Destination debts: Local and translocal loans in the migrant experience.

An established body of research now documents the ways that debt both motivates and shapes migration processes. Yet little scholarship examines the debts migrants incur after arriving in their destinations. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Cambodians living and working in Thailand, this paper explores debts imposed upon and taken by migrants after they have arrived in their destination. In Thailand, migrants take on debts in an attempt to obtain documents, to move into better paying jobs, and to start entrepreneurial projects. Often, these loans are translocal; taken by proxy borrowers in Cambodia, and sent across the border in what might be described as a 'reverse remittance' financed by debt. By exploring these debts and their consequences, this work elaborates the spatial nature of debt and draws attention to its capacity to engender spatially diffuse vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]