Migration infrastructures and (Im)mobile lives: interruptions, failures, and repairs

1. Introduction

In the last decade, there is increasing recognition that migration is a heavily mediated process, involving orchestration among an array of actors and systems that enable, channel, and manage mobilities across borders (Lin et al. 2017; Shrestha and Yeoh 2018; Xiang and Lindquist 2014). This focus on “those who move migrants rather than the migrants themselves” has paved the way for a more effective conceptualization of “the broader infrastructure that makes mobility possible” (Lindquist et al., 2012: 9). In their seminal work on migration infrastructure, Xiang and Lindquist (2014, 122) argue that the interplay of various “systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility” constituting migration infrastructures is often “self-perpetuating and self-serving”. Migration scholars have further expanded on their work to cover the key domains of infrastructure including state regulations, commercial intermediaries, socio-technological platforms, and humanitarian organisations (Pascucci 2017) as well as migrant social networks (Boost and Oosterlynck 2019; Hillmann, Walton-Roberts, and Yeoh 2022). Spanning the fields of international labour migration, education mobility industries, international marriage brokerage, urban real estate, and more, these studies have yielded considerable insight into how infrastructures underpin, support, and sustain existing mobility regimes and circuits of human mobility as shaped by the power dynamics of class, gender, race, skills regimes, and nationalism.

Yet, during the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, migration infrastructures came under significant duress. What became evident was the role of migration infrastructures in containing and impeding human movements across international borders. In aiming to contain the virus’ spread, regulatory mechanisms such as border controls and migrant labour policies across the globe were reorganised – and in some cases reversed – to prevent and slow down human mobilities rather than to facilitate them (Lin and Yeoh, 2021). Commercial intermediaries such as labour brokers and education agents faced greater difficulty in enabling migrant flows due to tightened border controls. Physical infrastructures – ranging from airports to interstate projects under China’s Belt and Road Initiative – that were originally constructed to send, host, transfer or repatriate migrants across borders were immobilised in various ways. Of note too is the increasing integration of digital platforms into immigration regimes, as well as their affordances in virtual travel, that are changing the ways people understand and experience mobility and immobility. Insofar that migration infrastructures mediate (im)mobilities, their capacity to function and continue is closely entwined with the conditionality of human movements.

While pandemic times saw an unprecedented globe-spanning decrease in mobility across borders, migration infrastructures did not operate in the same way to curtail mobility for all. Instead, the pandemic – along with crisis events, past and present, including environmental disasters, geopolitical turmoil, supply chain disruptions and economic distress – makes visible the politics of borders and mobility. What becomes even more clearly discernible is the differentiating effects of migration infrastructure, rendering certain migrant bodies less mobile while allowing others to move with relative ease. Migration infrastructures hence play an important role in constituting the power geometries of migration in both sending and returning contexts, enhancing the mobilities of those who are able to access and deploy resources even as they also intensify the immobilities of vulnerable social groups who experience stacking constraints in the face of multiple, compounding crises.

2. The collection

Departing from the literature’s predominant focus on the durability and stability of migration infrastructures in maintaining human mobility, this special issue turns attention to infrastructural breakdown and transformation as an avenue to gain fresh insight into the relationship between migration, infrastructures, and (im)mobilities. In other words, the articles in this collection are concerned with the diverse interruptions, failures, and repairs that are involved in the ongoing production of mobility systems and flows. What happens when the infrastructures that maintain migration regimes and mobility flows are disrupted? How do interruptions and glitches in various infrastructures, in turn, re-shape existing or create new practices and meanings of mobility and immobility? How might thinking about failures and repairs help (re)examine and theorise existing mobility infrastructures that organise and reproduce migration patterns, processes, and experiences?

In foregrounding infrastructural breakdown and its effects on human mobility, this collection examines different permutations of material, imagined, and digital infrastructures which organise migrant mobilities and immobilities in times of crisis, tensions and duress. The topics covered by the articles are diverse, allowing us to consider the multiple manifestations of infrastructures ranging from aero, urban, and digital networks, transnational markets such as those around surrogacy and education, as well as policy regimes regulating labour and lifestyle migrants. In showing how multiple infrastructures co-produce mobile and immobile lives in a diversity of contexts, the articles also emphasise certain commonalities in approach.

