7.4 Southeast Asia: Cities, Labor, Diasporas, and Displacement

 

Section 4: People in Motion

Cities, Labor, Diasporas, and Displacement

Approximate word count: 5,150 words, excluding references

Learning Objectives

After completing this section, students should be able to:

1. Explain why migration is often a household strategy rather than a purely individual decision.
2. Distinguish among internal migration, international migration, chain migration, labor migration, forced displacement, and diaspora.
3. Analyze how migrants help construct Southeast Asian cities and informal settlements.
4. Explain how colonial history, family networks, and government policies shaped Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia.
5. Describe the major labor-migration corridors within Southeast Asia and evaluate their economic importance.
6. Analyze how gender, immigration status, recruitment debt, and employer control influence migrant vulnerability.
7. Distinguish migration, smuggling, trafficking, forced labor, refugee status, and internal displacement.
8. Explain how online scam compounds connect trafficking, digital technology, organized crime, and political instability.
9. Describe how Myanmar’s civil war and the persecution of the Rohingya have transformed regional migration.
10. Evaluate how environmental change can influence migration without mechanically causing it.

A Passport Full of Geography

A passport is a small booklet containing an enormous amount of geography.

It can open an airport gate, close a border, permit someone to work, or turn the same person into a lawbreaker when a visa expires. It can determine whether a worker may change employers, bring a family, attend school, or remain in a country after losing a job.

Two passengers may sit beside one another on the same airplane while possessing radically different rights when they land.

One may arrive as a tourist who can leave whenever the trip becomes inconvenient. Another may arrive after borrowing thousands of dollars to pay a recruiter, with a work permit tied to one employer and relatives expecting money at the end of the month. A third may have no passport at all because the government of the country where that person was born refuses to recognize them as a citizen.

Southeast Asia’s economy depends upon movement. Oil, clothing, electronics, investment, tourist money, and online data cross borders continually. People move as well, but they encounter a denser landscape of documents, recruiters, checkpoints, employers, police, and laws.

A shipping container often passes through Southeast Asia more easily than the worker who loaded it.

Migration is sometimes treated as the final chapter of geography, something people do after the important subjects of culture, politics, and economics have been explained. In reality, movement helps create all three. Migrants build cities, staff factories, care for children, harvest crops, send money home, establish businesses, carry languages across borders, and transform the places they leave as well as the places they enter.

The region is not merely populated by people.

It is continuously being repopulated by movement.

Why People Move

The familiar push-and-pull model explains migration through forces that encourage people to leave one place and attractions that draw them toward another. Low wages, warfare, land shortages, or repeated crop failures may push people away. Employment, education, safety, or family connections may pull them elsewhere.

The model is useful, but it can make migration look too mechanical. People are not metal filings drawn toward a magnet.

Most migrants do not compare every possible destination and select the mathematically best one. They move through networks. A cousin offers a room in Bangkok. A recruiter visits a Cambodian village. A former classmate describes factory work in Malaysia. A sister already employed in Singapore explains how to apply. A church, mosque, labor broker, social-media group, or family member provides the missing information.

This is chain migration. Earlier migrants help later migrants find transportation, employment, housing, documents, and a community. Once a pathway develops, migration may continue even after the original cause changes.

Migration is also frequently a household decision. A family may decide that one member will move so that several others can remain. Earnings sent home may support children in school, parents needing medical care, a farm during a poor harvest, or the construction of a house.

The person moves. The household stretches across space.

This complicates the usual distinction between voluntary and forced movement. A worker may choose to migrate but face very limited alternatives. A farmer may technically decide to leave after repeated flooding, crop losses, rising debt, and the sale of family land. A domestic worker may freely agree to work abroad but never agree to surrender a passport or work without rest.

Migration can contain both choice and coercion. The important question is not simply whether a person moved voluntarily, but how much control they retained over the decision, the journey, the work, and the possibility of return.

Cities Built by Migrants

Southeast Asia’s cities did not grow first and then attract migrants.

Migrants built them.

Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and other urban regions expanded through the labor of people arriving from villages, smaller cities, neighboring islands, and other countries. Migrants constructed roads and towers, staffed factories and restaurants, drove buses and motorcycles, cleaned offices, sold food, repaired machinery, carried cargo, cared for children, and formed new neighborhoods.

Migration changes the countryside as well. Villages may lose younger adults but receive money, consumer goods, construction materials, and new ideas. Children may be raised by grandparents while their parents work in a distant city. Land may be cultivated by fewer people or rented to another household. A successful migrant may return and open a shop, purchase farm machinery, or build a house whose tiled roof announces that money has arrived from somewhere else.

Rural and urban places are not separate worlds. Families operate across both.

The Informal City

Rapidly growing cities rarely produce enough affordable legal housing near employment. Migrants and lower-income residents therefore rent crowded rooms, construct houses incrementally, occupy unused land, or purchase property through arrangements that governments do not fully recognize.

These communities are often called slums in international statistics. The term may identify serious deficiencies in housing, water, sanitation, or security of tenure, but it also encourages outsiders to treat a neighborhood as one undifferentiated condition of misery. Informal settlement is often more useful because it emphasizes the neighborhood’s uncertain relationship with land law, building regulations, and public infrastructure.

Informal does not mean imaginary, temporary, or economically empty.

Such neighborhoods may contain food stalls, repair shops, places of worship, childcare, transportation businesses, recycling systems, rental housing, garment production, construction crews, and stores serving thousands of residents. Many people employed in formal offices, hotels, factories, and households live in informal communities because their wages cannot purchase formal housing nearby.

The formal city often sleeps in the informal one.

These settlements should not be romanticized. Residents may face eviction, fire, pollution, flooding, inadequate sanitation, unsafe electrical connections, overcrowding, and limited access to schools or health care. Land insecurity can discourage families from investing in homes that might later be demolished.

Yet many settlements change considerably over time. Wooden walls are replaced by brick. A roof becomes a second floor. Electricity, plumbing, paved lanes, internet service, and community institutions gradually appear. Improvement may occur one paycheck and one room at a time.

A neighborhood can therefore become more prosperous without becoming legally secure. A family may own appliances, motorcycles, and smartphones while lacking recognized title to the land beneath its house.

Poverty and informality are related, but they are not identical.

Jakarta and the Attempt to Move a Capital

Jakarta demonstrates how migration, urban growth, water, and inequality can become entangled.

The metropolitan region contains government institutions, corporate headquarters, industries, universities, ports, shopping districts, and millions of residents. Its growth has placed extraordinary pressure on roads, housing, drainage, water systems, and surrounding land.

Parts of the city experience severe land subsidence. One major cause is the extraction of groundwater where piped water is unavailable or unreliable. As water is removed from underground layers, the land above can sink. Heavy buildings add further pressure, while sea-level rise and extreme rainfall increase flood danger. Poorer households often live in the most exposed areas and have the fewest resources with which to adapt (World Bank, 2021, 2023).

Indonesia began constructing a new administrative capital, Nusantara, in East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. The project is intended to reduce the concentration of national government functions in Jakarta and encourage economic development outside Java. Construction and the gradual relocation of government institutions remain ongoing rather than complete.

Moving a capital is easier than moving a city.

Government ministries may eventually occupy new offices in Nusantara, but Jakarta’s port, industries, neighborhoods, workers, cultural institutions, and enormous private economy will remain. Nusantara may redistribute political functions, but it cannot substitute for safe water, drainage, affordable housing, and transportation for the millions continuing to live in Jakarta.

The case raises a valuable geographical question: when a government relocates, which problems move with it, and which people are left to solve the problems that remain?

Diasporas and the Question of Belonging

A diaspora is more than a collection of immigrants. It is a population dispersed across several places whose members continue to maintain connections through family, memory, language, institutions, money, religion, business, or political involvement.

Diasporas complicate the idea that every people belongs naturally inside one national border.

