Irregular Migration and Human Security in East Asia

Jiyoung Song, Alistair D. B. Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317907725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Across East Asia, intra-regional migration is more prevalent than inter-regional movements, and the region's diverse histories, geopolitics, economic development, ethnic communities, and natural environments make it an excellent case study for examining the relationship between irregular migration and human security. Irregular migration can be broadly defined as people's mobility that is unauthorised or forced, and this book expands on the existing migration-security nexus by moving away from the traditional state security lens, and instead, shifting the focus to human security.

With in-depth empirical country case studies from the region, including China, Japan, North Korea, the Philippines, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and Singapore, the contributors to this book develop a human security approach to the study of irregular migration. In cases of irregular migration, such as undocumented labour migrants, asylum seekers, internally displaced people, trafficked persons, and smuggled people, human security is the cause and/or effect of migration in both sending and receiving countries. By adopting a human security lens, the chapters provide striking insights into the motivations, vulnerabilities and insecurities of migrants; the risks, dangers and illegality they are exposed to during their journeys; as well as the potential or imagined threats they pose to the new host countries.

This multidisciplinary book is based on extensive fieldwork and interviews with migrants, aid workers, NGO activists and immigration officers. As such, it will appeal to students and scholars of Asian politics and security, as well as those with interests in international relations, social policy, law, geography and migration.

1 Introduction

Jiyoung Song

East Asia¹ provides no fewer cases for migration and security studies than any other regions. It is diverse and vibrant. Intra-regional migration is more frequent than inter-regional. East Asia has high degrees of demographic, political, economic, sociocultural and ethnic diversity. It has the world’s biggest population (China, with 1.34 billion) and one of the smallest (Brunei, with only 399,000) (United Nations, 2011). In terms of income, it has the lowest gross national income per capita (Lao People’s Democratic Republic [Lao PDR or Laos], USD 1,130) and the highest (Japan, USD 45,180) (World Bank, 2011). In the Golden Triangle, the Balkans of Asia, there are numerous ethnic minorities, sharing the national borders between Thailand, Myanmar and Lao PDR for trade or employment. As the region as a whole provides ample evidence for the nexus between irregular migration and human security, and intra-regional migration becomes more prominent and dynamic, the set of case studies included in this book adds to a fuller understanding of people’s mobility when irregular.

International migration has been traditionally an independent research area for human geographers for population movements, economists for trade and development, sociologists for identities and integration, and lawyers for citizenship; therefore, multidisciplinary. It has become highly interdisciplinary over the past few decades, involving many scholars from different training backgrounds and bringing insights together. Limited scopes from one discipline are filled with fresh new perspectives from another to understand and explain such vibrant sociopolitical phenomenon such as transnational migration. This book gathers not just different case studies from East Asia, but also interdisciplinary perspectives, from politics, international relations (IR), sociology, geography, social work, anthropology and law, to a subset of international migration that is irregular. Regionally based scholars and practitioners share their cases and perspectives on the relation between irregular migration and human security.

For this book, we all start from the same premise. States hold the primary responsibilities to guarantee human security of migrants with irregular status. The state is not just an actor² that enacts and amends legislation on transnational migration between states and implements policy measures, but it is also a structure under which domestic and international, private and public actors, such as migrants themselves, agents, traffickers, smugglers, non-governmental organisation (NGO) activists or United Nations (UN) agencies, respond to or interact with one another. Mainstream political scientists have looked at cross-border migration from state sovereignty, power relations, transnational crimes and globalisation perspectives. The politicisation of migration, in particular, has received a great deal of scholarly attention (Ong and Nonini, 1997; Castles and Davidson, 2000; Castles and Miller, 2003; Geddes, 2003; Newman and Selm, 2003; Shain and Barth, 2003; Bourdeau, 2011). However, we also share that the state-centric view, focusing mainly on state control or national security (Brettell and Hollifield, 2000; Joppke, 2005; Statham and Geddes, 2006), has fundamental problems by not sufficiently looking at people, their mobilities and their human insecurities. Therefore, our common approach to irregular migration is to start examining the conditions of human insecurities of the migrants’ place of origin, transit and destination in each case study and to find correlations between the conditions of human security and their decisions to move to places where they can be more secure, even when their mobility is unauthorised, unregulated or forced by the relevant state authorities.

The securitisation of migration: the English, Copenhagen and Paris schools

There are several useful theories for migration-security analyses to start with. Philippe Bourdeau (2011) introduces three models of securitisation of migration. The first and mainstream model is from the realist tradition of IR. Robert Kaplan (1994) warned that Western states should fear the ‘coming anarchy’ associated with mass migration, while Samuel Huntington (2004) infamously declared that the persistent flow of Hispanic immigrants would constitute a major potential threat to the cultural and political identity in the US. Myron Weiner (1995) states that ‘advanced industrial countries can protect their borders from invading armies but not from hordes of individuals who slip into harbours, crawl under barbed-wire fences and wade across rivers’. Weiner’s (1992–1993) migration-security nexus draws the Security Stability Framework on how international migration creates conflict within and between countries from a realist perspective, seeing migration as a potential threat to national security. For realists, international migration affects state sovereignty, the balance of power among states and the nature of violent conflicts in the international system (Adamson, 2006).

