Embrace and Exclude

Across the world, migrant workers fill massive labor demands in jobs that citizen workers largely avoid. Increasingly reliant on migrants, many nation states face the challenge of incorporating them economically while evading the social and political backlash that can come with expanding membership to newcomers. How do states pull off the balancing act of embracing and excluding migrant workers and with what consequences?

Looking beneath the surface of temporary visa policies, Pei Palmgren argues that these programs often feature a mix of temporal and spatial boundaries around migrant rights that vary across and within countries. From the perspective of Thailand, Embrace and Exclude elucidates such variation, its impact on migrant lives, and how it hinges on the state's maneuvering for participation in broader economies. State authorities continually adjust boundaries around migrant rights, in ways that shape contrasting conditions of noncitizenship, including trade-offs between rights and social protections, on the one hand, and the ability to live among family and community, on the other. This book shows that borders are not simply durable or porous. Rather, they are flexible, able to bend across time and space in ways that meet national, regional, and global needs.