From Migration to Missingness: Informality and Poverty in Nepal’s Borderlands

Absence of migration is a dimension of cross-border labour migration in South Asia that has not received much research. Although in the literature, remittances and successful migration patterns are the main topics of interest, little has been discussed on those families who have suffered disappearance over a long period of time in informal labour corridors. The paper examines the lived lives, emotional and socio-economic lives of the families of missing migrants in a situation that is characterized by the de facto open-border situation in Nepal. The study makes use of the qualitative research design as it relies on focus group discussions (FGDs), key informant interviews (KII), and in-depth interviews with 10 purposively chosen families of missing migrants in the Kanchanpur district. Small in size, the findings capture trends that reverberate among other similar households living in the migration prone communities. This paper concludes that disappearance is not a solitary personal tragedy but is institutionally enshrined in informal systems of migration, which are weakly documented, debt-financed, precarious labour, caste based inequality, and poorly coordinated institutions between Nepal and India. Majority of the cases were of first-time migrants, which means that there has been a greater vulnerability in unregulated labour markets. Deserted families face both cumulative and compounding sufferings such as income breakdown, systematic food insecurity, land instability, debt trapping, gender labour overburden, and long term legal liminality. The women and children, especially, experience a psychosocial disturbance that is associated with ambiguous loss and social uncertainty. The article has theoretical contributions in conceptualizing the missing as structural missingness, informality-invisibility nexus in open-border regimes and a framework of vulnerability in relationship with disappearance as a factor in reproduction of poverty across generations. The policy implications of the study comprise registration systems on a community level, bilateral coordination systems and legal acknowledgment of extended disappearance.