Grading Qualities and (Un)settling Equivalences: Undocumented Migration, Commensuration, and Intrusive Phonosonics in the Indonesia‐Malaysia Borderlands

Undocumented migrants’ bodies are typically assumed to exhibit signs of their so‐called “illegal” status. In the absence of phenotypic, linguistic, or religious diacritics of categorical outsidership, however, how are migrants made legible and policed? How might they navigate state surveillance by exploiting their perceived equivalences with members of a host community? Indonesians were long encouraged to informally emigrate to neighboring Malaysia because they readily assimilated as Malay‐speaking Muslim members of the greater “Malay race.” More recently, however, they have figured in countervailing narratives as a parasitic and frustratingly elusive presence in need of expulsion. This article outlines how Indonesian migrants and Malaysian citizens are responding to these developments by jointly reevaluating their qualitative equivalences. First, it sketches how “diasporic infrastructures” linking Indonesia and Malaysia have enabled the conditions of possibility for the production of equivalences between migrants and hosts. Second, it sketches a semiotics of “grading” (a process whereby agents discern and evaluate qualitative intensities), examining how equivalences between these commensurate collectivities are settled, indicated, and framed along gradations of more‐or‐less‐ness. Third, it assesses how sonically graded differences in embodied qualities of talk can unsettle equivalences between migrants and citizens, potentially putting migrants at risk.