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In the Global South, states are increasingly using regularization programs as a means of managing migrant populations. These regularization programs are often described as progressive, in that they seek to bring migrants into state systems of rights and protections. Yet they tend to occur alongside processes of securitization aimed at expanding greater state control over temporary migrant populations. This article draws on multi-sited ethnographic data from Thailand to highlight the sharp end of legal status: the costs, debts, risks, and unfreedoms it can produce for migrant workers. To do so, I draw on fieldwork undertaken during Thailand’s 2017–2018 regularization campaign, where unauthorised Cambodian migrants were given the opportunity to regularize their status by obtaining passports and two-year work visas/permits. Through interviews with Cambodians seeking to regularize their status, I explore how regularization produces  documents of precarity : documents that both  are insecure  and  may produce risk and insecurity  for migrants. While regularization offers migrants legal status, it also puts them into new, asymmetrical relationships with states, brokers, employers, and financial institutions. These findings illustrate how contexts of reception shape the meaning of legal status, and highlight how regularization campaigns can be entangled with efforts to control and restrict migrants.

The trade-offs of legal status: regularization and the production of precarious documents in Southeast Asia