Governed by Data, Invisible in Law: Biometric Surveillance, Platform Precarity, and the Datafication of Migrant Labor in Malaysia

This paper examines the datafication of migrant labor governance in Malaysia, arguing that the growing digital infrastructure surrounding migration — biometric registration, employer-tied databases, algorithmic productivity monitoring, and cross-border recruitment platforms — constitutes a regime of digital dispossession that is legally unaddressed and politically uncontested. Drawing on critical data studies, decolonial political economy, and the emerging field of digital migration studies, the paper interrogates how migrant workers in Malaysia are rendered exhaustively visible to state and capital through data, while remaining structurally invisible to the law that is supposed to protect them. Anchored in Chowdhury's (2022, 2023, 2026a, 2026b) frameworks of reciprocal methodology and Indigenous Gnoseology, and engaging with Couldry and Mejias's (2019) concept of data colonialism, Spanger and Andersen's (2023) analysis of convoluted mobility, Leurs and Smets's (2018) digital migration studies framework, and Beduschi's (2021) international human rights analysis of AI-driven migration management, the paper develops a concept of relational data sovereignty as an alternative governance foundation. It proposes five institutional reforms for Malaysia and ASEAN and argues that the reform of digital governance in migration contexts requires both epistemological and institutional transformation — centering the knowledge, agency, and rights of those most governed by data and least protected by law.