ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the book's central puzzle and argument: given a wider ambivalent migration policy context, safe migration depends on informal practices which reconciles seemingly incompatible actors, practices, and outcomes. The chapter foreshadows these tensions through an ethnographic vignette of one of the book's many safe migration interventions: the Myanmar Migration School. Being an informal Thai language school, which serves a large number of predominantly Myanmar labour migrants in Bangkok, it holds huge potential as a conduit for safe migration awareness raising funded by its international aid donors. Yet, despite the awareness raising on safe labour migration (in part to reduce migrants’ dependency on brokers), the school is in effect a “broker school” as students’ newfound knowledge on Thai labour law and work permit application procedures allow students with newfound opportunities as paid intermediaries assisting other migrants with their migration. The chapter explicates the book's theoretical orientations. As safe migration discourse attempts to target migrants as they move through space (as opposed to being confined by it), programmes are predisposed to privilege pre-emption as opposed to territorial fixity as premise for interventions. These temporal and spatial dimensions of safe migration discourse and practice situate the book within current theoretical concerns relating to the anthropology of policy and migration, with particular emphasis on post-panopticism and the mobilities turn in the social sciences.
