ABSTRACT
This chapter examines pre-decision, pre-departure, and post-arrival training in Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. Exposing migrants to specific attitudes and knowledge prior to departure has become a central strategy for UN, NGOs, and governments that work with migrants. The chapter delineates how pre-departure training of migrants has become ubiquitous in the Mekong region in the last decade, straddling a range of actors working on labour migration. The chapter considers the effects of two central epistemic assumptions entailed in these interventions: first, how programme implementers’ preoccupation with targeting migrants before departing constitutes technologies of anticipation (i.e. the right kind of “awareness” is instilled in migrants before migrating) and second, how such interventions confuse “behaviour” with social conditions, description with prescription, and intent with practice. The chapter details how the combination of these two programme logics transforms formal awareness raising (e.g. how to obtain legal travel documents) into intersubjective considerations of safety within migration (which brokers to trust). This, in turn, transposes risk (and responsibility) from the state onto migrants.
