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The governments of the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) are eager to see their region become a bustling market for goods and investments, and anticipate the many advantages that more robust intra-regional trade should bring. Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar, in particular, count on intra-regional trade for their development since it constitutes a substantial portion of their total external trade. Aware that there is still much space for growth -- intra-regional trade stands at just 12 percent of total trade -- GMS governments are fully engaged in integrating infrastructure, harmonising financial markets and reducing tariffs in order to facilitate the movement of goods.

To put in place a regional market economy conducive to trade, investments and businesses’ expansion across borders, GMS policymakers are envisioning a “highly efficient system -- allowing for goods and people to travel freely around the GMS without significant impediment, excessive costs, or delay” as one of the Asia Development Bank’s 2005 programme strategy papers puts it.
    
When it comes to realising this market liberalisation goal, however, it would seem that the “free flow of people” is considered somewhat less desirable than the “free flows of goods and capital”. The harmonisation of visa processes and removal of barriers favour flows of tourists, students and highly skilled labour, but fail to make provision for the large transnational flow of unskilled migrants. On the occasions when labour movements -- other than that of professionals and business persons -- are referred to, it is in the context of forced migration or trafficking, which reinforces calls for harsh security and control measures to protect the victims, rather than the easing of cross-border travel.

NEEDED, BUT UNWANTED

GMS governments seem hesitant to recognise that the regionalisation process is leading to the emergence of a labour market shaped by the industrialising economies’ demand for unskilled labour and disparities in regional development. Overall economic growth has failed to reduce the gap between rural and urban areas and between more industrialised and less industrialised countries. While countries with a more advanced production and export-driven economy face a manpower shortage in low-skilled jobs, those that are lagging behind face a surplus of unskilled labour due to rural poverty, underdeveloped infrastructure and low or poor-quality education. This imbalance in the sub-regional labour market is redressed by a flow of young, entrepreneurial migrants in search of a more prosperous life across borders.

The numbers vary greatly, with conservative estimates in 2005 ranging from 1.8 million to 4 million intra-regional migrants in the GMS. The largest migration flow is from Laos, Cambodia and, especially Myanmar, to Thailand  -- the country with the most diversified industrial base in the sub-region -- with the remaining percentage migrating to the closest neighbouring country and, eventually, to farther locations.

The majority of these migrants are undocumented. They have little option in the current policy environment but to migrate through irregular means or become irregular in successive phases of the migration process. In Thailand, there are claims that 90 percent of the estimated 2 to 3 million migrants from other GMS countries are there illegally, and that about half of these have no legal or valid travel document. The registration system that grants a temporary work permit to a limited number of migrants does not attempt to legalise the migrants’ status. According to Thai immigration law, they remain “illegal aliens”, having entered the country without travel documents or having overstayed. In a strange twist, it is as if the registration system rather ‘regularises’ the employers, providing them a channel for hiring foreign workers legally.

This ambiguous stand reflects the reality of a society unprepared to integrate migrants for fear of social tensions and security threats, but willing to utilise their labour to foster its economic growth. In Thailand, as in other mid-level income countries, lower-paying, lower-status and more physically demanding jobs have become less attractive to a higher educated population. Labour-intensive industries, under harsh competition in the global market, look to fill the manpower shortage and keep wages down by taking advantage of cheaper and abundant labour from across the border. For poor people in neighbouring countries, the suppressed wages, still higher than in their country, are appealing enough to compel them to migrate in search of job opportunities abroad.  

Without any identification papers and often after arduous travel from their hometowns, migrants cross the border with the help of relatives, informal contacts and brokers. Once in Thailand, an unofficial recruitment system facilitates the hiring process and distributes them throughout the country. A majority of migrants ends up working in agriculture, domestic service, fish processing and fisheries, textile and garment industry, and construction, with the rest filling a myriad other jobs, including in the entertainment industry and in informal trade. Irrespective of the sector they work in, migrants are generally placed in bottom positions under the supervision of Thai workers, in what are often referred to as the “3D” – Dirty, Dangerous and Difficult (some also say Disdained) -- jobs.

