Foreword “Migration should be a choice and not a necessity.” Those seminal words inspire—from the international Declaration which had preceded the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees adopted not-so-long-ago. That premise permeates this book which acts as an optical lens for various and varied academic discourses, testing and contesting the variegated experiences of people’s movements in the Southeast Asian region. It projects progression—at times progressive, at times regressive—through the prism of boundaries, status validation, and documentation. It is imbued with a sense of the past and is replete with the immediacy of the present. There is a key awakening through the advent of COVID-19 which is concurrently invasive and pervasive. Interfacing with the fate of individuals and groups in the region, the pandemic proffers also a gargantuan challenge: is it to be a calamity or an opportunity, at least through lessons learned of what to do and what not to do? Rightly, the discourses in this book have multi-dimensional implications traversing history, political-economy, sociology, and normativity. How to expose and address the etiology of movements, especially if they are coerced or forced through push-pull factors? What are the ontology of choices and the deontology of rights and duties which could be invoked in this region not only as imagined aspirations but also as political expectations? How to do so when confronted with the vagaries of the Nation-State and the variability of the State-of-the Nation? One thing is for sure. Whether the outlook is steeped in historicism, actualism, modernism, and or futurism, this region will not be sedentary but ambulatory—both intra-regional and inter-regional. As one of the chapters of this book poses, as a bridge between paradigms and paradoxes—are we to opt for “universalism” which tries to care for “all” OR “selectivism” which cares for the “deserving”? Or is there a hybridised version of what Southeast Asia should seek to be, especially if it is not too State-centric? There is then the preferred path of migration, with the testament of “the good, the bad and the wobbly,” perhaps even “criminality” such as violence and violations v