First, the articles use multi-sited fieldwork to uncover interconnections across different migration infrastructures and shed light on the relationality of mobility. Shresta (2023), for example, draws upon multi-sited ethnography with Nepali student-migrants in Japan to demonstrate how infrastructurally mediated mobilities are produced across uncharted migration destinations emerging from gendered sites of friendship as well as serendipitous connections between social, profit-driven, and diplomatic infrastructures. Similarly, Jacobsen et al. (2023) conducted fieldwork across four surrogacy markets of India, the United States, Germany, and Ukraine to illustrate the interconnected webs of providers within the assisted reproductive technology industry, noting how these transnational linkages exacerbated the vulnerability of reproductive workers during the pandemic.

Second, the articles take into account a wide range of actors that play a part in the operation of migration infrastructures, from state organisations to commercial agents, and also individual migrants whose aspirations and desires continue to drive their decisions around mobility. Chan’s (2023) multi-sited ethnography led her into conversations with Indonesian and Filipino women migrants, migration brokers, and institutions to uncover the multinational connections that link different migrant destinations into a field of opportunity structures, giving rise to various emergent labour migration pathways. Koh’s (2023) article also depicts such infrastructural entanglements across states, markets, and migrants; and in particular points to the capacity of mobile and well-resourced individuals in leveraging agent networks to reboot mobility projects.

Third, some of the research illustrates the increasing viability of digital and online fieldwork in a time when research infrastructures within the academy are also being interrupted. For example, Zhang (2024) deployed online interviews and digital ethnographies to capture the affective and emotive dimensions of Chinese state-sponsored “care packages” for Chinese international students stuck in the UK in pandemic times. The necessity of moving research onto digital platforms as a result of pandemic constraints on researcher mobility also allowed for a greater appreciation of the ways in which online and offline spaces are jointly reconfiguring migrant experiences of mobility and immobility.

All the articles in this special issue have a distinctive focus on migration infrastructures that circulate human (and non-human) mobilities in and around Asia. They cover geographical locations such as Malaysia, Japan, China, Vietnam, and India, while also underlining those transnational infrastructural linkages that connect mobility flows with places beyond Asia such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Chile, and New Zealand. In doing so, the articles extend beyond the binary lenses of sending and receiving countries to capture the complex spaces that emerge from within and between various points of departures, arrivals, transits, and stopovers throughout migrant journeys (Ehrkamp 2020). These intermediary spaces feature an array of actors spanning state, market, and community that play crucial roles in connecting, channelling, and diverting migration flows into, within, and out of Asia.

Taken together, the articles pay heed to the socio-cultural and commercial aspects of (im)mobilities to offer insights on the way migration infrastructures and mobility cultures are reframed and redesigned in times of duress and crisis. In the next section, we organise key insights around the themes of infrastructural interruptions, failures, and repairs, underlining the contributions the case studies bring to bear on understanding migrants’ mobile and immobile lives.

3. Interruptions, failures, and repairs

In focusing on infrastructural interruptions, breakdowns, and repairs, this special issue departs from the usual scholarly emphasis on how infrastructures maintain and reproduce migration, thus moving into a less charted research terrain. The articles not only offer a unique consideration of the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of migration and mobility infrastructures in disruptive times, but also their transformative potential.

3.1. Interruptions

First, we ask how infrastructures that support migration and mobility regimes are interrupted by various events, processes, and practices. Within migration literature, the notion of interruption is particularly useful in shedding light on the fundamental contingency and irregularity of temporal structures that characterise migration trajectories (Mavroudi, Page, and Christou 2017). Interruptions can therefore also be understood as the kind of impact that infrastructures have on migrant experiences.

Most articles in this collection highlight the COVID-19 pandemic as a major source of interruption to various forms of migration and mobility. Tran and Sandhya (2024) examine the pandemic’s disruptions to labour and education migrations along the Vietnam-Japan and Nepal-Malaysia migration corridors with a focus on how the work of recruitment agencies came to a complete halt and had to exit the market due to suspension of international flights and non-issuance of new permits. Two other articles by Shresta (2023) and Zhang (2024) also discuss the blanket application of temporary measures on education migration to keep migrants abroad and non-migrants “at home” as a strategy to contain the coronavirus, essentially interrupting the longstanding rhythm of student mobility flows between Nepal and Japan and China and UK respectively. This interrupted rhythm, as demonstrated in both case studies, also profoundly exert frustrations and stress on the international students who have to confront thwarted plans and stalled mobility. Jacobsen (2023)draw attention to how the Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) market was severely disrupted and “incapacitated” for a period during the pandemic regulations due to the interrupted webs of reproduction (i.e. “reprowebs”) that has ensured smooth facilitation of persons, tissues and technologies which undergird the business of surrogacy.