The Hmong diaspora discussed in Section 2 connects Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, France, Australia, California, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The historical route from the highlands of Laos to Saint Paul passed through colonial rule, the Secret War, refugee camps, resettlement programs, and family networks.

Other Southeast Asian diasporas developed over centuries rather than decades.

Chinese Communities Across Southeast Asia

People from southern China migrated into Southeast Asia during many historical periods. Some arrived as merchants. Others came as miners, plantation workers, farmers, craftspeople, shopkeepers, sailors, and laborers. Later migrants included professionals, students, and investors.

There is therefore no single “overseas Chinese” experience.

Chinese Singaporeans form the majority of their country’s population. Chinese Malaysians are a large national minority with established political, educational, and commercial institutions. Chinese Indonesians have experienced both economic prominence and severe discrimination. Chinese Filipinos developed extensive commercial and family networks while becoming deeply embedded in Philippine society. In Thailand, many Chinese-descended families adopted Thai names, language, and political identities over several generations.

In port cities such as Melaka, Penang, Singapore, Manila, and parts of Indonesia, intermarriage and cultural exchange produced communities often described as Peranakan. Their languages, clothing, architecture, food, and religious practices combined Chinese and local traditions.

None of this means that Chinese-descended Southeast Asians possessed an inherited cultural talent for business.

Colonial governments often assigned ethnic groups different economic and legal positions. Chinese migrants were sometimes excluded from landholding, government service, or political power while being encouraged or confined to mining, trade, tax collection, and commerce. Family and hometown networks then provided credit, information, employment, and trust across long distances (McKeown, 2001; Reid, 1993).

Commercial success was historically produced. It was not biologically programmed.

The visibility of a few wealthy business families also obscured less affluent shopkeepers, laborers, miners, farmers, and wage workers. During periods of political or economic crisis, leaders sometimes redirected public anger toward Chinese minorities by portraying them as outsiders controlling national wealth.

Indonesia’s anti-Chinese restrictions and episodes of violence demonstrate how quickly a population rooted in a country for generations can be described as foreign when nationalism needs an enemy. Similar tensions appeared elsewhere in the region.

Diaspora creates a difficult question of belonging. How many generations must a family live in a place before outsiders stop asking where it really came from?

Southeast Asia’s Regional Labor System

Southeast Asia contains both major migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries.

Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei attract large numbers of workers. Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam send workers abroad, although nearly every country does some of both.

In 2024, an estimated 24 million ASEAN citizens lived outside their countries of citizenship. About 7 million lived in another ASEAN member state. Intra-regional migrants are concentrated heavily in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, fishing, seafood processing, domestic work, hospitality, and other essential but often lower-paid occupations (International Labour Organization [ILO], 2026a).

Several corridors are especially important.

Workers from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos travel to Thailand. Indonesians work in Malaysia, Singapore, and elsewhere. Malaysians commute or relocate to Singapore. Filipino workers travel throughout Asia and far beyond it. Migrants also move internally between poorer islands and the major urban and industrial regions of Indonesia.

ASEAN has reduced many barriers to trade and investment, but it is not an area of free movement comparable to the European Union. Most workers still require national visas and permits. Their legal right to remain may depend upon a specific occupation or employer.

ASEAN governments have recently expanded cooperation on skills recognition, recruitment practices, migrant protection, and the portability of benefits. The 2024 Vientiane Declaration called for greater recognition and development of migrant workers’ skills at all levels, while its implementation process remained subject to national laws and policies (ASEAN Secretariat, 2024, 2026).

The border has become more permeable to capital than to labor.

Migration as Development

Labor migration is often discussed primarily as a social problem. It is also an economic strategy used by workers, households, businesses, and governments.

Migrants fill labor shortages and perform work that local workers may be unable or unwilling to accept at the wages offered. Employers gain workers. Destination countries gain production, taxes, services, and care. Origin countries receive remittances, the money migrants send home.

Families may use remittances to pay school fees, purchase food, obtain medical treatment, improve homes, buy land, repair farms, or start businesses. During economic crises, natural disasters, or crop failures, money from a migrant can keep an entire household from collapse.

