A(nother) geography of fear: Burmese labour migrants in George Town,Malaysia

Abstract

While scholarship around urban fear has brought forward important insights around the relationship between fear, mobility and social exclusion, questions relating to legal exclusion have largely been left outside the scope of inquiry. In cities around the world there are, however, a growing number of people who are not only de facto excluded from rights to/within the city (based on their gender, class, age etc.) – but de jure excluded based on their non-citizen or ‘illegal’ status in the host country. Drawing upon field work conducted in the Malaysian city George Town this study examines how both regular and irregular Burmese migrants perceive safety and danger in the city and how this, in turn, influences how they navigate urban space. The results of the study reveal how the migrants in George Town navigate the city as a ‘borderscape’ – producing a(nother) geography of fear which does not primarily reflect a fear of crime but rather a fear of state institutional practices, such as police controls, road blocks and raids. This shows, the paper argues, the need to pay attention towards both social and legal exclusions when examining how people in cities around the world are able to access and take possession of urban space.

Keywords

fear Malaysia migration non-citizens urban space

Introduction

Questions relating to fear in urban space have long preoccupied geographers (see for example the special issues: ‘Fear in the city’ in Urban Studies 2001; ‘The geography and politics of fear’ in Capital and Class 2003; ‘Scary cities: urban geographies of fear, difference and belonging’ in Social & Cultural Geography 2010). While such scholarship has brought forward important insights around the relationship between fear, mobility and social exclusion, questions relating to legal exclusion have largely been left outside the scope of inquiry.¹ Legal status is, however, an increasingly important axis of marginalisation (Varsanyi, 2006, 2008),² as a growing number of people worldwide are not only de facto excluded from rights to/within the city based on their gender, ethnicity/race or class etc., but de jure excluded based on their non-citizenship status. This includes irregular migrants – who are ‘deportable’ (De Geneva, 2002) and lack the legal right to remain within the city (and territory) at all (Varsanyi, 2006).³ But it also includes those who are temporary legal residents in the city – who, despite their legal right to remain, may face restrictions in civil, social and political rights due to their status as ‘low-skilled’ and temporary foreign workers (see for example: Baines and Sharma 2002; Nah, 2012).⁴ This fundamental distinction between ‘citizens and “others”’ as ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (Peutz and De Genova, 2010: 14) is important for how urban space is perceived and navigated (Greenburg, 2010). It produces, this study suggests, an(other) urban geography of fear: in which spatial strategies are not primarily developed in response to the fear of crime, with which previous scholarship has been much preoccupied, but rather in response to the fear of state institutional practices – such as police controls, roadblocks, raids, detention and deportation.

The following study takes an interest in the geographies of fear amongst Burmese⁵ circular labour migrants in the Malaysian city of George Town. Working with observations, interviews and mental maps the study investigates how these migrants perceive safety and danger in the city and how this, in turn, influences how they navigate urban space.

Malaysia is the key destination country for labour migrants in the Southeast Asian region. Accurate data is hard to come by, but moderate estimates suggest that the number of foreign migrants currently staying in the country exceeds 4 million – out of which around 2 million have an irregular status (see for example: Amnesty International, 2010). The vast majority of these migrants are ‘low-skilled’ temporary workers (referred to as ‘foreign workers’) from poorer countries within the Asian region.⁶ The largest group comes from Indonesia, followed by workers from Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar and India (Nah, 2012: 491). Estimates on the total number of Myanmar nationals in Malaysia vary, but as of 2012 there were 250,000 registered Burmese labour migrants and another 250,000 believed to work irregularly in the country (Hall, 2012: 3).⁷ While most other major migrant-sending countries have negotiated agreements with the Malaysian government to regulate the recruitment processes and procedures around regular labour migration (ILO, 2013), with Myanmar such an agreement is still pending.⁸ This, coupled with Myanmar’s long history of authoritarian and lack of policies on (e)migration (Hall, 2012), has produced a situation in which most Burmese migrants perceive that their own government is, at best, unengaged in their situation. The sentiment in the Burmese migrant community of being vulnerable to exploitation and abuse has further been exacerbated by a number of ‘scandals’ involving Malaysian enforcement officials and Burmese migrants. One of the more publicised ones involved the ‘selling’ of Burmese detainees from detention centres in northern Malaysia across the border to Thailand. While there seems to be a general agreement that this type of ‘trade’ has now ceased (Nah, 2011b; informant interviews in Malaysia, 2013), it has had a detrimental effect upon the trust in Malaysian authorities in the migrant community at large – and especially amongst the Burmese.

