The politics of sanitization: Pandemic crisis, migration and development in Asia-Pacific

Abstract

COVID-19 has resulted in new anxieties about the risks and dangers involved in human mobility and forced governments to simultaneously re-engineer policies for temporary health control and longer-term border-crossing and migration policies; characterized by the sanitization of space and mobility. This special issue considers the policies, including health and non-health measures, that have impacts on migrant workers and migration. While COVID control measures are often phrased in medical language and policy discourses, they often serve multiple goals including political and social control. The papers in this issue cover different places in Asia and the Pacific. We propose the "politics of sanitization" as a conceptual framework to examine the multiple dimensions of state governance and the variegated impacts upon migrants, including: (1) sanitizing space and borders, (2) stigmatization and sanitizing migrants’ bodies, (3) sanitizing ethnic borders and the national body, and (4) reorganizing the borders of sanitization and membership of society.

Discrimination during COVID-19: Assessing migrant workers’ vulnerability to forced labor in Thailand’s seafood industry

“…Filling the research gap, this article analyzes how the discriminatory nature of policies in response to COVID-19 affected migrant workers’ vulnerability to forced labor in Thailand’s seafood industry. Discrimination against migrant workers includes racist and xenophobic societal attitudes, which intensified during the pandemic, fueling segregationist policies, strict immigration control and the suppression of migrants’ rights (Chan and Lan, 2022; Marschke et al, 2020; Guadagno, 2020: 5, 12; ILO, 2020c: 1). The structural marginalization faced by migrant workers resulted from their precarious legal status, limited access to health care and social security, as well as legal barriers to unionization (Suhardiman et al, 2021; Rogovin, 2021; Vandergeest et al, 2021).…”

Precarity among transient migrants: Mainland Chinese workers in Brunei Darussalam during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…In some countries, the less educated, labor class migrants were even seen as carriers of the virus (Haque and Rahaman, 2021). Similarly, governmental or institutional isolation practices or “sanitization policies” for migrant workers incited stigmatization and social exclusion, which, in turn, generated discrimination and xenophobia against them and violated their rights, welfare and opportunities (ILO, 2020; Yeoh, 2022; Chan and Lan, 2022).…”

Book review: Migrant Workers in Singapore. Lives and Labor in a Transient Migration Regime

“…The migration literature has been enriched by various works exploring the link between COVID-19 and migration, producing interesting outputs, such as the edited books by Triandafyllidou (2021) and Silva (2021). With regard to the specific context of the Asian region, the third issue of the Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, a special issue coedited by Chan and Lan (2022), is dedicated to discussing the cases of Hong Kong (Chan and Piper, 2022), Taiwan (Lan, 2022;Cheng, 2022) and Japan (Vogt and Qin, 2022).This edited book adds to this growing scholarship by offering a thorough and multi-disciplinary analysis of the way the Singaporean state and society have dealt with the presence of 1.3 million foreign workers when COVID-19 arrived. The book focuses particularly on the 300,000 foreign construction workers, mainly Bangladeshis, Indians and Chinese, who lived as part of a transient population in the city-state.…”

“…The migration literature has been enriched by various works exploring the link between COVID-19 and migration, producing interesting outputs, such as the edited books by Triandafyllidou (2021) and Silva (2021). With regard to the specific context of the Asian region, the third issue of the Asian and Pacific Migration Journal , a special issue co-edited by Chan and Lan (2022), is dedicated to discussing the cases of Hong Kong (Chan and Piper, 2022), Taiwan (Lan, 2022; Cheng, 2022) and Japan (Vogt and Qin, 2022).…”