The Philippines developed one of the world’s most organized systems of overseas employment. Filipino nurses, sailors, engineers, construction workers, domestic workers, hotel employees, teachers, and service workers are employed across the globe. The government celebrates these workers as national contributors, while the economy benefits from the money they send home.

But remittance income is not free money.

It is a wage earned somewhere else by someone who is absent.

A parent may miss years of a child’s life. Grandparents may become daily caregivers. Marriages are maintained through video calls, money transfers, brief visits, and plans to reunite later. Migrants may miss births, funerals, illnesses, holidays, and ordinary evenings that no payment system can deliver home.

A remittance records both income and separation.

Gender, Care, and Invisible Skill

Women make up a substantial share of Southeast Asia’s migrant workforce. They work in factories, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, farms, entertainment, domestic service, childcare, and elder care.

Domestic work is frequently labeled unskilled labor. That label deserves suspicion.

A domestic worker may prepare meals, manage medications, care for infants, support an older adult with limited mobility, clean a household, organize schedules, shop, translate, and respond to emergencies. These tasks require judgment, patience, physical stamina, emotional control, and practical knowledge.

“Unskilled” often means that society has decided not to pay appropriately for a skill associated with women.

Migrant domestic workers are especially vulnerable because the workplace is a private home. A live-in worker may have no clear boundary between work and rest. Labor inspectors rarely enter. The worker may depend upon the employer not only for wages but also for housing, food, immigration status, and the ability to leave the house.

An ILO study of migrant domestic workers in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand found widespread long hours, low pay, weak social protection, and indicators of forced labor among portions of those surveyed. It also documented the extensive care skills employers relied upon but frequently failed to recognize or compensate (ILO, 2023).

Migration can nevertheless expand women’s power. Earnings may increase a worker’s influence over household decisions, allow children to attend school, provide escape from an abusive relationship, or create access to opportunities unavailable at home.

The same journey can produce autonomy and vulnerability.

The outcome depends upon wages, laws, recruitment systems, immigration status, control over documents, and whether the worker can safely leave an employer.

When Movement Becomes Coercion

Several migration terms are often confused.

A migrant is a person who moves, temporarily or permanently, for reasons such as work, education, family, safety, or opportunity.

An irregular migrant is someone whose entry, employment, or residence does not comply fully with a country’s immigration rules.

A refugee is outside their country and unable or unwilling to return because of a well-founded fear of persecution under international refugee law.

An internally displaced person, or IDP, has been forced from home but remains inside their country.

Migrant smuggling usually involves helping someone cross a border illegally in exchange for payment. The relationship may end after arrival.

Human trafficking involves recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt through coercion, deception, or abuse for the purpose of exploitation. A trafficking victim does not need to cross an international border.

These distinctions matter. Not every irregular migrant is trafficked. Not every exploited worker entered the country illegally. Not every trafficking victim initially objected to migrating.

The deception may concern what happens after arrival.

Recruitment Debt

Recruitment debt is one of the most common bridges between ordinary labor migration and coercion.

Workers may borrow money to pay recruiters for passports, medical examinations, transportation, visas, training, or placement fees. They may mortgage land or borrow from relatives and private lenders.

Once abroad, they discover that the wage is lower, the job is different, or the promised work does not exist. Returning home would not erase the debt. The worker may therefore remain in dangerous or abusive employment because leaving would shift the financial loss onto the entire family.

An employer may retain a passport, withhold pay, threaten immigration authorities, restrict movement, or tie legal status to continued employment.

The worker crossed the border voluntarily.

The workplace became a trap.

Far from Shore

Fishing and seafood processing reveal how supply chains can hide exploitation.

Migrant workers on fishing vessels may spend months at sea beyond ordinary inspection. Documents can be confiscated, wages withheld, and violence concealed. National jurisdictions overlap, vessels change flags, catches pass through several companies, and seafood is mixed before reaching processing facilities and supermarkets.

The consumer sees a frozen package.