For liberals, on the other hand, national borders should be open for free markets, labour mobility and individual liberty, as in the ‘client politics model’ (Freeman, 1995, 2002, 2006) or the ‘embedded liberalism model’ (Joppke, 1998a; Guiraudon and Joppke, 2001). In this liberal perspective, international institutions and international laws are supposed to set rules and regulations to respect individual freedom and democracy, and contribute to shaping more cooperative and open-minded state behaviour towards globalisation and migration. Free movements, however, like trade liberalisation, have made workers’ conditions worse in many parts of the world, instead of helping them alleviate poverty, underdevelopment and corruption.

Critical theorists oppose both realist and liberal views, arguing that security is neither about survival nor about urgency and exceptional practices. Rather, security is the ‘result of mundane bureaucratic decisions of everyday politics that create a sense of insecurity, fear, danger and unease’ (Bigo, 2002a, 2008). Didier Bigo identifies this as the ‘governmentality of unease’. According to him, the securitisation process is, above all, ‘routinised practices of professionals of security, essentially police and bureaucrats’. This relates to Ole Wæver’s securitisation theory to identify existential threats and the agent of speech act. The speech acts are not only done by bureaucrats or security professionals, but more by the conservative media, nationalist politicians or xenophobic individuals who post their opinions on the Internet, spreading over a few minutes across space. The state (or Bigo’s security professionals), in this sense, waits until normative equilibrium is reached in the society and belatedly reacts to social demands in democratic society. Threats may not exist, but fear does, endogenously, within individuals living in the system of mass migration. It is not just created by external sources of bureaucrats.

‘International Society’ is one of the ‘theorisable’ products of the English School, which claims that there is a society of states that share the same norms and codes of behaviour to be a member of the society. Here, the English School’s ‘International’ is not international enough, but Eurocentric, and therefore it has been little applied to the Asian context (Buzan, 2004; Acharya and Buzan, 2010). The norms and behaviour shared among Southeast Asian states, for example, is non-confrontational, non-interventionist and consensusbased, which may shape a different form of Asian IR from the European one. E. H. Carr (1946) left the self-deprecating comment that ‘the English-speaking peoples are past masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise of the general good’. This is probably true for those East Asian ‘masters’ who are in the making of the East Asian Community that pays little attention to irregular migration and human security of migrants.

The Copenhagen School, which is further developed from the English School, gives specific methodological insights to look into the securitisation of irregular migration. Barry Buzan’s (1993; see also Buzan et al., 1998) securitisation theory (ST) provides a framework to theorise how East Asian states are securitising irregular migration and which security norms the states are constituting and utilising over the years. As Bourdeau (2011) says, ST is ‘the most widely applied and fully developed model of relationships between migration and security’, and the ‘most creative and productive analytical framework’. Securitisation is, by definition, the ‘process of integrating migration discursively and institutionally into security frameworks that emphasise policing and defence’ (Bourdeau, 2011). Like social constructivism (Wendt, 1999), one of the greatest strengths of ST is that it shifts the focus of analysis away from merely material factors to sociocultural ones.

Wæver (2012) himself identifies his own ST as an analysis of ‘actual linguistic practices to see what regulates discourse’. The Copenhagen School examines what practitioners ‘do in talking security’ (Wæver, 2012). Wæver’s (2012) notion of security is that it is the ‘result of a move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue as above normal politics’, which also applies to human security. However, his interpretation of the designation of existential threat is negative, in the sense that it is only to justify the use of extraordinary measures or special powers such as enforcement, secrecy and other state security means to handle it. His view of security is a ‘failure to deal with issues as normal politics’. For Wæver, therefore, de-securitisation is the optimal long-range solution, which limits the scope of interpretations for security to human dimensions.

The book adds a new human dimension to Wæver’s ST. We notice that there have been changing conceptions of security from state-centric to people-centred. Previous work on the securitisation of migration focus on the negative notion of security with urgency, control and power (Beare, 1997; Freeman, 2004). Maggie Ibrahim (2005), for example, calls the securitisation of migration the ‘latest and most modern form of racism’. In fact, fearmongering, criminal imagery of migrants, witch-hunting or ‘othering’ particular ethnic groups are old tactics of securitisation of migrants. However, this limited, state-centric perspective of securitisation does not allow room for changing concepts of security.