Although the pandemic plays a significant role in interrupting migration infrastructures and migrant lives, Koh (2023) underlines how this global event was one of several factors that interrupted the Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) programme. In her case study, she discusses unprocessed applications, temporary suspension of the scheme, and sudden drastic changes to the criterion for applications as a series of interruptions which are attributed to unstable governance mechanisms and apparatuses. This point is made even clearer in Chan’s (2023: n.a.) article which demonstrates how “interruptions and delays in transnational mobility and work trajectories are the norm for many migrant workers in Asia”, and in such instances it is the bureaucratic infrastructures of the “migration state” (Adamson, Chung, and Hollifield 2024) that is immobilising migrants and interrupting their migration journeys.

Regardless of the scale and source of interruption, all the articles demonstrate that although interruptions often result in stalled mobility and suspension, they are largely momentary. State regulations that manage education, labour, reproductive, and leisure migrations during the pandemic were imposed with the aim of containing viral bodies initially, but soon gave way to visible signs of relaxation after the height of the global health crisis. Similarly, commercial intermediaries found new life by pivoting themselves in order to survive the disrupted migration brokerage markets, such as the MM2H agents in Koh’s (2023) study who diversified their services and explored new business collaborations with counterparts in the region. Overall, migration infrastructures are able to recover from pandemic-induced interruptions without complete overhaul or transformation. Interestingly, it is the interruptions “from within” local regimes and systems such as unstable and bureaucratic governance that ostensibly persist as migration chokepoints which constrict, slow down, and adds friction to migrant experiences of (im)mobility (Carse et al. 2023).

3.2. Failures

Second, we interrogate the ideas and experiences of infrastructure failure. The concept of failure within the migration literature points to the slippage between the design or purpose of a particular infrastructure and the non-achievement of corresponding outcomes. As a result, the failure in infrastructure creates intersective effects such as disruption, delay, or disablement (Raghuram and Sondhi 2022) or produces anxiety and uncertainty (Ramakrishnan, O’Reilly, and Budds 2021). As this collection shows, failure emerges as a by-product of infrastructural interruptions or breakdowns that converge at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, or as a result of major shifts in political regimes or societal norms. The articles offer a variety of cases of how infrastructural failure occurs within particular types of migrations (work, lifestyle, education and reproduction).

Various articles in this collection highlight significant flaws in state regulations aimed at creating an operational environment for commercial, private, and individual actors to function effectively. Drawing on the case of Indonesian and Filipino women migrants in Chile, Chan (2023) describes the denial of access to financial and labour sustainability, security, and proper migration channels by the government as “moments of infrastructural failure”. Jacobsen (2023) also provides a complex depiction of infrastructure failure when the global surrogacy market was halted due to the intertwined breakdowns of health systems and cross-border mobility restrictions of clients, service providers and surrogates. Koh (2023) examines the case of a policy failure of a lifestyle migration program that reveals a migration infrastructure failure due to a series of political and regime crises and further accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These moments of failure provide opportunities for the different types of infrastructural actors to re-think and re-calibrate systems, operations and plans that expose their ingenuity or inability in attempting to resuscitate infrastructures. We turn our focus now to the regenerative work of migration infrastructure – repairs, which is another important contribution we advance in this special issue.

3.3. Repairs

Third, we consider the various ways in which migration and mobility infrastructures undergo repair. The idea of repair within the nascent “disease mobilities” (Adey et al. 2021) literature concerns the need to attend to glitches and fissures in critical health, sanitation, and transportation infrastructures through the maintenance of supply chains, the upkeep of essential services such as home deliveries (and workers), and the circulation of skilled migrants while keeping to pandemic-induced laws around isolation, gatherings, and health protocols. Repair is enabled by the growth of teleservices including online education and telemedicine, and also facilitated by paperwork required in the repatriation and reunification of migrant workers with families.