The labor conditions that produced it may lie hundreds of miles offshore.

A 2026 ILO study continued to find systemic labor-rights problems among migrant workers in Southeast Asian fishing and seafood-processing industries, including recruitment abuses, excessive hours, and weak access to remedies (ILO, 2026b).

This does not mean every fishing operation uses forced labor. It means that isolation, subcontracting, irregular migration, and complicated supply chains make abuse unusually easy to hide.

Forced to Commit the Crime

One of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing forms of trafficking does not fit older images of plantations, brothels, or fishing vessels.

It begins with an online job advertisement.

The advertisement may promise employment in customer service, translation, information technology, online marketing, or a casino. Applicants travel to Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, or another destination. Some are transported across additional borders.

Upon arrival, they are confined inside guarded compounds and ordered to operate online scams. They may spend long hours contacting victims through social media, dating platforms, messaging services, or fraudulent investment sites. Workers who fail to meet financial targets may be beaten, tortured, sold to another compound, or threatened with harm to their families.

The workers are forced to commit crimes against people they may never meet.

UN human-rights investigators have documented trafficking, torture, sexual violence, debt bondage, forced labor, and forced criminality across a transnational cyber-scam industry centered heavily in Southeast Asia. Criminal organizations have exploited weak governance, corruption, casino economies, border regions, special economic zones, and armed conflict (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR], 2026).

This creates a difficult legal problem. When police raid a compound, the people inside may appear to be perpetrators of fraud. Some are. Others are trafficking victims being forced to deceive additional victims.

The modern trafficking victim may sit at a computer rather than behind a locked factory gate. The person being defrauded may be in Minneapolis. The coerced worker may be in a guarded compound near Myanmar’s border.

Digital technology did not eliminate geography.

It connected distant forms of vulnerability to the same criminal organization.

Myanmar: A Country Displaced

Myanmar entered the twenty-first century after decades of military rule and long-running conflicts between the central state and ethnic armed organizations.

A limited political opening during the 2010s allowed elections, greater international engagement, and expanding private business. The opening was incomplete. The military retained enormous constitutional power, and its 2017 campaign against the Rohingya drove hundreds of thousands of people into Bangladesh.

On February 1, 2021, the military seized power after an election won overwhelmingly by the National League for Democracy. Mass protests followed. Security forces responded with arrests and lethal violence.

Resistance expanded from demonstrations and strikes into armed conflict. Newly formed People’s Defense Forces began fighting the military, while long-established ethnic armed organizations expanded or reshaped their own campaigns. Alliances developed, fractured, and changed according to local histories and political goals.

The result is not one simple war between two uniform sides. Myanmar contains many overlapping conflicts involving the military government, democratic resistance organizations, local defense forces, ethnic armies, militias, and communities seeking different forms of autonomy.

By 2026, UNHCR was supporting more than 4.2 million forcibly displaced and stateless people inside Myanmar, including approximately 3.5 million internally displaced people. Conflict had spread across major parts of the country, affecting Chin, Kachin, Kayah, Kayin, Mon, Rakhine, Shan, Sagaing, Magway, and other regions (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2026a).

A figure such as 3.5 million can become abstract. Displacement means leaving behind fields, livestock, tools, schools, medication, documents, family graves, stored food, and knowledge of how to survive in a particular landscape.

Some people flee once.

Others move repeatedly as front lines shift, shelters become unsafe, or assistance disappears.

Karen, Karenni, Kachin, Chin, Shan, Rakhine, Bamar, Rohingya, and other communities have experienced aerial attacks, burned villages, forced recruitment, persecution, and displacement. Refugee camps along the Thai border that were established as temporary shelters have existed for decades.

A child can be born, complete school, and become an adult in a place officially considered temporary.

Temporary is sometimes a political word meaning that no one has accepted responsibility for a permanent solution.

The Rohingya: Displaced Before Crossing the Border

The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim population with deep roots in Rakhine State in western Myanmar.