Unskilled migrants’ low-wage labour enhances the country’s competitiveness in the global market and subsidises domestic consumption by helping produce goods and provide services at cheap prices. Still, this significant contribution to the economy of the destination country goes unrecognised, and migrants continue to be unprotected and discriminated against. Due to their illegal status, they have difficulties accessing health and education services and their living conditions are often inadequate. They cannot travel freely (even registered ones are bound to the location of their employment) and are used as scapegoats for all kinds of social problems, from drug trafficking to deforestation. When they suffer abuses and exploitation, they are unable to seek legal assistance or appeal to the law, and they live in fear of being arrested and deported.

MIGRATION HERE TO STAY

How to foster inclusion of migrants into society in order to enhance their well-being and offer them better protection will continue to be an intractable question as long as migration flows remain irregular. Pressure is, hence, mounting for the Thai government to find ways to better manage, and eventually regularise, migration. This also because Thailand’s dependence on migrant labour will likely increase in the years ahead.

Extrapolating from current demographic and labour trends, Dr Srawooth Paitoonpong of the Thai Development Research Institute predicted at a March workshop of the Development Action Network in Phnom Penh that in the future, Thailand will encounter an even greater manpower shortage because of its ageing and diminishing workforce amidst expanding economic demands. Besides increasing participation rates and productivity of Thai labour, the country may inevitably need to supplement native labour with migrant workers. Fifty years from now, at least 10 percent of the projected workforce necessary to keep the Thai economy grow may consist of migrant workers.

At the regional level, this increasing realisation of the need for migrant labour in more industrialised countries is matched by a growing appreciation of the positive impacts that migration, if properly managed, may have on the sending countries’ economic growth and development -- through financial remittances, investments and know-how transfers. Policymakers in Laos, Cambodia and other sending countries are becoming interested in maximising the contribution of migrants to development, while limiting the negative consequences of migration -- including depopulation, disrupted family lives and loss of human capital. In this context, they also wish to ensure that their citizens live in suitable conditions abroad and that they can, on return, easily re-integrate into their communities.

Moved by diverse concerns and expectations, GMS governments are starting to accept that migration is here to stay and that intra-regional flows ought to be addressed jointly. A notable signal of this change was the recent signing by Thailand of bilateral agreements with Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar to import 50,000 to 100,000 workers from each country, with the logistics sub-contracted to labour recruiting agencies overseen by government institutions. These efforts are still to be put into full effect, cover only temporary migration, do not include personal provisions, and their value is more for future rather than for current migrants. Still, they are an important recognition of the emerging intra-regional labour market and the need to govern it through collaborative mechanisms, which will hopefully lead to a more comprehensive sub-regional framework to allow migration of unskilled workers and protection of their rights.

Until then, the regularised and safer movement of migrants remains an elusive dream, as pointed out by the ‘Labour Sans Frontiers’ project of Empower Foundation. In this innovative project, migrant women from Myanmar in Thailand made paper mache dolls and gave them the popular name of  ‘Kumjing’ to represent themselves, their aspirations and struggles. Kumjing dolls have traveled all across the country and abroad to raise awareness of migration issues in the GMS. As one migrant woman puts it: ”Migrants are unable to move freely. But when they turn themselves into dolls, into goods, they can go anywhere. These dolls can be taken across borders, live in foreign countries, go to hospitals and schools without fear.” Will there be a day when unskilled migrants in the GMS will not need to have dolls to move freely across the roads, seas and skies of their region?

*Rosalia Sciortino, better known as Lia, is a cultural anthropologist and development sociologist by training, who currently serves as Associate Professor at the Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, Thailand. Before that, she was the regional director of the Rockefeller Foundation in Thailand, overseeing grant-making activities in South-east Asia with a special focus on regional integration in the Greater Mekong Sub-region.  She has also worked with the Ford Foundation in Indonesia and the Philippines, and has published widely on development issues. A native of Italy, she has lived in Asia for nearly two decades.

(Parts of this column derive from a report written for the Rockefeller Foundation by the author in collaboration with Therese Couette, Philip Guest and Alan Feinstein on Labour Migration in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (2006). Responsibility for the views expressed here rests solely with the author.)