Irregular Migrants and the Sea at the Borders of Sabah, Malaysia: Pelagic Alliance
Vilashini Somiah
Palgrave: 2021
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Rumah Merah is a detention centre in Menggatal, Sabah, built to temporarily hold undocumented migrants caught by the Malaysian state’s enforcement net across the borders of the Sulu Sea and the border zones of Malaysia and the Philippines. The presence of the centre looms large over entire communities, a sort of black hole around which people living in the surrounding towns and villages attempt to find some semblance of routine and normalcy. Rumah Merah detention centre is a reminder of the ever-present possibility of arrest, detention and deportation faced by irregular migrants in Malaysia. Families, especially wives and children, are forced to live their lives while their partners and fathers are held indefinitely in centres such as this one. This facility exerts its gravity on the lives of families and friends, a constant reminder of the abnormal relationship between ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives and a state which deems them useful only insofar as objects for politicised agendas and subjects for sovereign domination.

Irregular migrants are those for whom the decision to move across borders does not follow predictable patterns of travel between homeland and destinations, and whose journeys are characterised by uncertainty and vulnerabilities both environmental and political. It is surprising and rare to come across writings that seek to represent, as fully and richly as possible, the daily lives of people who have been largely left at the margins of the nation-state. Trapped in zones of exceptions, strewn across geopolitical borders where there used to be borderlands, such communities as the nomadic Bajau Laut people of the Sulu Sea have become little more than relics of a traditional history, at best, or contemporary threats to the legitimacy of today’s national borders, at worst.

• Tags: Issue 29, Malaysia, Parthiban Muniandy, Vilashini Somiah