Myanmar’s government has generally denied them recognition as one of the country’s official national ethnic groups. Citizenship rules and administrative practices rendered most Rohingya stateless, restricting movement, education, employment, marriage, and access to services.

Their displacement therefore began before most crossed a border.

When a government refuses to recognize a population as belonging, the border effectively moves around them.

Myanmar’s military launched mass operations in northern Rakhine State in August 2017 following attacks by a Rohingya armed group. Soldiers and associated forces killed civilians, burned villages, and committed widespread sexual violence. Approximately 750,000 Rohingya fled into Bangladesh during the largest phase of the exodus.

By June 2026, Bangladesh hosted approximately 1.2 million refugees from Myanmar, most of them Rohingya living in and around the enormous camp complex at Cox’s Bazar. This included about 150,000 people who had fled renewed violence since early 2024 (UNHCR, 2026b).

The camps provide safety from immediate persecution, but they offer limited freedom of movement, employment, education, and long-term security. Humanitarian assistance remains essential, and reductions in international funding threaten food, health care, and other basic services.

Return cannot be understood merely as transporting people back across the border.

A safe and voluntary return would require citizenship, security, political rights, restored property or compensation, and confidence that the people and institutions responsible for persecution will not repeat it. Without those conditions, repatriation risks becoming another forced movement.

Some Rohingya have attempted dangerous journeys across the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal toward Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, or elsewhere. UNHCR reported that 2025 was the deadliest year recorded for these voyages. More than 6,500 people attempted sea crossings, and nearly 900 were reported missing or dead. More than half of those attempting such journeys in recent years were women and children (UNHCR, 2026c).

The choice is not between a comfortable camp and a dangerous boat.

It is between forms of confinement, uncertainty, and risk.

Climate and the Decision to Leave

Environmental change influences migration, but rarely through a single direct chain.

A flood does not strike a village and automatically produce a predictable number of migrants. Families respond differently according to savings, land ownership, employment, social networks, government assistance, health, age, and previous experience.

One household rebuilds. Another sends one family member to the city. A third moves temporarily and returns. A fourth loses its land and never comes back.

Climate change alters the conditions within which these choices are made.

In the Mekong Delta, saltwater intrusion can reduce agricultural production. In coastal Indonesia, land subsidence and rising seas increase flood exposure. In the Philippines, typhoons may repeatedly damage housing and livelihoods. Heat can make outdoor labor more dangerous. Drought can increase debt or reduce rural employment.

Yet an environmental event rarely acts alone. Migration may result from the interaction of crop loss, debt, inheritance, employment demand, housing costs, government policy, and a relative already living elsewhere.

The second ASEAN Migration Outlook emphasizes that climate change can contribute to temporary mobility, planned migration, displacement after disasters, and immobility among people who lack the resources to leave. It also stresses the importance of creating safe migration pathways rather than assuming all movement represents a failure of adaptation (ASEAN Secretariat, 2024).

The people most exposed to environmental danger are not always the people most able to escape it.

Migration can be a form of adaptation when it is planned, supported, and chosen. It becomes displacement when people lose meaningful control over the timing, destination, or conditions of departure.

The phrase climate refugee is commonly used in public discussion, but it does not generally describe a separate legal refugee category. A person displaced by a storm may be in desperate need without meeting the international legal definition of a refugee.

Terms such as climate-related mobility, environmental migration, and disaster displacement are usually more precise.

Precision matters because different words create different legal rights.

Who Has the Right to Move?

Southeast Asia was created through movement.

Tectonic plates built islands. Monsoon winds carried ships. Traders moved religions and languages. Armies crossed borders. Capital entered factories. Tourists arrived at beaches and temples. Migrants followed jobs, relatives, roads, and rumors of opportunity.

Yet these movements are not governed by equal rules.

Oil, electronics, investment, and tourist money are welcomed across borders. Workers are recruited, documented, inspected, restricted, and sometimes expelled. A corporation can transfer production from one country to another, while a worker tied to one employer may not be permitted to change jobs.

A wealthy traveler experiences the border as a brief line at an airport.

