Rural livelihoods in the northeastern Thai borderlands have moved away from being predominantly agrarian, yet farming remains a desirable alternative for many people. The empirical findings from fieldwork in a village in the northeastern Thai-Lao borderlands indicate how dependence on agriculture is determined by family contexts, such as land ownership, education level of household members, their gender and age. Cheap Lao labour and government price-support policies have enabled farmers to remain in production and diversify. Some educated rural people have successfully found employment opportunities outside the village as migratory wage labour, and are able to attain higher social status back in the village. Successful migrants have invested their earnings on cash-crop production and become rural entrepreneurs. Conversely, less educated migrants were unsuccessful in finding good jobs in the city and viewed agriculture as a more favourable alternative and valuable security. Geographical, cultural and economic specificities conditioned rural transformation and contributed to increasingly diverse and geographically extended livelihoods.

A considerable number of migration studies to date have focused on either internal or international migration. Such studies tend to highlight the economic inequality that underlies human mobility, and hold that migration proceeds according to the rural‐to‐urban divide, as well as between nation‐states. However, these approaches fail to describe how labour moves internally, internationally, and within and across sectors. This paper addresses this complexity by examining cross‐border migration that takes Lao migrants from agricultural to service sectors, from the hinterland of Laos to the borderlands of northeast Thailand, and from Laos to Bangkok and other urban centres in Thailand. By drawing upon case studies in a border village in northeast Thailand and in two villages in Lao People's Democratic Republic, this study shows that Lao migrants engage in rural‐to‐rural migration at different stages of their lives and reveals how internal migration in Thailand leads to emigration from Laos. Although a relatively high wage rate in Thailand plays a critical role in human mobility across the border, there are other determining factors that need to be considered, including the historical context of the movement between the sending and receiving areas, geographical proximity, and a shared linguistic and cultural background that supports cross‐border migration and which complicates migration patterns. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Based on research in a border village in Northeast Thailand and two villages in Laos, this paper discusses how formal regulations on cross-border migration are negotiated, such that the practice becomes socially acceptable amongst receiving communities. This paper focuses on the border-crossing experiences of Lao migrants to argue that regulations governing the Thai-Lao borders have been circumvented in response to labour demands in the Thai borderlands and mutual interest between local state officials and borderlanders. It is illegal for undocumented migrants to cross the Mekong to work in the farms along the Northeast Thai-Lao borderlands, but the practice has become socially acceptable. This licit 1 status helps Lao migrants to navigate local state authorities, who are also involved in local social relations.The importance of local social relations is emphasised by differences in cross border-migration between jobs in agriculture and jobs in service industries. In urban settings, migrants do not participate in local social relations to the same extent. Consequently, they are viewed as illicit, 2 as well as illegal. While acknowledging the ongoing legal constraints on migrants and their movements, this paper seeks to provide an understanding of how state authority in the border regions is mediated by enduring social relations that create a legitimate space for informal and mutually beneficial actions.