Neither Migrant nor Refugee: Comparative-Historical Study of Burmese Migration into Thailand

摘要

By marshaling new empirical evidence and theory from the Thailand-Myanmar border, this dissertation challenges the current refugee-migrant binary discourse that pervades much of the research on human migration across various disciplines. Two millennia of human mobility into, out of, and across the Chao Phraya basin of Thailand are synthesized inductively to argue for a new classification of migration that values causal physicality and identity creation over past typologies that reify some notion of the "labor migrant" or the "refugee." This historical review is compared to contemporary movements of Burmese- and Karenic-speakers into Thailand, utilizing in-depth interviews with migrants and officials in Thailand (n = 24). Hypotheses are posited about the relationship between predictor variables of past persecution and other demographic differentials against various social, political, economic, and geographic aspects of contemporary migrants. These are tested deductively against a dataset constructed from a larger survey questionnaire of migrants both inside the "refugee" camps and outside the camps on the Thai side of the border (n = 4,000). The study of only "refugees" or only "labor migrants" is a common form of confirmation bias in migration studies today. Acknowledgement of mixed migration as an empirical reality along the Thailand-Myanmar border assists in no small way to combat the confirmation bias inherent in the refugee-migrant binary.