The city of George Town, where this study is set, has a population of around 1.5 million and is located on the island Penang off the northwestern coast of Peninsular Malaysia. In Malaysia’s modern economic history Penang has held a key position as a centre for export-oriented manufacturing and in the early 1970s the country’s first export processing zone, the Bayan Lepas, was established at the southern outskirts of George Town. Over the past decades the share of foreign workers in the industries located here has steadily increased (Sirat and Ghazali, 2011) and today George Town hosts a large number of migrants (currently or formerly) employed in the manufacturing sector. Being one of the main urban economic hubs in northern Malaysia, with a thriving informal economy, George Town is also an attractive first destination for irregular Burmese migrants, most of whom enter Malaysia via Thailand. Many of these migrants, including most of the respondents in this study, find employment in the city’s vivid street food sector – and especially with Chinese employers who are often viewed as culturally closer to the Burman majority group culture (also practicing Buddhism), relative to the Malays (who are Muslim) and the Indians (who are mostly Hindu but also Muslim or Christians).⁹

Approaching migrants’ fear in the city

Needless to say, migrants in the city (or elsewhere) are not a homogenous group. As individual people their identities intersect various structures of social hierarchy – such as gender, class, age, ethnicity and locality. As a group, however, they face some common challenges produced and performed through their social as well as legal status in the host community.

In previous studies on the fear of crime it is suggested that fear in the city is influenced by notions of who is regarded as ‘different’ in various social contexts (England and Simon, 2010). Similar claims are made in studies focusing particularly upon migrants’ fear – both in relation to the way that being recognised as a ‘foreigner’ may increase the risk of racist and xenophobic attacks (Greenburg, 2010; Kwan, 2008) but also because it may attract the attention of the local police or immigration authorities (Greenburg, 2010; Holgersson, 2011; Lang, 2002). Greenburg (2010: 70) therefore proposes that ‘where one can be in the city and how one moves about is radically circumscribed by how one’s body is marked by foreignness’ (emphasis in original).

The risk of being caught by the police or immigration authorities has been highlighted as a central challenge for irregular migrants’ mobility in several studies (Holgersson, 2011; Lynge Madsen, 2004; Willen, 2007). But a few studies have also illustrated how regular migrants are sometimes fearful of encounters with host state authorities – and in particular the local police. In her study of Congolese migrants in Johannesburg, Greenburg (2010) for example illustrates how the practices of the South African police force – and in particular the continuous identity controls performed in the streets – work to induce fear and restrict the mobility of migrants in the city. Lang (2002), in her study of Burmese migrants and refugees in Thailand, further illustrates how police corruption make migrants frightened when moving about in public. The respondents in her study stated that they were frequently asked to pay bribes and complained that they were ‘used as “ATMs” (automatic teller machines) for the Thai police’ (p. 175).

Studies have generally conveyed that migrants, in response to the above challenges and fears, tend to restrict the amount of time they spend in public space and generally avoid moving outside familiar territories. Various bodily strategies to avoid attracting attention have also been found (Holgersson, 2011; Willen, 2007) – as in the case of Lang’s study from Thailand (2002: 174) where Burmese migrants adopted techniques for blending in through, for example, dressing and walking in ‘Thai style’. It should, however, be pointed out that while migrants have been found to live with high levels of fear and adopt strategies to remain unnoticed, there are also examples of, what Koskela (1997) terms, ‘bolder’ spatial strategies – where people take possession of urban space without being afraid or in spite of being afraid (see also Holgersson, 2011; Kwan, 2008). Finally, previous scholarship also cautions us to construct the ‘fearful others’ as mere passive victims (Kwan, 2008). Instead, high levels of fear often imply a high level of ‘spatial expertise’ and strategising (Koskela, 1997, see also Holgersson, 2011) – i.e. knowledge around which places are associated with danger and how best to avoid these.

