Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we examine the formal and informal pathways for labour migration from Thailand's Udon Thani province to South Korea, which are parallel but connected with various dimensions of migration infrastructure as well as how female migrants can access and experience these pathways.

Paper long abstract:

Migration studies have recently taken a 'infrastructural turn', which has given insight into the emergence and functions of different aspects of migration infrastructure focusing on how these infrastructures mobilize migrants. The gendered dimension of low-skilled labour migration pathways and infrastructures, as well as their entanglements with migrants' subjectivities, remains underexplored. This paper aims to analyze the authorized and unauthorized labour migration pathways from the rural areas of Udon Thani province, Thailand to South Korea, which are parallel but connected and intersect with various dimensions of the migration infrastructure and how female migrants can access and experience these pathways. Having limited access to the official migration pathway through the Employment Permit System (EPS), female migrants often resort to unauthorized pathways. This can have different implications for the individual trajectories, which are analyzed to illustrate how infrastructure and migrant trajectories have become entangled in complex intersecting entanglements. Drawing on migration histories of returned migrants, in-depth interviews with aspiring migrants, as well as semi-structured interviews with migrant sending households and stakeholder interviews collected in the Udon Thani province of Thailand and Interviews with Thai labour migrants in Korea collected between April and September 2022, this study presents nuanced understandings of female migrants' lived experiences of low skilled migration infrastructures by (re)centering on migrants' own agencies, desires, and life-courses.

Keywords:

Migration Infrastructures, Female Labour migration, migration aspirations and capabilities, low-skilled migration, migration pathways, irregular migration