Migration infrastructures and the production of migrant mobilities

Abstract

Since the proclamation of a mobility turn in the 2000s, scholars have populated the field with invaluable insights on what it means to move, and what the politics of movement are. One particularly useful thread revolves around the issue of infrastructures, which have generally been taken to mean the manifest forms of moorings and fixities that help order and give shape to mobilities. Yet, while significant inroads have been made in delineating the morphologies of transport infrastructures, mobilities research has been relatively reticent about the organisational structures, orders and arrangements that give rise to another key mobile phenomenon of our time — international migration. In this editorial introduction, we lay down some groundwork on the productive and political nature of infrastructures that likewise affect and inform the way (im)mobilities are contingently created and parsed in migration. Looking through the prism of East and Southeast Asia and its migration infrastructures, we take advantage of the ‘new’ infrastructural configurations in an emerging empirical context to point to some directions by which mobilities researchers can more rigorously interrogate ‘migration’ as another socially meaningful and specific form of mobility that exceeds a mere displacement of people or change in national domicile.

Keywords:

• Migration infrastructures
• migrant mobilities
• politics
• intermediaries
• brokers
• Asia

Acknowledgements

The guest editors would like to acknowledge Kristel Acedera’s assistance with this special issue. We would also like to thank Pennie Drinkall, Kevin Hannam and Mimi Sheller for their support, and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms.