Thailand Accepts Its Status as a Migrant Hub, but Workers Face Precarious Conditions

Thailand is a regional magnet for migration and the most popular destination for labor migrants in the Mekong subregion of Southeast Asia. As several sectors of its economy have grown reliant on workers from neighboring countries, the government has tried to formalize its labor migration system. While providing rights and protections on paper, however, policies have deepened migrant workers’ marginalization without offering access to permanent settlement or eliminating barriers to social and political integration.

More than 5.3 million foreign nationals lived in Thailand as of the start of 2024, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates, with the vast majority migrant workers from Cambodia, Laos, or Myanmar (also known as Burma).1 Of the 3.1 million foreign-born workers registered with the government, about three-quarters were from Myanmar (see Figure 1).2 There also are significant numbers of irregular workers; IOM estimated 1.8 million of these were from Myanmar, where a 2021 military coup renewed years of civil conflict and economic crisis.3

The Ministry of Labor maintains lists of occupations in which migrant workers are permitted to work and from which they are prohibited.4 Migrant workers are mostly employed in the service, construction, manufacturing, and agriculture sectors, in what are referred to as “three-D” jobs—those that are dirty, dangerous, and demeaning. For example, more than 980,000 migrant workers were employed in manufacturing and 695,000 in construction as of 2024,5 and more than 160,000 people from Cambodia and Myanmar were legally employed in the seafood processing sector in 2022.6 These numbers, however, do not count the many irregular migrants working in these and other industries. As of this writing, Thailand also hosted around 80,000 people displaced by war in Myanmar in what the government calls “temporary shelters” for displaced people along its western border, as well as more than 5,000 urban refugees and asylum seekers registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).7 Thailand lacks a dedicated asylum or refugee law, rendering humanitarian entries illegal, so many displaced migrants have historically worked informally or registered as labor migrants to secure legal status.

As labor migration has grown over time, including steady irregular migration, the Thai government has tried to catch up by implementing a formal guestworker system through memoranda of understanding (MOU) with neighboring governments. Migrant workers who enter through the MOU process or who regularize their status once in the country are entitled to a set of labor rights and social protections, including workers’ compensation, health care, and social security. At the same time, the guestworker system grants only temporary status, prohibiting immigrants from settling permanently, integrating, participating politically, and advancing their careers outside of low-wage sectors.

This situation reflects a strict boundary between foreign-born workers and Thai society writ large, enabled by long-prevalent nationalist and xenophobic sentiments. State elites and public education curricula have defined the nation in opposition to its neighbors, which are often depicted as aggressors and threats rather than peers.8 Thai media narratives often highlight migrant populations during crises, crime surges, or public-health concerns, framing them as safety risks, vectors of disease, or burdens on state resources rather than essential economic contributors.9 As such, protests and other forms of backlash against immigration have recurred periodically, despite the country’s economic dependence on migrant workers. This dependence is likely to grow, as Thailand faces a need for labor amid low fertility rates.

This article discusses Thailand’s migrant worker policies and their impacts on migrants and their families. It draws on the authors’ long-term research on migration and labor in Thailand as well as a study involving more than 40 in-depth interviews with migrant care workers, employers, and state officials in the Bangkok metropolitan area and the southern city of Surat Thani, conducted in 2023 and 2024.

Labor Migration Policies Evolve with the Economy

Thailand’s regulation of migration has run in parallel with its economic growth. Labor migration skyrocketed as the country’s economy grew rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, amid a shift from agriculture to export-oriented industrialization. Between 1987 and 1994, the number of migrant workers grew from an estimated 38,000 to 525,000, according to the National Security Council.10 Others estimated that during this period, 1 million migrants, mostly from Myanmar, were in the country without authorization.11 In addition to the pull of Thailand’s economic growth, some migrants were pushed from their countries by armed conflict and economic deprivation. For example, ongoing fighting between ethnic nationalist militias and a brutal military dictatorship in Myanmar has displaced people to Thai government shelters along the border since the 1980s, and many others have sought employment throughout Thailand.