The insights from the above studies are important for the analysis brought forward in this study. But, as will be seen in the coming sections, it also emphasises the need to pay explicit attention towards the intersection between fear, mobility and legal status. Before entering the empirical part of the paper we will, however, first take a brief look at Malaysian immigration policies – in order to situate migrants’ lives and fears in the city in an institutional context.

Malaysian immigration policies

Migration is a central feature of Malaysian history as well as its present (Ai Yun, 2000; Kaur, 2012). Following decolonisation and the rapid expansion of the Malaysian economy, large-scale immigration has largely been fuelled by the export-oriented development model and labour deficiencies (Kaur, 2010). The country’s dependency on foreign labour to sustain economic growth, and the Malaysian publics simultaneous scepticism towards large-scale immigration, has produced what Nah (2011a: 4) calls an ‘enigmatic’ policy approach: policies have often shifted and been both incoherent and contradictory. Illustrated by the fact that the government currently tries to reconcile two main (albeit somewhat contradictory) policy objectives: (a) to ensure the continued supply of foreign workers to selected sectors of the Malaysian economy whilst at the same time (b) ‘working towards the closure of the border’ (Garcés-Mascareñas, 2012: 64). In order to achieve this Malaysia deploys an employer-sponsored ‘guest worker’ programme that seeks to attract foreign workers while at the same time maintaining a high degree of control over these workers during their stay in Malaysia (Kaur, 2014). There are therefore several policies in place in order to ensure foreign workers’ temporality and immobility in the labour market (Garcés-Mascareñas, 2012). This includes time-specified work permits or visit passes – with mandatory return to the country of origin after the completion of the contract (Kaur, 2012; Nah, 2012), employer-sponsored work passes tied to one specific employer – with little possibility to change employer after arrival to Malaysia (Nah, 2011b). Foreign workers are furthermore not allowed to marry, bring children, acquire property, leave and re-enter the country freely or apply for permanent residency (Nah, 2011b, 2012).

In addition Malaysian policies have focused upon combating irregular migration through an increased emphasis upon internal border controls through policing, the deployment of amnesty/regularisation programmes followed by highly publicised expulsion campaigns (also known as Crackdowns) – during which the immigration authorities (aided by the Malaysian Voluntary Corps, RELA), the police and sometimes also the army raid workplaces, living areas and other public establishments in search for people without documents (Hedman, 2008; Nah, 2011b). Irregular migrants have further been criminalised and those found to violate immigration laws now face fines, imprisonment, detention and caning (Nah, 2011b: 139). While the Immigration Department is formally responsible for the procedures, the police conduct identity controls and roadblocks – which for the migrants who feature in this study have the biggest impact upon everyday life. The securitisation of migration in Malaysia has also involved a discursive shift towards a construction of migrants (and particularly, although not exclusively, irregular migrants) as a security threat (Arifianto, 2009). These processes of ‘Othering’ (Dannecker, 2005) have had significant implications for migrants’ (sense of) social exclusion and, as we will see, also for the sense of safety and mobility in public space.

Methodology

The empirical material for this study builds largely upon observations and qualitative research interviews as well as some mental maps drawn by the respondents. The material also includes some informant interviews with local NGOs, lawyers and police officers.

The participatory observations have largely been facilitated through the researcher staying (two-week periods a few months apart) in an apartment together with a group of irregular migrants in the Jelutong area of George Town (between 2012 and 2014). Between stays, contact with the residents in the apartment (as well as some of the respondents) was kept via Facebook and phone. Twenty-six in-depth interviews with Burmese labour migrants were also conducted as well as a group interview with an additional seven. The length of each individual interview varied from around one up to four hours, but on average they lasted around one and a half hours. All interviews were conducted in the company of an interpreter. Both of the interpreters working in the project (one man and one woman) are themselves migrant workers that hold university degrees from their home country Myanmar.

The interviews largely focused on a few main themes: ‘push and pull factors’ behind migration decisions, the organisation of the migrant trajectory, current employment and living conditions, perceptions of safety and danger in George Town/Penang and the spatial strategies adopted in response to this. The majority of the respondents live in the Jelutong and Free School areas, but a few also stay in the central parts of the city. None of these areas can be characterised as ‘migrant neighbourhoods’, but rather as low- or medium-income areas with mostly high-rise buildings and town houses. There are, nonetheless, thousands of migrants living in these areas, and amongst those encountered during the field visits the majority worked in service sector within their areas – although some also commute to larger workplaces (such as construction sites) outside their neighbourhoods.

