African Migration to Thailand: Race, Mobility, and Integration

This book, based on exploratory ethnographic research, analyzes the experiences of African migrants in Thailand.

Thailand has always been a regional migration hub with Africans being the most recent. Sitting at the intersection of race and migration studies, this book focuses on the challenges Black and labor migrants face trying to integrate into a society that has had very limited contact with and knowledge about Black Africans. Bringing together research from African, Thai, and European scholars, this volume focuses on forced migrants, such as Somali asylum seekers, and labor migrants, largely African men seeking better livelihoods in niche economies such as gem trading, garment wholesale, and football playing and coaching. The book also includes theoretical contributions to the understanding of precarity and human security, the concept of in/visibility to analyze the challenges African migrants face in Thailand as well as the concept of othering to understand discrimination against Africans. The book also analyzes the Thai migration policy context and the challenges facing Thai policy-makers, law enforcement representatives, and the migrants themselves. While not comparative in nature, this volume directly connects with studies of Africans in other parts of Asia, especially China.

Addressing an important gap in migration research, this book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of migration and mobility studies, African Studies, and Asian Studies.

Elżbieta M. Goździak is a former visiting professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, (2018-20) and Research Professor at the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) at Georgetown University (2002-18) and Editor-in-Chief of International Migration. In 2016, she was the George Soros Chair of Public Policy at the Central European University in Budapest.

Supang Chantavanich is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Political Science at Chulalongkorn University. She was the first Chairperson of the Asia-Pacific Migration Research Network (APMRN). Her research covers a wide range of topics, including forced displacement and labor migration.