Safe Migration, Dilettante Brokers and the Appropriation of Legality: Lao-Thai “Trafficking” in the Context of Regulating Labour Migration

Abstract

This paper sets to explore the interrelations between safeguarding migration flows between Laos and Thailand and dual models of migrant brokers' subjectivity. Within the anti-trafficking community in the Mekong region there is a tacit dual imagery of insider and outsider categories, where external brokers are associated with risk, whereas friends and personal networks within village communities constitute possible avenues for migration. The Thai and Lao governments have over the past years attempted to legalize migration flows. An important rationale for this which is advocated by international organizations in the Mekong region and elsewhere is the claim that will dry out a market for dubious brokers, making labour migration safer. This paper suggests that what sustains this legalization model is an implicit utilitarian view of migration which projects ideal-type depictions of traffickers and brokers. In light of ethnographic data from the commercial sex industry along the Thai-Lao border, this paper suggests that migration networks do not replace brokers, as brokering services are embedded within these very same networks where legality is appropriated as a resource with mixed results. Yet, although legality is being manufactured through the migration process, both consensual and deceptive recruitment (i.e., trafficking) of young Lao women, is taking place within a context where sex workers themselves play a central role as dilettante-brokers within wider informal social networks. In other words, legality does not alter brokering services, but rather the reverse holds true. Trafficking, then, is taking place in the very same contexts that are deemed safe by anti-trafficking programs.