DELIBERATE NONCITIZENSHIP: A GENERATIONAL PROJECT OF THE BAMAR MUSLIM FAMILIES IN THE THAI-BURMESE BORDERLAND

Abstract

The Bamar Muslims are a group of Muslim minorities in Myanmar. The Bamar Muslims discussed in this study are those who moved to Mae Sot, a Thai western border town, during the 1970s-90s, and their descendants born and raised therein. The Bamar Muslims believed that, in Myanmar, their ethnoreligious identity caused them everyday life discrimination and a rejection of Burmese citizenship whereas in Thailand, the Thai state regarded them as illegal immigrants from Myanmar. This double legal exclusion renders the Bamar Muslims in Thailand stateless across generations. Against this backdrop, the stateless Bamar Muslims in Mae Sot strived to formalize their belonging to the Thai polity through Thai state-issued identity document acquirement. Central to this attempt is a legal status entitled the "Person Without Registration Status" colloquially known among the locals as the "Ten-Year card." The status indicates the Thai state’s formal recognition of an individual's legal personhood without guaranteed pathways to Thai citizenship. Despite its seemingly inconsequential benefits, the Ten-Year card is highly sought after among the stateless Bamar Muslims in Mae Sot. In this study, I look at the multi-generational stateless Bamar Muslims’ everyday life struggles and their strategies to acquire Thai state-issues IDs to understand what the Ten-Year card category can tell us about the relationship between the state and its noncitizens, and how this noncitizenship experience differs among the Bamar Muslims of different age, gender, and sexuality. I propose to understand the Ten-Year category as deliberate noncitizenship, a pragmatic state-individual relationship that both parties intentionally establish while allowing normative obligations to one another to be contingent, nonreciprocal, and not guaranteed. Deliberate noncitizenship arises and dwells in the context where various forms of the state’s exclusionary practices such as border demarcation and immigration controls are at work, and yet vii never fully function as they are intended to. Moreover, the pathways to acquire this pragmatic status are not evenly accessible for all noncitizens but are forged by unequal power relations that accompany noncitizen individuals’ different embodiments of age, gender, and sexuality. These power dynamics at play in the Bamar Muslim families connect noncitizen domesticity at a micro level to the larger field of political membership and belonging to the Thai state and society. In sum, this present study provides the field of migration and (non)citizenship studies with an analysis that bridges the often separated discussions between vulnerable mobile figures on the one hand and the statelessness in situ on the other hand. In other words, it points out the interconnectedness between movement and stasis in noncitizenship and its vulnerability. Moreover, by foregrounding multi-generational Bamar Muslim families and their domesticity, the present study enhances the understanding of migration phenomena beyond the hegemonic narrative of labor migration that emphasizes the economic relations between host states and mobile figures.