Yet legal pathways were very limited. As more migrants came without authorization, the state moved from implicit tolerance to ad hoc regulation. Starting in the 1990s, the Cabinet issued resolutions to temporarily legalize migrant workers. These resolutions were based in two pre-existing interrelated acts: The Foreign Employment Act of 1978, which allows the Cabinet to pause the deportation process, letting migrants work temporarily in certain sectors; and the Immigration Act of 1979, which criminalizes entering the country without a visa or violating immigration laws, sets deportation terms, and gives the Ministry of Interior discretion to permit immigrants to stay in the kingdom “under certain conditions.”

Over the years, the government has used Cabinet resolutions to intermittently register migrants. For example, in 1992, to appease business groups lobbying for a relaxation of laws prohibiting low-skilled migration, the government opened registration for workers from Myanmar in nine of Thailand’s 76 provinces, reaching more than 700 workers. A resolution in 1996 expanded work eligibility to Cambodians and Laotians in 43 provinces, giving work permits to more than 239,600 migrants employed in fishing and agriculture.12 After such registrations, authorities conducted enforcement operations and deported those who did not register, but irregular migration continued in the absence of legal alternatives. In August 2001, registration was opened to migrants in 73 provinces and then nationwide, enrolling 568,000 workers.13 As Thailand manufacture of technology items for export (such as electronics, machinery, and automotive parts) expanded, the government invested in skills training and education for Thai citizens while confining migrants to low-wage sectors with poor working conditions and lax regulations.

Guestworker Agreements and Regularization Processes

This dynamic made the lower tier of the labor market increasingly dependent on migrant workers. In 2002 and 2003, the government signed guestworker MOUs with Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. The agreements outlined bilateral procedures for admissions and made worker visas valid for two years, with the option of a two-year renewal, after which the individual had to return home and re-apply. The agreementss also promised migrant workers rights and protections in accordance with Thailand’s Social Security Act, Workers’ Compensation Act, and Labor Protection Act. They also required authorities to implement a nationality verification process to similarly regularize migrants already working in Thailand, which involves having employers register their migrant employees, who must obtain identity documentation from home-country officials based in one-stop service centers in Thailand. Those who complete this process receive the same set of rights and legal residence limits as those who come through the guestworker process. Independent brokers, who are hired by employers and paid with deductions from workers’ wages, mostly handle the administrative tasks of this regularization. Brokers and recruitment agencies also manage much of the MOU process.

In the years after MOU implementation began in 2006 (for Cambodians and Laotians) and 2009 (for those from Myanmar), participation was sparse. Wait times for work approval were lengthy (up to 89 days in Myanmar), and fees for recruitment agencies to process documents were expensive (up to 19,000 Thai baht, or around U.S. $560, for those from Myanmar).14 While the nationality verification process was intended as a stopgap, the Cabinet repeatedly extended regularization deadlines. By July 2013, fewer than 37,000 migrants from Myanmar entered Thailand through the guestworker process, while more than 778,000 had used the nationality verification process.15

Trafficking Concerns in the Fishing Industry

By 2015, Thailand had become the fastest-growing migrant destination in Southeast Asia and the government faced international pressure to control migration, in large part because of labor abuses. Much negative attention focused on the country’s seafood industry, where international news reports exposed human trafficking and abhorrent labor conditions.16 Meanwhile, diplomatic pressure targeted regulation of the industry and migrant labor in general. In 2014, the U.S. State Department gave Thailand the lowest ranking in its annual Trafficking in Persons Report,17 and a year later the European Union issued a “yellow card” for Thailand’s “illegal, unreported, and unregulated” fishing practices, which included a threat to stop importing seafood from Thailand.18 EU officials expanded their diplomatic dialogue with the Thai government around fishing practices to include migrant labor issues, pressuring the government to strengthen protections.

In response, the Thai military government, which had taken power in a 2014 coup d’état, introduced regulations to monitor fishing boats and amended anti-trafficking laws. It also promoted the use of the guestworker process, renegotiating MOUs with Cambodia and Myanmar in 2015 and 2016, respectively, and established licensing requirements for recruitment agencies. A sweeping policy reform came in 2017 with the Royal Decree on the Management of Alien Work, which increased penalties for unauthorized work, including fines and potential jail time for employers and fines and deportation for migrant workers. When the decree was introduced, immediate crackdowns and deportations resulted in an estimated 29,000 workers leaving the country within weeks,19 disrupting labor supplies. In response, the government paused enforcement and eventually reduced some penalties and set migrant worker registration deadlines for the following year.