A refugee may experience it as the edge of survival.

Migration is often described as movement across space. Its deepest geography concerns power.

Who may leave? Who is permitted to enter? Who can change employers, bring a family, become a citizen, or return home safely? Who is treated as local after generations, and who remains permanently foreign? Who profits from a worker’s movement, and who carries the risk?

Southeast Asia’s cities and economies have been built by people in motion.

The challenge is to create a region in which movement enlarges human possibility rather than turning vulnerability into profit.

Key Terms

Migration: The movement of people from one place of residence to another, temporarily or permanently.

Internal migration: Movement within one country.

International migration: Movement across a national border.

Chain migration: A process in which earlier migrants help relatives or community members migrate and settle.

Circular migration: Repeated movement between an origin and destination rather than permanent settlement in one place.

Diaspora: A dispersed population that maintains connections through family, culture, memory, institutions, money, or political activity.

Informal settlement: A residential area developed partly outside formal land, building, or planning systems.

Remittance: Money sent by a migrant to people in the place of origin.

Irregular migrant: A person whose entry, employment, or residence does not comply fully with immigration laws.

Refugee: A person outside their country who cannot safely return because of a well-founded fear of persecution.

Internally displaced person: Someone forced from home who remains within the borders of their country.

Migrant smuggling: Facilitating unauthorized border crossing, generally in exchange for payment.

Human trafficking: Recruiting, transporting, transferring, harboring, or receiving people through coercion, deception, or abuse for exploitation.

Forced labor: Work extracted under threat or penalty that a person has not offered voluntarily.

Recruitment debt: Debt incurred to pay for the costs or fees connected with obtaining migrant employment.

Forced criminality: A form of trafficking in which victims are compelled to commit crimes.

Stateless person: A person who is not recognized as a citizen by any country.

Climate-related mobility: Human movement influenced partly by climate change and its effects on environments and livelihoods.

Thinking Geographically

1. Why is migration often better understood as a household strategy than as an individual choice?
2. How do migrant workers help produce both the physical city and the services that allow it to function?
3. Why is an informal settlement not necessarily a temporary or economically empty place?
4. What problems might Indonesia solve by building Nusantara, and what problems will remain in Jakarta?
5. Why is it misleading to explain the economic roles of Chinese-descended communities through ethnicity alone?
6. How can remittances expand a family’s opportunities while also revealing a cost of migration?
7. Why should domestic care work be considered skilled labor?
8. How can recruitment debt turn voluntary migration into coercive employment?
9. What is the difference between migrant smuggling and human trafficking?
10. Why might a person operating an online scam be both involved in a crime and a victim of trafficking?
11. How did Myanmar’s 2021 military coup expand an already existing geography of conflict and displacement?
12. Why does statelessness mean that Rohingya displacement began before people crossed into Bangladesh?
13. Why is physically returning refugees across a border not necessarily a solution to displacement?
14. How can environmental change influence migration without being its only cause?
15. Why might a person be too poor to leave an environmentally dangerous location?

References

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ASEAN Secretariat. (2024). Vientiane Declaration on Skills Mobility, Recognition and Development for Migrant Workers.

ASEAN Secretariat. (2026). Vientiane Declaration on Skills Mobility, Recognition and Development for Migrant Workers and its checklist.

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International Organization for Migration. (2024). World migration report 2024. United Nations.

McKeown, A. (2001). Chinese migrant networks and cultural change: Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii, 1900–1936. University of Chicago Press.

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Reid, A. (1993). Southeast Asia in the age of commerce, 1450–1680: Volume two, expansion and crisis. Yale University Press.

Suryadinata, L. (Ed.). (2007). Understanding the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

United Nations. (1951). Convention relating to the status of refugees.

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United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2026a). Myanmar.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2026b). UNHCR and humanitarian partners ask the world not to forget Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2026c). UNHCR: 2025 was the deadliest year yet for maritime movements of Rohingya refugees.

World Bank. (2021). Indonesia: Vision 2045—Towards water security.

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