This paper analyzes how policy-relevant actors understand the causes and effects of labor immigration to Malaysia, the country that receives the highest number of migrant workers in Southeast Asia. Whereas most research on international migration governance has focused on governance system outputs, this paper adopts an actor-centered perspective to investigate how actors narratively construct labor migration dynamics in Malaysia and how they conceptualize the drivers and impacts of labor migration policies and practices. The empirical material comes from 41 in-depth interviews with government officials, policymakers, international and regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations, employers' organizations, trade unions, and embassy representatives. The study found that Malaysia's migration governance system was perceived as "chaotic" due to the seemingly inconsistent, unclear "ad hoc" policy measures implemented, and that the governance system is perceived as "corrupt." Economic incentives were also seen as the primary driver of labor immigration, yet the main impact on Malaysian society was perceived as the spread of criminality, violence and disease, a narrative centered on migrant men. This paper argues that this discourse is problematic as it may drive types of policy measures that target migrant men.

This article examines whether highly-skilled migrants (HSMs) have better employment prospects compared to low-skilled migrants (LSMs), highly-skilled non-migrants (HSNMs) and low-skilled non-migrants (LSNMs) during the unsettling time of the COVID-19 pandemic. This question was explored by focusing on internal migration in Indonesia utilizing the August 2020 National Labor Force Survey, which includes several pandemic-related information. The study examined employment in terms of working status, change in hours worked and change in income. The results indicate that having high skills was very important in coping with the disruptions in the labor market, regardless of the migration status. The highly-skilled migrants were the second best (after the highly-skilled non-migrants) in coping with the crisis. As this study focused on migration, future research should focus more on short-term mobility, such as commuters, who were likely to have been more disadvantaged by mobility restrictions during the pandemic.

The education sector in India was among the most affected sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic. While considerable attention has been paid to informal workers' return or reverse migration to their home communities, not much has been reported about the challenges faced by migrant students. Using a mixed-method approach, the current study presents an overview of internal student migration in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic using data from the 2001 and 2011 Census of India and the 2007-2008 National Sample Survey Organization, and discusses challenges faced by selected migrant learners during the COVID-19 pandemic based on primary research. Based on the census data, nearly 3.3 million migrants in India move for study reasons with 2.9 million migrating within the state (with the duration of residence less than five years) from their last residence within India. The pattern of female student migration suggests an increasingly localized interdistrict migration. Findings from the qualitative data indicate that during the pandemic, students had compromised learning and placement experience, inadequate digital resources and pressure to repay loans. Student migrants experienced varying degrees of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic based on their destination and migration stream.

This paper probes how temporality is integral to the health examination regime that aims to protect citizens from infectious diseases in Taiwan. The paper finds that migrant workers in less-skilled occupations are examined more frequently than foreign professionals. Analyzing such differentiation, this paper argues that a is built on and increases the inequality between them and perpetuates instability in migrant workers' circumstances. Applying a temporal approach to the study of health examination opens new inroads into our understanding of how a "migration state" achieves the exclusion of migrant workers by making them outsiders subject to permanent intrusion into their bodies.

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified border control and disrupted international labor migration, but the complex consequences for migrant workers, including deepened marginalization and countervailing opportunities, have yet to receive sufficient scrutiny. Drawing on the case of Taiwan, this article examines how a host country reorganizes the multiple layers of physical and social borders for the purpose of sanitization, leading to an entanglement of mobilities and immobilities in migrant workers' lives. I illustrate how bordering practices have had uneven impacts on Filipino and Indonesian migrant workers across different circumstances of risk management. The findings highlight the geographic scales and temporal changes of shifting borders, which involve the negotiation of social membership for migrant workers in relation to the public health crisis and labor market shortage.

In September 2021, Immigration New Zealand (INZ) announced the offer of a one-off residence visa category - the 2021 Resident Visa, to over 165,000 temporary migrant workers and their family members living in the country. The offer was a response to the backlog and growing numbers of applications that INZ was unable to attend to largely because of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on relevant statistical data, news media reports and available academic publications, this research note examines how New Zealand's sanitization policies during the pandemic affected the lives of temporary migrant workers who hold various work visas.

This paper explores the "sporadic hyper-precarity" encountered by migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong when the city was hit by the Omicron outbreaks in early 2022. Migrant workers have long been suffering from job insecurity and structural vulnerability due to the contractization and flexibilization of work. The paper discusses how this structural vulnerability came to intersect with the health risks induced by the COVID pandemic. Adding to the debates of the structural precarity characterizing migrant work, we will further interrogate how workers are also susceptible to "sporadic hyper-precarity" - the kind of sporadic risks, uncertainty, vulnerabilities and stigmatization at times of crisis. The paper will elaborate on the "sanitized divide" and "care divide" between local families and domestic workers that has resulted in the unequal treatment of workers.

Japan's handling of border control measures during the COVID-19 pandemic has become known as -approach. literally means "closed country" and generally refers to a historic period when the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) kept Japan's borders shut because international contacts were feared to cause public upheaval and political instability. While these times have long passed, contemporary Japan, too, is known for its tight management of immigration avenues. In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of these avenues were cut off, and despite much criticism, have remained largely inaccessible for two years now. In this paper, we build on concepts from authoritarian populism and the performance of crisis to analyze how and why Japan revived its isolationist strategy. We decipher the discursive framings that Prime Minister Abe applied to illustrate the disruptive influence that open borders would have on Japan's public health, social stability and by extension, on the national body itself. We argue that from the onset of the pandemic on, the ethnic others were portrayed as a risk mainly for two intertwined reasons: Firstly, Japan's pandemic management relies on self-constraint rather than rules and sanctions, and the ethnic others' compliance was not fully trusted. Secondly, this exclusionary strategy fed into populist discourses and was presumed to result in favorable support rates for the administration.

This concluding article serves as an epilogue summing up key issues about migration, labor migrants and development amid a crisis of public health. We predict the forging of an age of sanitization in which different kinds of sanitizing policies will still be in place, especially in Asia, to deal with the sporadic changes of the pandemic. Sanitization politics will continue to intersect with different policy sectors and powers, which will extend beyond the medical understanding of a pandemic and blur the division between science and politics. It will have varied impacts on the migration regime and global governance as a whole.

COVID-19 has resulted in new anxieties about the risks and dangers involved in human mobility and forced governments to simultaneously re-engineer policies for temporary health control and longer-term border-crossing and migration policies; characterized by the sanitization of space and mobility. This special issue considers the policies, including health and non-health measures, that have impacts on migrant workers and migration. While COVID control measures are often phrased in medical language and policy discourses, they often serve multiple goals including political and social control. The papers in this issue cover different places in Asia and the Pacific. We propose the "politics of sanitization" as a conceptual framework to examine the multiple dimensions of state governance and the variegated impacts upon migrants, including: (1) sanitizing space and borders, (2) stigmatization and sanitizing migrants' bodies, (3) sanitizing ethnic borders and the national body, and (4) reorganizing the borders of sanitization and membership of society.

This article examines the experiences and assessments of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) on the Philippine government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is part of the growing migration literature exploring the formation of political remittances, defined as political principles, norms and practices migrants acquire during the migration process and what these imply for democratization, particularly in migrants' home countries. Data for the study came from an online survey of OFWs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results from the ordered logistic regression suggest that overseas Filipinos' experiences of successful pandemic management and aid distribution in host countries may influence OFWs to expect and demand similar measures in the Philippines.

Emigrants from Kerala, India, were among the international migrants affected by the displacing consequences of COVID-19 - job losses, decreasing wages, inadequate social protection systems, xenophobia and overall uncertainty - which led to large-scale return migration to India. Returning home due to exogenous shocks calls into question the voluntary nature of return, the ability of returnees to reintegrate and the sustainability of re-embedding in the home country. The role of return migrants in the development of their societies of origin is also unclear. In this commentary, we explore the circumstances of return migration since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic by focusing on a case study of Kerala and provide insights on the future of emigration from this corridor along with policy suggestions. The role of return migrants in the development of their societies of origin requires further research and policy interventions.

