ABSTRACT
This chapter deliberates how brokerage is situated within a broader context of informal practices that are premised on networks as opposed to organisational hierarchies. This chapter elucidates how migrant self-help groups, which commonly exist outside formal aid delivery, are premised on distinct operational logics in contrast with formal assistance. A central component of such assistance involves expatriate Myanmar monks and Buddhist temples in areas with high concentration of migrants. The chapter shows how Buddhist religious practices are central to the social, financial, and even political mobilisation of migrant aid delivery. Furthermore, the chapter considers the ubiquitous role of social media within migration assistance. This involves migrant self-help groups’ innovative use of text messaging apps’ GPS capability in order to locate confined domestic workers, and the use of Facebook to mobilise supporters and financial resources from hundreds of thousands of migrants. The chapter shows how such informal assistance supersedes formal organisations’ temporal and spatial reach. Paradoxically, informal migration mechanisms are both oppositional yet extend the state's spatio-temporal reach of migration governance.