There is another problem with ST: the disconnection between theory and empirical evidence. As Bigo (2000; see also Bigo and Tsoukala, 2008), the founding father of the Paris School, points out, actual policy practices often reveal patterns different from those found in official discourses. Many have tried to fill this gap. Bourdeau (2011) brings his own cases from Canada and France, whereas Melissa G. Curley and Wong Siu-lun (2008) provide the Northeast Asian case studies. None of the above-mentioned securitisation theories of migration extensively focus on migrants themselves. Although concepts of security have expanded to include non-military and human-centred aspects over the decades, securitisation theory still sees it from a state-centric, top-down perspective. In this regard, feminist security studies offer valuable analyses on how different forms of migration are securitised or under-securitised (Ticker, 1992; Hansen, 2000a, 2000b; Enloe, 2001; Sjoberg, 2010). This book also joins this endeavour by examining public discourses and actual policies, as well as providing empirical fieldwork interviews with migrants and relevant stakeholders involved in irregular migration on the ground. Migrants’ self-organising adaptive behaviour, and the interactions among themselves and with the state migration regimes, are key to understanding the evolutionary correlations between migration and security. A migrant-centred, bottom-up human security approach would fill the theoretical gap.

Human security: the securitisation of human rights

The conventional concept of security is mainly centred on national defence, military security or territorial integrity of sovereign states, virtually synonymous with ‘defense’ (Poku and Graham, 1998; King and Murray, 2001–2002). Notions of personal, cultural or environmental security emerged, and the re-conceptualisation of security has been carried out by IR theorists (Thomas, 1987; Matthews, 1989; Booth, 1991; Wiberg, 1992; Buzan, 1993; Jones, 1995; Wæver, 1995; Baldwin, 1997; Krause and Williams, 1997; Poku and Graham, 1998). The major breakthrough was the 1994 report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 1994). In the report, the UNDP laid out two broad categories of human security: ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ (UNDP, 1994; Chen, 1995; Florini and Simmons, 1998). The UNDP argued that ‘human security is not a concern with weapons—it is a concern with human life and dignity’, best insured through prevention, and people-centred. It detailed seven components of human security: personal, community, political, economic, food, health and environment securities, which are interdependent.

Since then, the new concept of human security has been revisited for further investigation for its utility and its relation to other global political concerns (King and Murray, 2001–2002; Bellamy and McDonald, 2002; Kerr et al., 2003). Some have a narrow definition of human security as ‘vulnerability to physical violence during conflict’ (Lodgaard, 2000), while others share a broader concept, linking it with other areas such as development or globalisation (Sen, 1992, 1999).³ Ernst Haas (1983) long argued that the security literature needs to learn from the ‘evolutionary epistemology’ of global life. Mark Duffield (2005) agrees, in this sense, that human security provides a means of distinguishing geopolitics and the security of states from biopolitics and the security of the population.

For many in East Asia, economic, food, energy and environmental issues are real and immediate threats to their survival and resilience. In East Asia, political elites can be more receptive towards the idea of human security, in contrast to their cautious approach to human rights. In many countries in East Asia, domestic politics are insecure or unstable due to the lack of political legitimacy, corruption, nepotism, rising middle classes, ethnic rivalry and immigration. From an authoritarian elite’s perspective, human rights is a threat to maintaining his or her authority, since the discourse of human rights is assuming the state as the potential perpetrator by either committing human rights violations or omitting its obligations to protect human rights. With human security, however, by securitising human rights, perpetrators are not just states, but also private parties. Furthermore, a state can remain as the security provider or protector and still establish normal authority in international relations.

Unlike their sensitivity to human rights, often resisted as an imperial Western concept, many Asian elites are receptive to the idea of human security, at least in their foreign policy. In fact, Japan has initiated the Asian approach to human security by embracing socio-economic issues such as food and energy security, in contrast to the Canadian emphasis on the ‘freedom from fear’ in armed conflict. The Japanese government sees human security comprehensively covering ‘all the menaces that threaten human survival, daily life and dignity—for example, environment degradation, violations of human rights, transnational organised crime, illicit drugs, refugees, poverty, anti-personal landmines and other infectious diseases such as AIDS’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 1999; King and Murray, 2001–2002). ASEAN leaders not only tolerate the concept, but also embrace and mobilise it in their public speech acts. At the symposium on ‘Realizing Human Security in Asia’ in Tokyo in 2010, the Secretary-General of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Surin Pitsuwan, endorsed the concept of human security as ‘a rather comprehensive concept … [that] … will not be in competition with the issue of state sovereignty. In fact, it is making the state sovereignty more meaningful because state security, state sovereignty, also would involve responsibility’.⁴

Amitav Acharya (2001b) argues that human security is originally an ‘Asian’ concept for the following reasons. Mahbub Ul Haq, who is the main author of detailing the concepts of human security in the 1994 report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is an ‘Asian’ scholar. Japan’s comprehensive security bears both a traditional statist notion of closer military cooperation with the US and non-traditional economic, energy and food security (Satoh, 1982). Other Asian political leaders embrace the broader conception of human security (Matsumae and Chen, 1995; Tow et al., 2000; Thiparat, 2001) (on the Asian concept of human security, see Alagappa, 1988; Bajpai, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• I Undocumented labour migration
• II Refugees, IDPs and other forced migration
• III Trafficking in persons
• IV People smuggling
• References
• Index