An amnesty scheme for undocumented migrants in Thailand offers hope for many Myanmar workers operating in the shadows, but the costs are high, and migrants then face burdensome tax demands from the Myanmar junta.
By FRONTIER
Ko Tin Myo Oo fled his home village in Bago Region’s Phyu Township to avoid conscription into the Myanmar military. With the help of a broker, he crossed illegally from Mon State into Thailand’s Kanchanaburi province, where he landed a job on a pig farm in April last year.
The 26-year-old wanted to work on a construction site in Bangkok or another big city but was wary of living in an urban area, where he believed he would be at greater risk of arrest by the police for lacking immigration documents.
For migrants like Tin Myo Oo, being arrested often means a period of detention followed by deportation. This would be disastrous for their livelihoods and wellbeing even in normal circumstances. However, since the Myanmar junta began a nationwide conscription drive in February last year, targeting people aged 18 to 35, there have been reports of repatriated migrants being sent into the armed forces immediately on arrival.
“If I was arrested and deported, I’d be conscripted into the military, like others who have been deported. So, I decided to work on a farm where it’s easier not to be noticed,” said Tin Myo Oo.
He is one of 12 undocumented workers on the farm. To minimise the risk of arrest, the farm owner provides living quarters in a secluded area and bans them from leaving the property.
“We’re paid 20 baht [US$0.58] an hour or about 200 baht a day, but we don’t earn an income every day because the owner doesn’t give us work every day,” Tin Myo Oo said. “The owner provides accommodation but we have to buy our own food. Because we can’t leave the farm, we have to arrange for others to buy food for us, which makes it more expensive.”
“We’re grateful that the farm owner protects us from being arrested by the Thai police, so we don’t complain about being underpaid,” he added. The minimum daily wage in Thailand varies according to region – in Kanchanaburi it’s 345 baht per day.
This protection came amid a 120-day crackdown on undocumented migrant workers by Thai authorities. The campaign ended in mid-September with 256,213 arrests, nearly 200,000 of which were of Myanmar nationals.
U Moe Gyo, chair of the Joint Action Committee for Burmese Affairs, which advocates for migrant workers, said Myanmar people hoping to find work in Thailand face a grim choice.
“If you stay in Myanmar, you will be drafted into the military and die. If you flee to Thailand because you fear being conscripted and are arrested by Thai police and deported, you will be sent to the military and die. It’s as if our people are coming to Thailand to work because we think it’s better to die on a full stomach than be killed by a sword,” Moe Gyo said.
Because of these risks, Tin Myo Oo was relieved to hear in September that the Thai government had decided to allow undocumented migrant workers from Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam to legalise their status.
The registration process takes about four months. It begins with undocumented workers being included on a list submitted by employers to the labour authorities, after which the migrants apply for work permits and arrange health checks and health insurance ahead of an authorisation process that can last 30 days. The final step involves collecting biometric data and registering personal details.
The language barrier and a complicated registration and identification process mean that all undocumented migrant workers need to rely on the services of brokers, whose fees can add considerably to the cost of becoming a legal resident.
Tin Myo Oo said the farm owner hired a broker for his workers, who each have to pay 15,000 baht. This includes the cost of a Certificate of Identity, a passport-type document issued by the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok to otherwise undocumented migrants who are already in Thailand.
“We had to pay 5,000 baht to the boss immediately and the remaining 10,000 baht will be deducted from our pay at the rate of 1,000 baht when we are paid every 15 days,” he said, adding that since being included on the list submitted to the labour authorities, their pay had been increased to 330 baht on working days.
The arrangement means that Tin Myo Oo is paying 2,000 baht from his monthly salary of about 9,000 baht for five months.
Ko Aung Latt, a Bangkok-based broker, told Frontier that the cost of providing registration services had risen because of a huge backlog of illegal workers.
The Thai government has rolled out similar amnesty schemes for undocumented migrants over the years. The last time was in September 2023, and there has since been a large influx of undocumented Myanmar immigrants wanting to avoid conscription.