Beyond the idea of regenerative repair, the renewal of infrastructures is also often embedded in political, classed, and gendered processes (Truelove and Annavarapu 2023). In the main, the articles discuss how different actors and institutions – occupying different social positions and harbouring different motivations – respond to infrastructural breakdown and glitches, and the kinds of projects of restoration they engage with in order to reinstate mobilities. As some articles in this collection show, repair-works may come in the form of state-led maintenance which seeks to mend a local glitch while restabilizing the dominant system and regime. Such infrastructural repair also increasingly relies on the market and individual innovation to help reboot cross-border mobilities. As the collection demonstrates, both short-term improvisational negotiations, tactics, and strategies as well as longer-term labour, footwork, and bureaucratic willpower have been deployed to repair, alchemize and re-script institutional and infrastructural components. Crucially, while it sometimes seems that migration and mobility systems are being built back in ways that leave wider structures and power relations intact, we also stress the importance of contemplating alternative modes of repair that prioritise social justice and ethics in departing from the logics of domination.

Extending the idea of mending, Chan (2023) offers the concept of “patchwork infrastructures” which points to the necessary darning of categorically opposing migration elements, such as those involving labour contracts and legislation vis-à-vis unexpected help through social networks. She goes on to argue that ‘a focus on the patchwork nature of infrastructure attends to the nature and effects of the infrastructural “kinks”, failures, delays, and interruptions to migration journeys and plans that require repair in terms of “stitching”, connecting, or matching work between institutions or diverse actors (e.g. between migrants and employers; between employers and agencies; between migrants and peers; between migrants and state actors, between brokers and state actors, etc.)” (Chan 2023, 15). Tran and Sandhya’s article (2024) focuses on how migration brokers are largely propelled by commercial interests in doing repair work to survive infrastructural breakdowns. Their paper shines light on transnational infrastructuring, repair and rebuilding among “mobility entrepreneurs” to keep business afloat into the future. Zhang’s paper (Zhang 2024) focuses on state efforts of emotionally repairing the damaged national identities of citizens while keeping them immobilised outside national borders. This is done while anticipating a normalcy which is primed to arrive in the future (Zhang 2024, 16). She argues for COVID health packages as marking “a distinct infrastructural encounter”, loaded with promise, and heavy with meaning for overseas Chinese students in Europe. Repair is thus promissory, regenerative, and potentially revitalizing rather than a mere rebuilding of the status-quo.

The articles also remind us that the state and commercial actors may often have the power and resources to galvanise quickly to manage such interruptions and failures in ways that, on the one hand, reinforce the legitimacy of the state and, on the other hand, transfer the costs and burden of managing interrupted mobilities to the individual. For instance, the Chinese state combined logistical, technological, and affective modes of engaging and assuring overseas Chinese students via the dissemination of health packages even as travel infrastructures were suspended to prevent these students from returning home (Zhang 2024). Similarly, when the MM2H immigration and visa programme was severely disrupted by the pandemic, a variety of stakeholders including aspiring migrants, real estate agents, and business associations lobbied the government to rescue the MM2H migration infrastructure (Koh 2023). To various extents, the articles show how migration and mobility infrastructures in Asia continue to be predicated upon strong state-driven and market logics to respond swiftly to reinstate stability and coherence during critical times when infrastructural interruptions and failures occur.

4. Concluding remarks

If a focus on migration infrastructure encourages attentiveness to systems of maintenance and reproduction, then attention to infrastructural breakdown and/or failure gives weight to its transformative potential. To date, there has been relatively little research that explores the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of migration infrastructures, while at the same time paying attention to those inventions, experiments, and potential overhauls that emerge to rebuild them. The wide diversity of economic and socio-political contexts in Asia offers considerable room for a critical examination of the multiple kinds of interruptions and failures and their associated repair-works within diverse migration regimes and circuits, including those related to labour, family, education, lifestyle, and health migrations. Some of these analyses would benefit from what Xiang (2024, this issue) terms the (im)mobility infrastructures perspective, which focuses on the management of physical movements of people, in addition to the migration infrastructures perspective that has a focus on how international migration is coordinated. By drawing analytical attention to these lifespan events and forces that shape and remake migration infrastructures and their related mobilities and immobilities, greater clarity may be gained in terms of how to move forward in building migration and mobility systems that are equitable and sustainable.

Acknowledgments

This special issue is based on the workshop ‘Infrastructures and (Im)mobile Lives: Interruptions, Failures, and Repairs,’ held at and funded by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 21-22 February 2022. The editors of this special issue would like to thank all presenters, discussants, and support staff who made the workshop possible. Special thanks to Xiang Biao for a thought-provoking keynote, and to all anonymous reviewers and Sven Kesselring for editorial assistance. Additional funding support by Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2 [MOE-T2EP402A20-0004, PI: Ho Kong Chong].