Clearly, this type of research involves a number of ethical considerations. Above all, these relate to the potentially negative impact that the presence and visibility of a foreign researcher may have. Most of the migrants in this community go through significant efforts to avoid attracting attention (from authorities as well as neighbours) – and being a white European female in this area invariably attracts both attention and curiosity. Dialogues around safety and danger were therefore continuously ongoing during the course of the fieldwork with fellow residents, interpreters and friends. Amongst other things, this resulted in the interviews taking place in peoples’ homes (typically late at night as both the respondents and interpreters have long working days). All of the respondents live together with other (Burmese) migrants, which in turn meant that others were often present during the interview. In a few cases, however, it was possible to perform the interview with a greater degree of privacy. A decision was also made not to record the interviews, but to take notes that were then discussed together with the interpreter.

Background

All of the respondents interviewed for this study come from Myanmar. The majority of them are ethnic Burmans, although two belong to the ethnic minority group Kayin. They are mostly in their mid-20s to mid-30s, 13 women and 13 men, and while six of them have children they had all travelled on their own or with an adult partner to Malaysia. The stated reason for deciding to migrate was almost exclusively related to the difficulties in finding regular work and/or surviving from the low wages paid in Myanmar. As the fieldwork for this study came to an end, nine of the respondents had a regular status, 15 were irregular and the remaining two had obtained a UNHCR card. The legal status of migrants in Malaysia is, however, far from stable – and many of the respondents had experienced a change in legal status (sometimes several times) during the course of their stay. For those who had entered the country legally this was the result of them having ‘run away’ from their employers. Some of them, as well as some of those that had entered the country irregularly, had been able to regain a regular status during one of the reoccurring amnesty periods and regularisation programmes. Some had, however, ended up losing that status once more. When speaking of the challenges facing both regular and irregular migrant workers it is therefore important to bear in mind that these are not two distinct or separate categories. Instead, many respondents had experiences of living in Malaysia both ‘legally’ and ‘illegally’ – and while some of them currently held a passport with a valid work permit they were aware that this may change if they themselves or their employers decide to terminate their employment. Burmese migrants in George Town further live in the same ‘community’, meaning that they share apartments, move about, socialise and belong to networks that include both regular and irregular migrants.¹⁰ Therefore, while this paper does make use of the categories regular and irregular migrants, it attempts to move away from simplistic and dualistic notions of ‘legal’/‘illegal’ migration. The main reason, as already illustrated above, is that this fails to capture the complex reality of migrants’ relationship to their host state – where both regular and irregular migrants navigate along a continuum of social and legal restrictions and exclusions in everyday life.

In the coming sections emphasis will be placed upon migrants experiences of fear and the resulting patterns of mobility. The respondents, however, expressed a number of emotions in response to their situation apart from fear. Some spoke of their general sense of ‘unfreedom’, powerlessness, sorrow and sadness. But there were also simultaneous expressions of satisfaction – in particular with the fact that they were able to provide for their families back home and with the higher standard of living in Malaysia relative to Myanmar. Also, whereas this paper is preoccupied with the way that fear produces a certain geography – there were a number of strategies used to cope with anxiety and fear. This included talking/discussing/comforting/supporting each other, praying and visiting the monks at one of the Burmese temples for spiritual guidance. There was also a strong sense of community, where people went through great efforts to help friends find medicine and health care, transportation, money, food and other necessities. Also, while several respondents could not hold back their tears during the interviews when describing their situation, they also laughed – using humour (or gallows humour, perhaps) as a way to cope. One woman, for example, burst out laughing when describing her first encounter with the police, where she had first physically struggled with a police officer that tried to pull her into his vehicle using the umbrella she was carrying, and then she had cried so heavily that the policeman did not know what to do and released her.