This article examines the link between parental migration and young children's education using data from the Philippine country study of the Child Health and Migrant Parents in South-East Asia (CHAMPSEA) Project. The key research question probed here is: what difference does parental migration make to the school outcomes of young children? Specifically, it looks at factors that explain children's school progression (school pacing) and academic performance (school achievement) using multiple regression analysis. These questions are explored using CHAMPSEA data gathered from a survey of children under 12 years of age and their households in Laguna and Batangas (n=487). The concern that parental absence due to migration can negatively affect the school performance of children is not supported by the study. If parental migration affects school outcomes, it is associated with positive outcomes, or with outcomes which show that children in transnational households are not doing worse than children living with both parents. Positive school outcomes are best associated with a migrant-carer arrangement where fathers work abroad and mothers stay home as carers -children in these households fare very well when it comes to school pacing and school achievement. The study concludes that families and households need to provide both economic and psychological support to enhance the chances that children are at pace with their schooling and are doing well at school.

To date, research that includes children's views on parental migration has been insufficient. Based on the children's assessment of well-being, we use a case study of Thailand to ask whether children of overseas migrant parents are less or more resilient compared to children of non-migrant parents. We make use of data from the Child Health and Migrant Parents in South-East Asia (CHAMPSEA) Project, one of the few studies that provide space for children, both of migrant and non-migrant parents, to voice their views. Our sample includes 496 children aged 9 to 11 years old. The outcome variable captures children's subjective well-being as an indicator of whether they are a resilient child. Our multivariate analysis controls for other potential contributing factors, including the children's individual attributes, carer's mental health, parents' education, family functioning as reported by the children, and household economic status in order to investigate the effects of parental migration. Qualitative information from in-depth interviews with selected carers and group interviews with community leaders are also used to explain the results. Our findings highlight the importance of taking into account children's own perceptions. Compared to children of non-migrant parents, those of migrant parents are more likely to give a positive assessment of their own well-being. The other contributing factors include whether the child sees their family as functioning well. In Thailand, international migration is predominantly undertaken by fathers while childcare remains the responsibility of mothers, and public attitudes towards overseas migration, especially paternal migration, is generally favorable. This may help explain the positive perception of children of migrants towards themselves.

Little is known about the patterns of alcohol use among adolescents and the transmission of alcohol use behaviors from parents to children, including the passage into responsible and problem drinking, in the developing world. The following paper uses primary data from the Child Health and Migrant Parents in South-East Asia (CHAMPSEA) Project for older children aged 9, 10 and 11 to examine the prevalence (16.2 percent) and correlates of alcohol use initiation including parental migration status, caregiving arrangements and exposure to environmental alcohol use (family and friends) in Vietnam. Contrary to expectations, there is no observed migrant 'deficit.' There is some indication that early adolescents in the care of their grandparents are less likely to have a history of experimentation with alcohol use, although it is fully attenuated after controlling for other factors. Peer use is the most powerful explanatory measure of early adolescent drinking, with early adolescents more than five times as likely to have ever drunk alcohol if their friends drink also, and as expected, there is a strong child gender difference with girls much less likely to have a history of alcohol use. "A man without alcohol is like a flag without wind"- Popular Vietnamese saying.

Migration is an increasingly significant driver of transformations in family configurations and caregiving practices as well as living arrangements. The sustainability of geographically-split family formations is dependent on several factors, including the presence and strength of care support networks among migrants and their left-behind families, access to communication infrastructure and the stability of the families' financial resources. Drawing on both a selective review of relevant academic literature as well as key findings from the CHAMPSEA Project, the article first examines the effects of these three factors on the well-being of migrants' left-behind family members, especially children. The article also considers major implications of the project's findings, as well as possible challenges for migration and development policies. One area of concern for migration and development policy arising from our research findings is the need to provide better support for left-behind caregivers or carers who are substituting for the absent migrant in childcare and domestic work but who may also need care and support themselves. Another area relates to the need to improve communication infrastructure to help migrants and their families maintain their relationships across transnational spaces; while a third lies with the importance of minimizing migrant families' economic stress stemming from the cycle of debts resulting from exorbitant broker fees and the mismanagement of remittances. By acknowledging both the social and economic costs of international labor migration on families, governments of labor-sending countries can create a more effective legal and institutional framework as well as design suitable supporting mechanisms for left-behind families. There is then a stronger possibility that migration can become a sustainable development strategy for transnational families in South-East Asia.

