This article explores dominant discourses on ‘illegal’ migrants in the context of contemporary Indonesian labour migration to Malaysia. By focusing on the particular case of migrant domestic workers, it discusses recent political moves undertaken by both nation-states to regularise migratory movements. These state-induced efforts at regularising transnational migration have been promoted as combating trafficking and ‘illegal’ migration, but they have led to the legitimisation of a migration scheme that has much in common with colonial indentured labour. Hence, the paper argues that this ‘legal,’ state-sanctioned migration scheme gradually leads domestic workers into ‘legal’ — but bonded — labour arrangements and that the labour contract, as such, needs to be analysed as an instrument of subordination. Through the counter-narrative of Arum, an Indonesian domestic worker performing her work ‘illegally’ in Malaysia, the paper then goes on to argue that to migrate through ‘illegal’ migration channels can be interpreted as an act of voluntarily circumventing the ‘legal,’ state-sanctioned migration scheme. Thus, ‘illegal’ migration can be equated with deliberately resisting a coercive system.

Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork in and around a Malaysian apartment building, this paper explores discourses on and practices of friendship among young Iranian residents. The paper argues that for Iranians in Malaysia, most of them students, forming close social ties always holds the risk not only of personal betrayal but also of political infiltration, and thus making friends is informed by suspicion, anxiety and ambivalence. In the context of both formal state surveillance and informal moral policing in the high-rise, Iranian students often choose to ‘keep their distance’ from other Iranians. By analysing quotidian mutual observation and questioning, mistrust, but also forms of sociality that develop in the dense, cosmopolitan urban contact zone of an apartment building, this paper teases out conflicted narratives about intimacy and distance, and argues that these must be understood in the context of the local, material urban landscape of the high-rise, the uncertainty of life in transit as well as the political context of Post-Revolution Iran.

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