Navigating Thailand’s Extortion Regime: On the Ambiguities of Relational Autonomy in the Contested Management of Migrant Deportability

Abstract

That deportability renders migrant labor hyper-exploitable is well established in critical migration studies. In Thailand, deportability has long underpinned the vulnerability of undocumented Myanmar migrants to police demands for ad hoc financial payments. Prior to Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, such extortion was a frustrating but mostly manageable feature of migrant life in Thailand. However, since the coup, deteriorating conditions in their country of origin have rendered Myanmar nationals in Thailand more fearful of deportation. Thai police have been able to leverage this heightened fear to increase their financial demands. How have Myanmar border crossers navigated this extortionate arrangement? In this article, I draw on the autonomy of the migration approach to center the agentive character of migrant responses to deportation threats and extortion demands. But given charges of romanticization made against atomistic conceptions of migrant autonomy, I find that relational conceptions offer a more persuasive analytical premise. What attention to autonomy’s relationality reveals, I suggest, are ambiguities in the contested management of migrant deportability, as it has played out on the Thai–Myanmar border. These ambiguities are integral to Thailand’s extortion regime, and they generate at once possibilities and pitfalls for migrants’ mobility struggles.