Many parents from South-East Asia who go overseas to work are motivated by a desire to secure a better future for their children, yet the health consequences for children who stay behind are poorly understood. This study is the first cross-country comparison to explore the relationships between parental migration and the risk of undernutrition (stunting) for primary school-aged children. The analysis uses data from the CHAMPSEA Project for children aged 9 to 11 years in the Philippines (N = 480) and Vietnam (N = 482). A series of logistic regression models compares outcomes for children living in transnational households and children living with both parents in non-migrant households in the same communities. We find no general advantage of having a migrant parent. Rather there is a reduced risk of stunting only for some left-behind children in the Philippines, whereas having a caregiver with low educational attainment is a major risk factor for all children. The findings point to a complex set of relationships between parental migration and child nutrition, possibly reflecting differential opportunities for accumulating household wealth through overseas earnings. Moreover, differences between the two countries caution against generalizing across national or cultural groups. We conclude by considering the implications of the findings for theories of transnationalism and for the UN Millennium Development Goal of reducing childhood undernutrition.

This research note aims to understand the impact of parental migration on the children who stay behind by examining the issue of smoking. It asks whether tobacco use and exposure are higher among children in migrant households compared with those in non-migrant households in Java, Indonesia. Data were collected in 2008 in two provinces, West Java and East Java, as part of the Child Health and Migrant Parents in South-East Asia (CHAMPSEA) Project. The analytical sample used here relates to children aged 9, 10 and 11 living in both non-migrant and transnational households (N=451). The findings show that the incidence of ever having smoked among these primary school-aged children is relatively low at less than 10 percent, but that boys are much more likely to have used tobacco than girls. Findings from multivariate logistic models predicting smoking behavior show no difference between the children of migrants and non-migrants; nor does household wealth appear to influence whether or not a child has tried tobacco. Gender, child stunting (low height-for-age), carer's education, family functioning and tobacco use by friends are the four main factors found to be significantly associated with child smoking.

The inexorable link between migration and development is paradoxically both taken for granted and a challenging puzzle. Describing interdependent dynamic processes, the study of both offers opportunities to theorize and observe social change. The body of knowledge that has come to include studies of both migration and development has enriched the individual fields of migration and development. In the development field, concerned with the processes that underlie economic growth or contribute to improved livelihoods, adding a migration focus has broadened observations about development to include those about vulnerability and security, for example. A migration lens on the development process also reveals the presence of social networks and the selectivity of behaviors and events. In both cases, such observations have enriched our understanding of development processes. The same epistemological process is at work when migration scholars consider development in relation to migration. A development lens means attention to the institutions that regulate the production of goods and services and the related distributional processes. The migration of populations and experiences of migrants elucidate both the potentialities and vulnerabilities that accompany development and globalization, while simultaneously introducing a new conceptualization of class.

This study examines the educational consequences for those children of emigrants who are left behind in Fujian Province, China. Specifically, we compare the school enrollment for children from emigrant households with the school enrollment for children from non-emigrant households. The data are drawn from the 1995 China 1% Population Sample Survey. We find consistent evidence that emigration affects educational opportunity for children in a positive way. First, children from emigrant households are more likely to be enrolled in schools than children from non-emigrant households. Second, emigration also has positive consequences in reducing gender gap in education. Although girls from non-emigrant households still experience a lower enrollment rate, for the emigrant households the overall school enrollment for boys and girls has been approaching convergence.