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COVID-19 has resulted in new anxieties about the risks and dangers involved in human mobility and forced governments to simultaneously re-engineer policies for temporary health control and longer-term border-crossing and migration policies; characterized by the sanitization of space and mobility. This special issue considers the policies, including health and non-health measures, that have impacts on migrant workers and migration. While COVID control measures are often phrased in medical language and policy discourses, they often serve multiple goals including political and social control. The papers in this issue cover different places in Asia and the Pacific. We propose the "politics of sanitization" as a conceptual framework to examine the multiple dimensions of state governance and the variegated impacts upon migrants, including: (1) sanitizing space and borders, (2) stigmatization and sanitizing migrants' bodies, (3) sanitizing ethnic borders and the national body, and (4) reorganizing the borders of sanitization and membership of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many countries, irregular immigration usually engenders adverse public reaction and restrictionist policies. However, public attitudes often vary and looser policies have been adopted at certain times and for certain reasons. The purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of undocumented, transnational marriages in the Sino-Vietnamese border areas of China, and to explain why many undocumented immigrants are treated leniently and/ or have not been deported. Research reveals that this could be due to female immigrants considerably relieving the marriage market crisis along China's border. Thus, unauthorized border crossing continues despite prohibition and de facto marriage is prevalent and uncontrollable. China and Vietnam have yet to establish a bilateral cooperation to address the problematic aspects of this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]