This thesis examines refugee migration and refugee governance in Hong Kong and urban Thailand. It analyses the patterns, aspirations, practices and embodied experience of refugee migration, refugee survival strategies in first asylum ports, and the refugee regulatory regime. The Asia and Pacific region was host to one-third of all refugees worldwide and the population of urban refugees continues to rise across the region. However, many countries and cities in Asia such as Hong Kong and Thailand are not signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol and they do not accept refugee settlement. Much of the contemporary scholarship on refugee migration focuses on plights of the "sending" and "receiving" societies, but this study deals with refugees in the first asylum ports of Hong Kong and urban Thailand. This research adds to the studies of urban refugee in Hong Kong and Thailand which are under researched. It provides a better understanding of the everyday life struggle and social interactions of urban refugees in two major first asylum ports in Asia. In the post-Cold War era, there has been a change in the pattern of asylum seeking in Asia. Rather than moving en masse like the Indochinese refugees in the second half of the twentieth century, current refugees move through different first asylum ports in Asia such as Hong Kong and urban Thailand on an individual basis. This thesis builds a micro-level analysis of the process of escape by highlighting the desires and strategies that fuel the transnational movements of refugees. It illustrates the actual happenings of the asylum seeking process from home to destination and the cultural process of "becoming a refugee". In Hong Kong and urban Thailand, refugees are subject to both international and domestic laws and regulations. Many of them may get stuck in limbo for years with little chance of being resettled. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Hong Kong and urban Thailand, this thesis examines the survival strategies of urban refugees. It offers an instructive perspective for understanding urban refugees by examining their networking skills and strategies in the context of existing social structures and the regulations adopted by the two host governments. Drawing on the narratives of urban refugees in Hong Kong and Thailand, this thesis reveals the refugee regulatory regime to which "unwanted" migrants are subject in the first asylum ports, and how they seek "home" where home is quite impossible. This thesis argues that urban refugees actively utilise their social networks on their exile journeys, making use of local and transnational social connections in both "legal" and "illegal" exits and entrances. Although they get stuck in limbo for years with a slim chance of resettlement, they actively find ways to cope with their liminal lives by developing different survival strategies in transnational social spaces. The life world of the refugees in Hong Kong and urban Thailand is not static but is largely entangled in transnational communications, interactions and emotional attachments that happen between people in first asylum ports, homelands and resettlement countries. Stranded as they are in Hong Kong and urban Thailand for years, their life strategies are continuously shaped by new encounters in their refugee life and everyday happenings in the first asylum ports.