Limited physical mobility further seemed to encourage various forms of ‘virtual mobility’ – with phones constantly ringing and beeping, Facebook pages being updated (if there was a connection) as well as the consumption of (what seemed like a never-ending stream of) pirate-copied DVD comedies, satire programmes and music videos from Myanmar as well as Asian and Western action and romantic movies.

Finally, while most migrants attempted to avoid any contact with Malaysian authorities many of them had in fact been stopped in police controls. Their main strategy when facing such a control was to pay the police officers some duit kopi (literally ‘coffee money’) in order to avoid being arrested for not having a passport, for not being in possession of the original document or for driving a motorbike without a valid driving license (see below). From the migrants’ perspective, bribery was thus used as a means to (at least temporarily) negotiate the conditions of ‘illegality’ and non-citizenship (Franck, unpublished manuscript; see also: Azis, 2014; Lynge Madsen, 2004).

Fear as part of everyday life

One of the strongest impressions from the time spent in the Burmese migrant community is that fear, anxiety or at least extreme caution is a central aspect of migrants’ everyday lives in George Town. It influences decisions around where to live, work, eat and do shopping, how to get there and during which days and hours. In fact, experiences of fear and strategies around how to avoid danger were one of the more common topics of conversation. As were the text-messages of warning from friends that had spotted a road-block or heard a rumor of an upcoming raid, calls from people who needed to be picked up somewhere and discussion/speculation around what had happened to those that had been apprehended by the police.

In the interviews respondents were asked broad and open-ended questions around their general sense of safety (such as: Do you feel safe in Malaysia? Why do you not feel safe? What are you afraid of?), as well as more detailed questions regarding their perceptions of particular places and modes of transportation. The question ‘Do you feel safe in Malaysia?’ was pretty much answered with a unanimous: ‘No’ (or perhaps more accurately: ‘No!’). Several respondents even reacted to this question by laughing – as if that they assumed it ubiquitous knowledge that migrants in Malaysia do not feel safe.

The high level of fear in the Burmese migrant community was exaggerated by migrants’ legal and social exclusion in Malaysian society. As we have seen above, the rules governing immigration and non-citizenship in Malaysia have rendered migrants a weak bargaining position vis-à-vis both their employers and the state. Regular migrants depend on their employers to retain their legal status. Complaints or protests about working conditions and wages can, migrants are well aware of, lead to a termination of the contract – and thus deportation. Irregular migrants, on the other hand, live under the constant threat of deportation and punishment, and have no possibilities to seek redress in case of abuse. Several migrants further expressed that they did not expect any assistance from neither Malaysian state institutions nor the Malaysian society at large if they were to encounter problems, become victims of abuse or even crime. One woman, a regular migrant who had worked close to ten years in Malaysia, summarised this by stating: ‘Nobody cares about foreign people in Malaysia’. Faced with problems many would therefore rather turn to their ‘friends’ – which for the most part meant other Burmese migrants.

Legal status and reasons for fear

Some studies on urban fear of crime have found that an increasing police presence in local neighbourhoods proliferates peoples’ sense of safety (see for example: Adu-Mireku, 2002; Yavus and Welch, 2010). The sentiment in the Burmese migrant community was, however, quite the opposite. In fact, all of the 26 respondents, as well as those who participated in the group interview, spoke in one way or the other of how the continuous identity controls performed by the police throughout the city induced fear and mediated their ability to move about freely.

For those who stayed and worked in George Town ‘illegally’ fear of the police was clearly associated with their criminalised status. Many of them spoke of how the fear of encountering the police produced a constant state of anxiety in everyday life. While punishments and potential abuse related to arrests were issues of concern, so was the loss of livelihood that would follow from such an arrest – not just for the migrants themselves but also for the families they supported through their remittances in Myanmar. One of the younger women interviewed, who worked 14 hours a day washing dishes in hawker stalls, stated the following:

I am the oldest daughter in the family so I have to support my family, my younger sisters and brothers. I have five siblings … I have been here 4 months now. I have two jobs … [But] I have no permit, no visa, no documents so I am scared all the time. I am scared of the police and the gangsters. I am scared of the police because they can catch me and take me to jail. I am super scared of going to jail because if I am in jail I cannot work anymore, and then I cannot get money. I am afraid of the gangsters because they can do bad things to me.

