Angie Ngoc Tran is an activist scholar working on Vietnamese transnational labor movements, migration, and its forms of resistance. In this book, she compares migratory strategies of Vietnamese migrant workers from five ethnic groups—the ethnic Vietnamese, Vietnamese Chinese, Khmer Krom, Cham, and Hre—in Malaysia and other developing countries such as Thailand and Cambodia. In her analysis, Tran uses an intersectional framework that helps her go beyond class analysis to show how the five ethnic groups use their sociocultural and economic capital to respond to the risks, precarity, and opportunities associated with the labor brokerage state (LBS).
At the basic sociological level, the book examines the usual story of Vietnamese migrant workers who, due to aggressive recruiting practices and a lack of relevant information, borrowed a significant amount of money to pay for various brokerage and travel fees. In Malaysia, the workers are living in precarity caused by unsafe working and...
