Deport or Treat? Migration Governance, Health, and Brokered Biolegitimacy

This paper examines how biolegitimacy and brokering are central to labor migration governing regimes in Thailand. Whereas undocumented migrants would risk deportation whilst seeking health services in the past, current policy responses favor medical treatment – as opposed to deportation – regardless of patients’ legal migrant status. Exploring how migrants’ corporal bodies give rise to new forms of policy practices and claim-making, the paper explicates how these changes have enabled a broadened operational space for aid agencies that assist labor migrants. At the same time, these changes must be understood in relation to the role of brokers (e.g., migrant health translators) and brokering practices (i.e., aid programs’ role as mediators of assistance) in how they expand interventions. Thus, aid programs’ extended operational space can usefully be understood as brokered biolegitimacy. The paper concludes by considering wider implications for how we both understand brokerage and the politics of life within migration policy regimes.

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