Regular migrants, however, also expressed concerns and fears of encountering the police. Apart from a general sense of ‘unsafety’ in Malaysian society, their most pronounced reason to dread such encounters was that they were often associated with economic losses. Regular migrants are rarely in possession of their original passports and the photocopy that they mostly carry is not recognised as valid identification in police controls. The respondents explained how the police would therefore ask them to either provide the original document through ‘calling their “boss”’ (who was usually in possession of it) or pay a bribe to be released. One man, who was one of the few who was actually in possession of his original passport, however, explained that he was still asked to pay bribes. The police, he stated, will always ask for money and ‘even if there is no problem they will make one up’.

Some migrants (nine out of the 26) also raised the fear of crime during the interviews. As a difference to statements around the fear of the police, women and men tended to address this somewhat differently. Women were, for example, more explicit in their fear of crime and, whereas men spoke of assaults and robbery, women’s fears were linked to the threat of sexual violence (see also: Brownlo, 2004; Koskela, 1997; Pain, 2001; Tanusree, 2011). Gendered fear of crimes further intersected ethnicity/bodily appearance and migrant status. Both women and men stated that it was ‘more dangerous for women’ to move around the city, especially alone and late at night. Being identified as a migrant woman, they explained, could put women at risk of becoming trafficked for sexual purposes. One respondent, a 26-year-old woman working late nights in a road-side hawker stall, explained that besides being apprehended by the police she was afraid of being picked up by ‘gangsters’:

In the nighttime I am most afraid. When I come back from work it is already late and then there are not so many people. There are gangster boys … Sometimes if they see illegal [migrant] girls they catch them and send them to Thailand to no good places. They sometimes sell the girls … I have heard such stories.

While only one of the women interviewed had her own experiences of this type of exploitation, it was clear that the trafficking in migrant women in the region induced fear amongst the Burmese migrant women in George Town.

Perceptions of urban space

In order to further investigate the migrants’ understanding of safety and danger in urban space, a number of respondents were asked to draw ‘mental maps’. This exercise basically consisted of the respondents’ being asked to draw a map of George Town – and to mark with a green colour pencil the sites they perceived as ‘safe’, use orange for ‘semi-safe’ and red for ‘dangerous’. ‘Safety’ and ‘danger’ are, however, clearly difficult concepts to work with – given that questions around ‘what we are afraid of’ have both local and provisional answers (Sparks et al., 2001: 885–886). This was also noted by several of the migrants, who objected to the use of the term ‘safe places’ and argued that there were actually no places in George Town that were ‘really safe’ for migrants – regardless of their legal status.

The map shown in Figure 1 provides an interesting reading of safety and danger in George Town. This was the most detailed and sophisticated mental map retrieved, and the respondent who drew this had a university degree from his home town in Myanmar and had stayed more than six years in George Town working in both factories (with a regular status) and in numerous jobs in the service sector (with an irregular status). In drawing the map he specified his own understanding of the given colours, where green was used to describe sites that were ‘Almost safe (But be careful)’. Like in most other maps, as well as in the narratives provided during interviews, the home (marked ‘flat’ in Figure 1) was perceived as the ‘safest’ place to be in the city (but see below). The respondent that drew map 1 also marked the Burmese temple as well as an area where the respondent had a lot of migrant friends with green. He used orange to mark places that were ‘Dangerous [to] 60%’ – which included his own workplace,¹¹ and red for sites that were ‘100%’ dangerous for all migrants. He then added shaded red areas to mark sites he perceived as 100% dangerous – but only if you drive a motorbike without a license (which is the case for most Burmese migrants). A site marked red in almost all of the maps (see Figures 1 –4), and generally agreed to be the ‘most dangerous place’ in George Town for Burmese migrants, was Komtar. This is a shopping centre located in the central parts of the city where migrants (both Burmese and others) go to remit money, purchase Burmese foods, groceries and medicine. The police regularly perform raids and controls inside the building as well as in the nearby streets.

Figure 1.

A mental map of fear.

Figure 2.

A mental map of fear.

Figure 3.

A mental map of fear.

Figure 4.

A mental map of fear.

