Publication: Globalising Thailand through gendered ‘both-ways’ migration pathways with ‘the West’: cross-border connections between people, states, and places
Issued Date
2020-01-01
Resource Type
ISSN
14699451
1369183X
1369183X
Other identifier(s)
2-s2.0-85078496342
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Mahidol University
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SCOPUS
Bibliographic Citation
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. (2020)
Suggested Citation
Paul Statham, Sarah Scuzzarello, Sirijit Sunanta, Alexander Trupp Globalising Thailand through gendered ‘both-ways’ migration pathways with ‘the West’: cross-border connections between people, states, and places. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. (2020). doi:10.1080/1369183X.2020.1711567 Retrieved from: https://repository.li.mahidol.ac.th/handle/20.500.14594/53554
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Title
Globalising Thailand through gendered ‘both-ways’ migration pathways with ‘the West’: cross-border connections between people, states, and places
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Abstract
© 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article explains why significant Thai-Western ‘both-ways’ migration pathways have evolved, grown and sustained over the last decades. It introduces a set of research contributions on transnational social relationships and cross-border connections between people that arise from the increasingly large-scale mobilities and migrations between Thailand and ‘the West’ – countries from Europe, North America and Australia. While Thai and Western people’s social relationships are usually studied as personal stories within a cross-border marriage migration perspective, we consider it necessary to see them as more than marriage migration. Specifically, we argue that the growing ‘both-ways’ Thai-Western migration pathways can only be understood by reference to three features of globalisation processes specific to Thailand: first, cross-border connections and social networks generated by massive West-to-Thailand tourist mobilities that incentivise Western men to see living permanently with a Thai partner as ‘realistic’; second, the radical transformations of Thai rural societies under conditions of economic development that produces ‘surplus’ mobile women; and third, the restrictive state immigration and citizenship regimes in the West and Thailand that leaves few pathways open for migration, other than by ‘marriage’. In sum, Thailand’s specific experience of globalisation is the explanatory backstory to the extraordinary prevalence of Thai-Western ‘both-ways’ migrations.