Paper short abstract:

Narratives of return Thai migrants demonstrate how Israel's migration regime and neoliberal logic fostered the normative environment for marginalization and exploitation of migrants and neglected to consider their claims as rights-bearing subjects and as participating agents in the Israeli locality

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on long term ethnographic research with Thai return migrants in one sending migration village community in Isaan region in Thailand, by itself heavily effected by neo-liberal policies and unequal social-economical disparities. The village's residents have been migrating in their hundreds to Israel and back for the past 30 years. Their hindsight migration narratives demonstrate how Israel's migration regime and neo-liberal logic fostered the normative environment for marginalization and exploitation of migrant workers and neglected to consider their claims as rights-bearing subjects and as participating agents in the Israeli locality in a way which goes beyond their economic function as workers.

Thais have been migrating to Israel to work in farms for the last three decades. This migration regime institutionalized both as part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and as part of Israel's shift from a collective welfare state into neo-liberal social politics. What started as a crisis management solution in order to replace the Palestinian work force quickly became an ongoing phenomenon creating total dependence on migrant workers in the agriculture sector in Israel. As part of these processes a new large-scale for-profit industry developed, with the state giving private manpower agencies a central role in all stages of the migratory and employment process and outsource the access to medical treatment for migrants to private health insurance companies. These and other state-designed control tools created the legal conditions for the commodification of migrant works by constructing the employer-employee relations as 'property-like' and the latter as a commodity