There are several aspects of these mental maps that invite us to think further about migrants’ geographies of fear. First, because of how these maps convey an understanding of urban space as a ‘borderscape’ (Perera, 2007: 206–207). ‘The border’ is here not found in a fixed site, but its location rather corresponds directly with the ‘bodily movements’ of enforcement officers (Mountz, 2011: 65), i.e. where the police set up a control or perform a raid. Places were thus marked in these maps as ‘safe’ and ‘dangerous’ in accordance with where migrants calculate that there is a low or high risk of encountering a control, rather than where they see a low or high risk of becoming a victim of crime. Second, while part of the city (notably Komtar) was perceived as ‘Always dangerous’ to all migrants, Figure 1 shows how ‘danger’ operates differently before different groups of migrants. Compare for example the blue dots with the shaded red markings in Figure 1: where the former marks the entire city space as ‘Always dangerous for all illegal [migrants]’, while the latter signals danger only for those who drive without a valid licence. Additionally, while it does not come across in the mental maps, the interviews revealed how safety and danger also intersects bodily appearance. Amongst the respondents there was general agreement that ‘looking Burmese’ was ‘more dangerous’. Being identified as a Burmese migrant, in other words, was perceived as increasing the risk of being controlled by the police, as well as becoming a victim of criminals targeting migrants (see above). The role of gender in coding places as ‘safe’ or ‘dangerous’ should further be noted – in relation to both ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces (see Pain, 2000 for more on this). Whereas ‘the home’ was described as ‘the safest’ place, incidents of domestic violence were observed during the fieldwork. For migrant women the possibility to seek protection, aid or health care in relation to domestic violence (or any violence for that matter) intersects both their legal and social status. That is: the rights attached to their migration status (as regular or irregular migrants) but also their relative isolation from Malaysian society and dependency upon their own community.

Finally, and leading us on to the next section of this paper, Figures 2 –4 provide illustrations of how many migrants described (and drew) the city as comprising of a distinct and limited set of ‘nodes’ (typically the home, workplace and Komtar) – to which they tried to limit their movements in everyday life.

Spatial strategies for navigating the city

The most common spatial strategy adopted amongst the Burmese migrants in George Town was to effectively limit the amount of time spent in public. In reality this means that many migrants go to and from work and attempt to avoid ‘unnecessary’ movement in public space – especially ‘outside the neighbourhood’. One of the irregular migrants, a 35-year-old man working in a Chinese food court, explained how he planned his movements through the city:

I don’t go to Komtar on Saturday or Sunday because sometimes there is a police control inside, a surprise control. But weekdays I am not afraid [there]. I usually go to coffee shops to have a drink, but I always choose a shop that is close to my home. Then I feel safer as I can run quickly back to my room.

In order to restrict movement in public space, many migrants live in close proximity to their workplaces – within walking or biking distance, and some (where the employer provided lodging) live in their actual workplace. Many also move if they change their work location (see also Greenburg, 2010).

Whereas restricting movement was the most prevailing spatial strategy, a notable exception was the visits to Komtar. Despite being the agreed ‘most dangerous’ site in George Town for migrants, all of the respondents still went here (albeit more or less frequently) – out of necessity (to remit money) but also to socialise and buy goods or clothing ‘from home’. There were also examples of more experienced migrants stating that they didn’t care (anymore) if the police stopped them. They trusted their ability to bargain with the police and thus moved around more or less as they pleased.

An important aspect of urban spatial strategies relate to modes of transportation, and the respondents often had very clear perceptions of the danger and safety associated with particular transportation modes. As illustrated in the statement of this 25-year-old woman who had lived in George Town for two years as an irregular migrant:

I take my bike to work. Or I take the bus. If there is no bus I will take a taxi. Bus is the safest. Taxi drivers can also lie to you. And if you are alone, taxi is not safe. Motorbike is not safe. There are many accidents. Also there are more controls by the police. The police don’t check the bus. Walking is also okay because the police usually don’t check that.

