An Examination of Wage and Income Inequality within the American Farmworker Community

Bowers, Marianne L.; Chand, Daniel E.

doi:10.1177/2331502418786707

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Both in the United States and elsewhere, researchers have consistently found that legal status is a key dimension of security (Goldring and Landolt 2011). Undocumented migrant workers consistently earn less and experience more job precarity than those with regular status (Cobb-Clark and Kossoudji 1999; Phillips and Massey 1999; Rivera-Batiz 1999; Capps et al 2003; Bloch 2010; Bowers and Chand 2018). In what has been called the “work-citizenship matrix,” research has shown that “precarious legal status has a long-lasting, negative effect on job precarity” (Goldring and Landolt 2011).…”

Section: Questioning the Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

Is Regular Migration Safer Migration? Insights from Thailand

Bylander

2019

Journal on Migration and Human Security

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In the context of sharply increasing levels of international migration, development actors across Southeast Asia have begun to focus their attention on programming intended to make migration safer for aspiring and current migrant workers. These projects, however, typically begin with the assumption that more regular, orderly migration is also safer for migrants, an idea built into the language of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Compact on Migration. This article questions this assumption. It takes as its starting point the observation that migrant workers who move through legal channels do not systematically experience better outcomes among a range of indicators. Based on data collected from Cambodian, Burmese, Laotian, and Vietnamese labor migrants recently returned from Thailand, this work highlights the limits of regular migration to provide meaningfully "safer" experiences. Although migrants moving through regular channels report better pay and working conditions than those who moved through irregular channels, they also systematically report working conditions that do not meet legal standards, and routinely experience contract substitution. In other areas, regular migrants generally fare similarly to or worse than irregular migrants. They are more likely to experience deception and to have written or verbal agreements broken in migration processes. On arrival in Thailand, they routinely have their documents held, and they are more likely than irregular migrants to experience harassment and abuse both in the migration process and at their worksites. They are also more likely to return involuntarily and to struggle with financial insecurity and indebtedness after returning. These findings challenge mainstream development discourses seeking to promote safer migration experiences through expanding migration infrastructure. At the same time, they highlight the need for policymakers, development actors, and migration practitioners to reconsider the conflation of "safe" with "regular and orderly" migration throughout their programming.

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