Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Migration management in Thailand reaches a crossroads

By Andy Hall
Special to The Nation
Published on May 4, 2011

Last Tuesday the Cabinet approved a new registration amnesty for millions of undocumented migrants from Cambodia, Laos and Burma working in Thailand.

Around 85 per cent of these workers, who for decades have contributed significantly to Thailand's economic development, are from Burma. Inter-agency planning for this registration should take time to ensure effective information campaigns that allow migrants and employers to genuinely comply. As in previous registrations, if the Thai government fails to prioritise awareness raising or if the registration is too short, confused, expensive and untransparent, the initiative will be undermined. Engagement with all stakeholders is highly recommended.

Migrants who register in the coming months will move from an undocumented and illegal status to a documented and semi-legal status. It is likely some are now being smuggled across the border and others are flooding out of border refugee camps. It is without dispute many migrants in Thailand remain undocumented. Those documented are either semi-legal awaiting Nationality Verification (NV) (350,000), fully-legal having completed NV (400,000) or fully legal with glitches (150,000 have passed NV but have no work permits).

Newly registered migrants will not immediately be eligible for NV, which previously enabled them to become documented and fully legal. NV has, together with import of workers, been the cornerstone of the migrant regularisation policies since 2004 and hence this decision is significant. One reason provided for this opening of registration is that it was requested by Burma, which will apparently have a role in deciding how newly registered workers will become fully legal. The government's migration management policies still remain short-term reactions to employer demands. But Burma has an increasingly important role, it seems.

A significant element of this decision is to push worker import from neighbouring countries. In late 2010, the Labour Ministry announced plans to import migrants from Bangladesh and Indonesia to replace undocumented migrants to be deported in a crackdown. On the prime minister's orders, that crackdown intensified during 2010 but became an untransparent mess, bringing employers and rights groups onto the streets.

With only around 50,000 workers imported legally into Thailand in eight years from its three neighbouring countries, the government claims labour shortages are now threatening national and economic security so it is time to look further afield for solutions. However, the resolution refers only to import of workers from Cambodia, Laos and Burma. The prospect of employers shelling out airfares to bring in Bangladeshi and Indonesian workers seems unlikely. Burmese workers continue to be a primary target for solving Thailand's migration woes.

Thai employers urgently need low-skilled workers from Burma, but Burma has not been providing workers fast enough for Thailand, nor can it possibly do so. No one can expect a country with such low development status and lacking in migration management capacity to deliver millions of migrants legally and with such urgency.

But without legal entry of migrants into Thailand in the first place, the government has always claimed it cannot solve the challenges that follow. From a human rights perspective, the Thai bureaucracy and security apparatus that overseas migration policy clearly sees the situation differently, and exploitation results from such a position.

Over the past two decades a cycle of policy confusion, poor migration management and lack of long-term and realistic planning has and continues to result in gross exploitation of migrant workers. The international community is becoming more aware of this situation, particularly in the context of human trafficking and forced labour. Good employers and Thailand and its people are undermined by this situation. The rule of law continues to be weakened and corruption has become endemic to migration management.

NV and worker import require payment to unregulated brokers who continue to extort migrants in collusion with government officials, given the huge amounts of cross-border paperwork involved. Unregistered workers and their employers have to pay out to authorities every month to avoid arrest. Many employers prefer this arrangement to the complexity and cost of registration. Arrest, detention and deportation of undocumented migrants too frequently involves a web of bribes and a cycle of smuggling and trafficking of victims to quickly bring them back into Thailand.

For migrants, regularized status means increased confidence to assert rights against employers and, in theory, better protection against arrest or extortion. Access to health and social security services should be increasingly guaranteed too. Greater frequency of large scale protests by migrants who consider themselves fully legal are something the government would do well to take seriously to avoid potentially increasing conflict involving exploited migrants and their abusive employers.

However, lack of access to rights accorded to migrants, whatever their status, and necessity to register with one employer and inability to change, make registration unattractive for many. For both migrants and employers, the expense of registration, lack of understanding, and complexity, as well as lack of enforcement against unregistered workers and employers and continued extortion by officials, means incentives to register remain weak.

The U-turn in re-opening registration for migrants is commendable as one potential means to address exploitation. But migration management systems in Thailand still remain fundamentally flawed. Thailand remains without a long term migration policy that integrates human, national and economic security. The Illegal Alien Workers Management Committee (Kor Bor Ror), an umbrella of 22 agencies, remains weak and its capacity low to tackle Thailand's mounting migration challenges.

Should international agencies and embassies supporting migration policy development, and particularly Asean, consider innovative ways to prod Burma to ensure some kind of managed or formal out-migration from the country instead of the present smuggling and trafficking we see today? Should migration stakeholders support an increased role for Burma in assisting migration policy development in Thailand? These are sensitive questions and the answers are even more sensitive.

What is perhaps easier to agree on is that Asean should have a central role in Thailand's migration debate, despite its regional framework on migration at a standstill and the sensitivities surrounding its most problematic member. UN agencies and embassies supporting migration policy development should continue, perhaps by widening debate on what is acceptable, to find more innovative ways to assist.

There are genuine challenges in moving forward with migration policies. But the benefits of low-cost workers contributing to Thailand's economic development come with responsibilities, particularly when such workers come from Burma. Much more effort is required if the situation of migrants in Thailand is to improve. Central to solving these challenges should be a human rights perspective that ensures the Burmese migrants behind this complex debate are not forgotten.

Andy Hall is a foreign expert at Mahidol University's Institute of Population and Social Research and a consultant to the Human Rights and Development Foundation.

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