There was general consensus amongst the respondents that public buses were the safest mode of transportation (although waiting at the bus stop was sometimes mentioned as not so safe). The most important reason for this was that public busses would generally pass uncontrolled through the police roadblocks. Some of the women further expressed that they felt safer on the bus because there were usually many other migrants on board who could assist them in case of trouble. This finding differs from some of the previous studies on the fear of crime, which have found that women associate various forms of public transportation with ‘concerns for personal safety’ and they therefore ‘prefer to drive or take a taxi (Yanus and Welch, 2010: 2494). For migrant women in George Town, however, taxis were only perceived as moderately safe (as taxi drivers were rumoured to cooperate with the police to get a cut of the bribes). Driving a car was, on the other hand, basically out of the question because of the costs and need for valid identification. Finally, respondents all agreed that motorbikes were the most dangerous way to move through the city. For the most part this was related to the fact that motorbikes were more or less always stopped at the roadblocks.

An important objective of the migrants’ spatial tactics was to ‘remain invisible from the state in order to uphold their livelihood strategies’ (Lynge Madsen, 2004: 173). Keeping your head down, walking out of light, not making eye contact with the police (and sometimes also other Malaysians) were bodily strategies mentioned as ways to stay out of sight. A major obstacle to this strategy was, as indicated above, the way that the body was ‘marked by foreignness’ (Greenburg, 2010: 70). The fieldwork did, however, not reveal too many examples of people trying to dress in a ‘Malaysian-style’ in order to blend in (cf. Lang, 2002). Asked a direct question of why he did not dress in a more ‘Malaysian manner’ one man responded: ‘Because I really don’t like it!’ [his emphasis]. From observation it can, however, be established that although most of the migrants changed to a traditional Burmese sarong (longyi) once they came back home – none of them wore it walking down the street. The women also washed the yellow cosmetic paste (thanaka) off their faces when leaving the house.

Finally, while women in fear of crime have been found to restrict moving about alone late at night (Yavus and Welch, 2010), migrant women in George Town seldom have the privilege of making such a choice. Instead, the jobs available to them often imply that they have to work late evenings – in jobs rarely accepted by the local native women. Women have also been found to avoid dark and secluded places (Koskela, 1997; Tanusree, 2011; Yavus and Welch, 2010), but the migrant women accompanied back home from their workplaces in George Town often walked down back-streets and alleys and avoided the bigger and lit streets. This does not mean that these places were perceived as ‘safe’, but rather that the fear of encountering the police in more public and busy places seemed to outweigh their fear of crime.

Conclusion

The results of this study provide general support for the claim that peoples’ ability to take possession of urban space is closely related to social status and to broader power-relations in society (Koskela, 1997; Pain, 2000, 2001; Valentine, 1989). But they also illustrate how urban geographies of fear are negotiated and performed at the intersection of peoples’ social and legal status. As shown throughout the study, the conditions of non-citizenship and ‘illegality’ produce a(nother) – and somewhat different – urban geography of fear (see also Greenburg, 2010; Holgersson, 2011): in which migrants perceive and navigate urban space as a ‘borderscape’ (Perera, 2007) and where ‘safety’ and ‘danger’ in the city is evaluated and acted upon on the basis of where there is a low or high risk of encountering the local police. The perceived ‘dangers’ in the city, however, operate somewhat differently before different groups of non-citizens, intersecting both legal and social categories as well as bodily appearance. According to the migrants interviewed in George Town there were, for example, certain sites perceived as dangerous for all migrants whereas other places were dangerous only to certain groups – such as those who lack a passport, drive without a valid license or simply look too ‘Burmese’. The simplistic division of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ migrants is not sufficient to capture this. Instead, we need to recognise that migrants in the city navigate along a continuum of social and legal restrictions and exclusions in their everyday life.

Finally, the findings here support the previously argued point that subordination and high levels of fear do not denote passivity (Koskela, 1997; Kwan, 2008). On the contrary, the migrants in this study cope with and respond to fear through deliberate decisions and strategies, which require extensive knowledge of the urban landscape as well as of the practices of Malaysian authorities and society at large.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their very constructive and helpful comments. Thanks also to the mobility research group at the Human Geography unit at the University of Gothenburg, Jochen Klerens and the other participants at the Gothenburg Centre for Globalization and Development seminar, Claes Göran Alvstam, Joseph Anderson and Andrea Spehar for useful comments at various stages of the writing process.

Funding

Adlerbertska Forskningsstiftelsen are acknowledged for initial funding.

Notes

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