite to my life. I do not have a chance to go from place to place’ (PVM-20).

Figure 7. Thun Win. ‘Beautiful blue sky.’

At the same time, the migrants are largely unable to challenge the conditions under which they live and work, reflecting their political immobilization. For example, it is difficult for the migrants to complain due to threats that they will then be reported to the police. Two key migrant labor rights CSOs based in Mae Sot support this. In Mae Sot, CSOs have successfully helped migrants in factories to mobilize and collectively demand higher salaries. For agricultural migrant laborers, this could include work to support their protection under the 1998 Labor Act. Yet, when asked about their engagement in the rural district in Tak Province, these CSOs explained that this is impossible there. One reason is the remote and scattered settlements that agricultural migrants live in; but more important is the widespread illegalization, which politically suppresses migrant laborers and prevents CSOs from supporting the migrants in obtaining their rights. Returning to the agrarian question of labor, and building on Pattenden’s (2021) stress on the importance of location and informality in shaping labor conditions and resistance, I as such show how this is further compounded by illegalization. Thus, while Pye (2021) concludes that the conditions of the rural proletarians who work for the same transnational corporations in Indonesia’s palm oil sector facilitate an opportunity to organize and resist, the illegalized migrant rural proletariat’s agency in Thailand is highly constrained. Practices of illegalization not only contribute to a precarious labor force but, perhaps more importantly, ensure that laborers are confined within a designated spatial area, which they can neither leave nor structurally change.

Conclusion

By presenting the experiences of migrant laborers in Thailand’s agro-industry I have shown how illegalization breeds extreme precarity through socio-economic, spatial and political immobilization. Practices of illegalization, encompassing both licit and illicit law enforcement, deployed daily through a combination of official and unofficial regulations by the state authorities, the local police, and farmers, confine migrants in a rightless position that is difficult to resist. The law, paradoxically, is used to facilitate exploitation rather than ensuring fairness. Consequently, the practices of illegalization and rural relations of production are co-constitutive, which points to the importance of taking daily practices of lawmaking into consideration when understanding the violent counters of capitalism and answering the agrarian question of labor. In particular, I show how the increasing fragmentation of labor classes takes place not only in urban but also in rural contexts, and how practices of illegalization are crucial due to the increasing reliance on international migrant labor in the agro-industry both in Thailand and globally. These are perhaps more important to challenge than ever due to the present post-coup context in Myanmar, which has forced many more across the borders to serve Thailand’s agrarian capitalist production and prevents any immediate returns.

Ethics approval

The research obtained approval from the ethics committee at SCIENCE and SUND University of Copenhagen.

Acknowledgements

I am particularly grateful to my local partner Saw A. H. L., who provided invaluable insights, language and cultural translations throughout the work, and to Ko S.T. and Ma N., who helped and cared for us throughout. I sincerely thank the migrants and other informants for sharing their time, stories and feelings with us. I appreciate very helpful comments from Kasper Hoffmann and Thorsten Treue and other colleagues at IFRO and during the Myanmar Borderlands Workshop, May 2023.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 801199.

Notes on contributors

Sofie Mortensen

Sofie Mortensen is a PhD student and her research focuses on connections between migration and agrarian change and the emotional impacts.

Notes

1 Field notes 22 January 2022.

2 The exact locations are anonymized.

3 Characterized by economic liberalism, anti-welfarism, free-market fetishism, and a global division of labor (Araghi 2009).

4 On 1 February 2021, the military seized power from the democratically elected government. Starkly opposing the will of the Myanmar people the coup resulted in massive uprisings and ongoing armed conflict, so far killing thousands and displacing more than a million both due to conflict and lack of livelihoods.

5 Interview with a professor at Chiang Mai University

6 Based on interviews with farmers, migrants and observations. 1 rai equals 0.16 ha.

7 From interviews with Hmong farmers.

8 Based on observations

9 In contrast the post-coup situation and increased border controls on both sides has increased the price of migration to several thousands of Thai baht.

10 Due to COVID-19 and the post-coup situation, border security has tightened and border passes are no longer available. Migrants now rely on expensive brokers, so-called agents, and pay several thousand Thai baht to cross the border.

11 1 USD ∼ 35 Thai baht

12 Adjusted to 332 Thai baht from October 2022

13 A few of the migrants are employed as managers, acting as a link between the Thai employer and migrant workers. They earn higher salaries and are usually registered, which exemplifies the differentiation among migrant labourers.

14 The use of chemicals is very widespread, poorly regulated, and constantly increasing in Thailand (Laohaudomchok et al. 2021; National Statistical Office 2013).

15 For a survey on racialization of migrants in Thailand, see ILO and UN Women (2021).

16 To enter legally migrants can, in addition to border passes, enter via the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by Thailand and Myanmar. This is too expensive and complicated for most.