Before Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, there were estimated to be roughly 4 million migrant workers from the country in Thailand, about half of whom had legal status. However, the post-coup economic crisis, widening armed conflict and the conscription drive have pushed many more people to seek work abroad – often without waiting for the considerable time it can take to acquire proper documents.
The International Organization for Migration estimates that, excluding people on short trips, about 330,000 Myanmar nationals migrated to Thailand in the 15 months between January 2023 and March last year. Of these arrivals, about 60 percent, or 198,000, did so illegally. IOM data also said that 2.3 million Myanmar nationals were legally registered as of March 2023, the highest number in recent years and accounting for 70pc of total registered migrants in Thailand.
The surge in the number of undocumented Myanmar migrants is a boon for brokers. Depending on whether an illegal worker is already employed, the cost of arranging a work permit, an early part of the process, ranges from 7,500 to more than 8,500 baht.
The broker Aung Latt explained that those without jobs must pay the upper amount due to the need to “borrow a boss”, because an employer’s signature is required on the work permit application.
After a permit is granted, workers need to pay another 4,000 baht to brokers for the biometric registration, a cost that many cannot afford, said Ma Thidar San, who works on a construction site in Bangkok.
U Htoo Chit, founder of migrant assistance group the Federation of Education and Development, said he was concerned about a sharp increase in the number of undocumented workers who can’t afford to use brokers in Myanmar and Thailand.
“Migrant workers have to pay a lot of money, not just for service fees, but also for official certificates from the Thai and Myanmar sides. That’s why I’m worried that there will be more illegal migrant workers without documents. Even documented workers can lose their status because of the high costs,” he said.
There was some good news for Tin Myo Oo, however. His application to become documented was successful and he no longer needs to hide away in the farm. But it has been a long and expensive process.
“I feel like all I’m working for is brokers, money lenders and the Thai government,” Tin Myo Oo said.
“My situation reminds me of the proverb, ‘A deer gives birth, but a tiger eats the fawn,’ because I have no money left for myself after working hard,” he said.
But as a legal migrant, Tin Myo Oo will soon face other demands on his money – in this case from the Myanmar junta, which is desperate to shore up its dwindling foreign currency reserves.
Starting in September 2023, migrant workers have been instructed to transfer home at least 25pc of their salaries through Myanmar’s formal banking system. This system uses an exchange rate that artificially overvalues the kyat, allowing the junta to pocket the difference with the actual market rate. The rate used by Myanmar banks for remittance payments was K4,150 to the US dollar on January 16, compared to the market price of about K4,650.
In addition to the remittance requirement, in December 2023 the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok announced a tax rate of 2pc on the earnings of migrant workers overseas, as stipulated in amendments to the tax law made earlier that year. They had been exempted from income tax since 2012.
The junta can only hope to enforce these measures among legal migrants, who need to periodically renew their Myanmar identity documents to preserve their status.
The embassy warned that it would not extend passports, which are valid for five years, or CIs, which must be replaced every four years, to migrant workers who failed to show proof of the 25pc remittance payments, as well as the receipts from tax payments, which can be made at branches of Bangkok Bank and 7-Eleven convenience stores.
This often means migrants must pay many months of back taxes if they have not been making regular payments, on top of all the broker costs and other burdensome fees. Those applying for CIs for the first time must pay three months in advance taxes, according to migrant activist Moe Gyo and Ma Nang Nang, a broker working in Thailand, although Frontier has not seen this confirmed by any official source.
Fellow activist Htoo Chit said these financial pressures reflect the failure of both Thai and Myanmar authorities to give migrant workers a fair deal.
“When we look closely at the memorandums of understanding between the two countries, we see that the Thai government has prioritised the interests of its own country and the interests of its own businessmen,” he said. “At the same time, we see that successive Myanmar governments have not provided systematic protection to migrant workers. That’s why they’re oppressed in Thailand.”
