ABSTRACT
This chapter examines migration within the East Asian space, with a focus on movements from Southeast Asia to East Asia through both legal and irregular channels, and the implications for civil society. While Southeast Asia has long been a site and source of migration, the massive movement of Southeast Asians throughout the world in recent decades is historically unprecedented. Globalization, conflict, atrocities, and immiseration have spurred migration toward old and new destinations within and beyond the region. Globalized economy and economic neoliberalism have fueled impressive growth but also aggressive pursuits of markets, natural resources, and cheap labor that contribute to heightened disparities, dislocations, and disenfranchisement. For many of Southeast Asia’s poor, migration is the only viable recourse. Centering the discussion in both sending and receiving countries, and illuminating the nexus between macro forces such as global capitalism and local repercussions such as landlessness, the essay is attentive to the broader human consequences of dislocation beyond the economic calculus to include the impact on individual migrants, their families, and communities. It also looks at the impact of immigration on East Asian societies, particularly on the discourse of multiculturalism and inclusion, and at the roles of state and national and transnational civil society actors, organizations, and institutions in the shaping of migration and migrant protection regimes