Labor Needs Have Persisted

The policies described above sought to incorporate migrants into low-wage sectors to meet labor needs. This effort has not always gone smoothly. Policy adjustments have been largely ad hoc and often created confusion among workers, employers, and the provincial officials tasked with implementation. With such confusion, it is easy for workers to fall out of status and become vulnerable to arrest and deportation. What has remained consistent is the exclusion of migrants from permanent settlement and citizenship rights. Even with the guestworker process, the government has leaned heavily on Cabinet resolutions to govern migrant work. Due to cost and wait times, the MOU process has yet to be sufficient to supply the Thai economy with the labor it requires.

More recently, external shocks disrupted the guestworker process. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the government suspended recruitment. While official migration channels were closed and border security reinforced, Myanmar’s 2021 coup and ensuing civil war pushed more than 50,000 people to Thailand. From 2020 to 2023, the Cabinet issued successive resolutions to extend the stay of guestworkers with expiring documents, register unauthorized workers, and extend registration deadlines. Of the more than 3 million migrant workers with regular status in 2024, four-fifths completed in-country registrations through the nationality verification process while about 19 percent came through the guestworker process and 1 percent were temporary workers from neighboring countries who received a border pass to work in designated districts.20

Still, the economy faced a shortage of around 280,000 workers as of 2024, according to the Ministry of Labor.21 In 2025, the government adopted a resolution to incorporate more foreign workers, this time in response to another external shock: abrupt humanitarian funding cuts by the United States and others. The government allowed working-age humanitarian migrants living in one of the nine temporary shelters for displaced people to work in 43 provinces for one year starting October 2025.

Ad hoc policies have provided some formal protections but also marginalization. Different types of documentation provide different rights: Both guestworkers and those who go through the nationality verification process are entitled to labor rights and social protections, for a maximum of four years. And many migrants interviewed by the authors said that even with access to public hospitals, they preferred private health clinics where treatment was faster and involved less discrimination. Some types of documentation limit movement. For example, the border-pass scheme, which was outlined in Section 64 of the 2017 decree, does not allow holders to leave certain districts, and grants only limited rights and social protections. Border-pass holders and those who have registered but have not verified their nationality cannot travel outside of the province of employment without risking arrest and deportation. Their semi-legal status also makes them vulnerable to extortion by local police, which is common.

Care Workers

Many others work and live under semi-legal conditions. For example, migrants who spend years doing child care, elder care, or domestic work typically secure work permits and visas like other migrant workers through brokers who serve as proxy employers on documents. However, because they work in private homes rather than businesses, these workers lack the same labor rights and access to the social security system as other migrant workers. Interviews with care workers from Myanmar and Thai employers indicate that, despite the migrants’ legal precarity and lack of formal social protections, these workers sustain long careers that are essential to Thai society. Some have chosen to have their children live in Thailand because of its educational opportunities, despite the complicated bureaucracies, recurring fees, and lack of social protections. Still, the limited rights and social services are a barrier to these families’ integration.

Meanwhile, Thailand’s dependence on foreign workers is likely to grow: It faces low fertility rates and is officially classified as a “complete-aged society,” meaning more than 20 percent of the population is 60 or older. Analysts project a drastic increase in the number of residents requiring caregivers.

Stuck in Marginalized Positions

Policies have created legal channels for migration and frameworks for basic rights but restrict migrants to temporary jobs in low-wage sectors. Regardless of reforms or ad hoc changes, these workers have been structurally marginalized with no political rights and limited prospects for socioeconomic mobility.

Workers with regular status are entitled to basic rights and protections, but only on a temporary basis. This temporary quality impacts households and communities, with many migrants separated from their families back home because the guestworker system does not allow them to bring dependents. In addition, even if rights exist on paper, workers often struggle to access them. For example, employers often neglect to enroll their employees in the social security fund, either out of ignorance or intentionally. Many migrants have also told the authors that they faced language barriers and discrimination in hospitals, public schools, and government offices. Meeting the administrative criteria to change employers is often difficult, resulting in many workers falling out of legal status when changing jobs.

