Infrastructural Mediation and Vulnerability in Nepal-Malaysia Labor Migration

This article considers new possibilities for anthropological approaches to the infrastructure of Asian migrations by foregrounding two key issues. First, I develop the notion of “infrastructural mediation” as an indeterminate yet regulatory feature of migration infrastructure, and second, I discuss how migrants, in turn, link mediation to vulnerability in terms of their experience in the recruitment and placement process. The ethnography traces the differentiated understandings and expansive operations of the mediation sustaining Nepal-Malaysia labor migration, producing unpredictable alliances between states and commercial intermediaries, redirecting (novel) migrant sociality, and maintaining state failure.