They face military conscription in Myanmar and are banned from Thailand for two years.
By Pimuk Rakkanam and RFA Burmese
Thailand has detained and deported more than 144,000 Myanmar citizens over the past three months, its labor ministry said, in a crackdown aimed at weeding out “job seekers” who use the turmoil in their country as an excuse to seek opportunities in Thailand, a Thai police chief said.
Myanmar nationals were the largest group detained in the campaign to round up illegal workers launched in June that involved inspections of nearly 15,000 businesses, economic zones and areas where job-seekers congregate, the Ministry of Labor said on the weekend.
Workers from Myanmar play a vital role in the Thai economy with about two million of them legally employed in areas such as agriculture, fishing and the service sector, but labor activists say many more arrive illegally hoping to find work.
Another factor behind the arrival of many more young Myanmar citizens in Thailand this year is a junta conscription law that came into effect in April, three years after the military seized power in a coup, as it struggles to fend off advances by insurgents battling to end military rule.
Assistant Thai police chief Lt. Gen. Itthipol Achariyapradit told Radio Free Asia that Thailand had to act against people who entered illegally, some of whom, he believed, were “opportunistic job seekers” citing conflict at home as an excuse to come to Thailand.
“For those without passports or crossing illegally, we have no choice but to detain them. We can sort refugees or political migrants out from job seekers,” Ittipol said.
“But if the situation remains unsafe we have to delay the process.”
He did not say if he thought being conscripted into the Myanmar army was an unsafe situation.
Despite Thailand’s need for migrant workers, it has been tightening up procedures for them, closing offices where migrants can get vital paperwork processed and granting the junta, through its embassy, greater authority over the fate of its migrant population in Thailand.
‘More reliable’
People being deported in the crackdown will be banned from re-entering Thailand for two years under the ministry’s rules and they also face the risk of being conscripted upon their arrival home, said Moe Gyo, chairperson of the Thai social aid organization Joint Action Committee for Burmese Affairs.
“Deported people are being recruited under the military’s conscription law and they’re worried,” he said.
Myanmar military authorities forcibly recruited dozens of people deported after serving time in jail in the southern Thai province of Ranong, relatives told RFA this month.
“We can’t say a similar incident won’t happen again. People returning from abroad were extorted and coerced in the conscription process,” Moe Gyo said.
One Thai employer was dismayed by the crackdown.
“It affects us a lot because if they have to go back and can’t return how can we find replacements,” said a hotel owner in the border province of Kanchanaburi who has hired undocumented people from Myanmar for years.
“We hire them not because they’re cheap labor – we pay them the same as Thais – but because they’re more reliable than Thai workers.”
Thailand’s Ministry of Labor did not respond to requests for comment from RFA.
While Thailand documents more than two million Myanmar workers in the kingdom legally, some labor groups estimate as many as seven million people from Myanmar are in Thailand.
The ministry said that in addition to 144,261 Myanmar nationals detained in the crackdown, there were 29,448 Cambodians, 12,258 from Laos, 117 from Vietnam and 6,196 from other countries.
Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by Mike Firn.
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