On 27 May 2025 at 5:30 – 7:00 pm, SEA Junction hosted the book discussion “The Trade-Offs of Legal Status Safe Migration, Documentation and Debt in Southeast Asia” by author Maryann Bylander. This recently published book explores the costs, risks, and unfreedoms produced alongside migrant regularization in Southeast Asia. Based on multi-sited ethnography and informed by a decade of experience researching migrant communities in Cambodia, the book describes the experiences of Cambodians confronting Thailand’s intensifying documentation regime. While Cambodians want legal status for the protections they believe it will offer, the book shows that documentation has ambiguous and often unwanted effects.

In the session moderated by our director Rosalia Sciortino, Maryann Bylander, presented the content of the book, while Ben Harkins from the International Labor Organization (ILO) provided an analytical review to encourage discussion with the public.

Speakers and Moderator

Maryann Bylander is Associate Professor of Sociology at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Her research focuses on questions of migration, development and debt/ financialization in Southeast Asia.

Benjamin Harkins is the ILO Technical Adviser for the Ship to Shore Rights South-East Asia programme, formerly in a similar function for the Tripartite Action to Enhance the Contribution of Labour Migration to Growth and Development in ASEAN (TRIANGLE II project). He holds a BA in Cultural Studies from the New College of California and a MA in International Development Studies from Chulalongkorn University.

Rosalia Sciortino is associate professor at the Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University; visiting professor at the Master in International Development Studies (MAIDS), Chulalongkorn University; and the Founder and Director of SEA Junction (seajunction.org). She has served as IDRC Regional Director for Southeast and East Asia (2010–2014), Senior Adviser to AusAID in Indonesia (2009–2010), and Regional Director for Southeast Asia of the Rockefeller Foundation (2000–2007). She also served as a program officer at the Indonesia and Philippines offices of the Ford Foundation. She regularly writes on funding trends in the region (see www.rosaliasciortino.com).

Photographer: Vinissa Kattiya-aree