Labor Organizing

Migrant workers also face significant barriers to labor organizing. They are not allowed to form labor unions and are barred from holding union executive committee positions. Since they work in migrant-dependent industries, in many cases there are simply no unions to join. Geographical isolation for workers in sectors such as fishing also hinders collective action. Instead, workers wishing to file grievances must do so with the labor protection office and, potentially, labor courts, often by relying on legal assistance from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in ways that can inadvertently undermine workers’ long-term autonomy. In industries such as seafood processing, “community welfare committees”—which include workers, employer representatives, and advocates—have been set up as alternatives, but they lack the organizing power of unions.

Advocates and international organizations have appealed to the government, so far without result, to allow labor organizing and collective bargaining rights for migrant workers. In the meantime, workers have leveraged alternative institutions such as community-based organizations, worker centers, and religious or funeral groups (social spaces for community-level organizing among Buddhist migrants, including those of Myanmar’s dominant Bamar and other ethnic groups) to build spaces for social and collective action. Some migrant groups have utilized legal mechanisms such as the 1975 Labor Relations Act to submit collective demands and engage in bargaining with employers. Migrant-worker associations and civil-society networks have trained workers to analyze power structures and facilitate negotiations in their workplace, while also advocating for Thailand to ratify the International Labor Organization (ILO) convention on organizing and collective bargaining (Convention 98).

Costs, Discrimination, and Inability to Naturalize

The system also places significant financial costs on migrant workers. People from Myanmar coming through the MOU process paid a median of U.S. $1,150 in recruitment fees and costs in 2023, while those being recruited from within the country paid an average U.S. $890 and those arriving irregularly U.S. $604.22 Many also face repeated costs to register, renew work permits and visas, and extend documents. All these processes require brokers to process paperwork, which migrant workers pay for from their wages. Except for recruitment agencies working within the MOU process, these brokers are independent and mostly unregulated, and their fees are in addition to government processing fees. As such, debt is common among migrant workers, regardless of status. Slightly more than one-third of workers from Myanmar surveyed by IOM in 2024 were in debt, owing an average U.S. $800.23 Recruitment fees and related costs appear to have increased since the start of the pandemic. These costs can disrupt migrants’ earnings, reduce the remittances they send home, and make them stay longer than intended.

The enduring economic, social, and political marginalization is enabled by poor regard for migrants among much of the Thai public, which often welcomes migrants’ labor but does not want them to become full members of society. For instance, although there is little evidence to support the claim, roughly three-quarters of Thai residents believed migrants increase crime, according to a 2019 ILO poll.24 A majority also said that migrants could not be trusted, threatened Thai culture, and were not necessary for the economy. Migrants are also often accused of being a drain on the public health-care system. Anti-migrant sentiment flared up during a COVID-19 outbreak in late 2020 in the central province of Samut Sakhon, where many migrants work in the seafood industry, resulting in many being pushed out of their jobs.25 Political pressure to control immigration has remained constant, and events such as Thailand’s deadly 2025 border dispute with Cambodia have fueled nationalism and anti-migrant sentiment.

The lack of a pathway to naturalization has been the strictest limitation facing immigrants. Migrant workers are ineligible for permanent residence and citizenship, depriving them of political rights and long-term security. Access to long-term status (such as through ten-year identification cards made available for stateless people, or long-term residence offered to skilled migrants and retirees) is also largely inaccessible to migrant workers. In October 2024, the government agreed to grant permanent residence to nearly 484,000 migrants and members of ethnic minorities who had lived in Thailand for decades or who were born in the country, indicating a slight loosening of this boundary.26 It remains to be seen whether this is a sign of larger policy change or if the government will make reforms in response to the need for immigrants amid low fertility, as some East Asian countries have done.

Rights—Within Limits

As the need for foreign labor persists, the Thai government will likely continue to adjust regulations while maintaining limits that keep migrants’ status temporary and prevent them from obtaining citizenship.

Perhaps counterintuitively, research in Thailand and elsewhere suggests that regularization of migration and increased government protections can cement migrants’ marginalization and vulnerability.27 To be sure, Thailand has ratified several ILO and UN conventions, signaling a respect for migrant rights. Policy reforms have sought to eliminate human trafficking and protect migrant workers who use documents and official employment systems. Yet policies aimed at formalization have also reinforced aspects of precarity, such as low wages, debt, reliance on temporary contracts, limited socioeconomic mobility, and deportability. This approach has contributed to keeping migrant workers and their families marginalized.

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