The study of migration has implications and possibilities beyond the commonly understood context of persons crossing the territorial borders of a state and the debates, policies and politics that ensue relating to allocation of rights, forms of recognition, scarcity of resources, worries of cultural autonomy, among some of the responses to the arrival and the presence of migrants.

What can we learn from migration studies in dialogue with other fields in inquiry – is that rather than situating the migrant as the figure or primary unit of analysis, a set of broader connections to social issues of care, care-work and caring, of advocacy and attention to the micro-politics of how we live life, and the many manifestations in the daily political economy of contemporary life are required. That is, critical migration studies engage in the entire social milieu, not only on the topics of migrants/newcomers. With such an approach a range of questions arise to reveal what is often hidden. Who does the laboring work that brings fresh vegetables to our tables at affordable costs? Are we aware of the slave-like conditions and pay rates of global labor, working across industries to make our daily lives possible? Moreover, what can we learn from situating migration not as an exception, or a problem, but as normal activities in a continuum of social change and of mobility?

What possibilities open when migration and migrant experience and giving ‘voice’ to marginalised viewpoints and lives is viewed as potential, fluidity, openness? Such alternate views may well be productive forms of knowledge and learning for those with the relative privilege of birthright citizenship in affluent, peaceful parts of the world. That is, what insights do those with relative geographic advantage, with access to clean drinking water, to arable land and natural resources, with less exposure to climate disasters have of the circumstances of those from more precarious parts of the globe. From these research positionalities, migration scholars, in forms of collaboration I will describe later, search for new social forms and problem solving from migrant experience as distinct from the common stigma attached to migrants as a problem and as a crisis to be administered, managed and governed.

In drawing attention to such views, I keep a deliberative eye to the task I have set myself in sketching what is new about migration and bordering – and where I feel we ought to be paying more attention. I would like to share a number of interlinked stories or narratives with you as this talk proceeds. I hope that by the end, the connections between these stories are evident.

I would also like to say at the outset that my view is from the South, with the Asia-Pacific more broadly framing my geographic stance. While Australia is geographically located in this region, its colonial-settler past has traces in the present.