Are Migrants Agents or Instruments of Development? The Case of ‘Temporary’ Migration in Malaysia

Abstract

How does the migration-development nexus affect conceptualisations of migrant agency that influence current debates about international migration? This paper discusses how treating migration as an 'enabler' of development limits how we understand migrants' agency. Although the migration-development paradigm defines migrants as 'agents of development', studies using this framework understand agency primarily in economic and financial terms, via migrants' engagement with global remittance flows. We discuss how this approach overemphasises those forms of agency that are functional to calculative measures and large-scale bureaucratic governance while obscuring migrants' capacities to navigate, adapt to and transform host societies. We suggest an alternative approach to understanding the actual diversity of migrants' experiences and practices: drawing from an ethnographic study conducted in Malaysia, we show how temporary labour migrants are able to use various innovative strategies, political technologies and devices in order to adapt to and secure dignified lives in the cities they work and live in. We conclude the paper with an invitation for migration scholars to move beyond the scope of narrow developmental frameworks to produce a more nuanced understanding of contemporary migrants' agency.

Informality and the politics of temporariness: Ethnic migrant economies in Little Bangladesh and Little Burma in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

“…Transnational remittance economies are a major driving factor for the growth of temporary labor migration regimes (Faist, 2009; Geiger and Pécoud, 2013; Hugo, 2009; Muniandy and Bonatti, 2014). States that struggle to attract foreign investment or aid, or whose own internal economic growth is considered too slow, turn to outsourcing their own workers to developed and wealthier countries with the promise of strong, consistent remittance inflows which entail the maintenance of strong transnational ties on the part of migrants (Ratha, 2013).…”

Migration Patterns in East and Southeast Asia: Causes and Consequences

“…This line of research is largely descriptive, and it has not been possible to situate it in the larger theoretical discussion or to theorize its observations. Some researchers have suggested that the discussion has ignored the agency of migrant domestic workers (Anderson 2010, Muniandy & Bonatti 2014. Migrant domestic workers are actively adapting to their harsh environment by adopting various strategies.…”

Seasonal agricultural workers and the habitus of mobile precarity

“…While profound in its effects, workers' circular mobility and habitus of precarity cannot be conflated with an inevitable fate towards disempowerment or an inability to assert agency. To the contrary, resistance among temporary workers in Canada (e.g., Gleeson, 2009;J4MW, 2018;McLaughlin, 2009, Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, 2018Preibisch, 2004;Smith, 2005) and internationally (Muniandy and Bonatti, 2014;Portes and Fernández-Kelly, 2015) is palpable. It is this assertion of presence and enactment of transnationality, however circumscribed by habitus and SAWP policy, that places circular migrants within the transnational conversation (e.g., Parreñas, 2010).…”