Myanmar and Thailand agree on registering migrant workers

Yangon - Myanmar migrant workers in Thailand have been given until the end of the month to register with authorities or face possible deportation, the English-language Myanmar Times reported Sunday. Myanmar and Thai officials agreed on the Thai National Verification process at a meeting in Bagan, Myanmar last week, the Yangon-based weekly newspaper said.

Under the program, Myanmar workers must return to Myanmar to get temporary passports and Thai work permits. They must express their intention to register by February 28, Thai government officials said.

Once registered, they would be granted the same legal status as Thai workers under Thai law, the Myanmar Times reported. With the temporary passport migrants would then be eligible for a Thai visa, work permit and health insurance.

According to the newspaper, the director of Thailand's Employment Department, Jirisak Sukhonchaat, said the workers who fail to express their intention to register prior to the deadline would face deportation.

He said that more than 200,000 of the estimated 1 million Myanmar migrants working in Thailand had already expressed their intention to register. Nearly 27,000 had completed the process, according to the Myanmar Times.

Myanmar's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, U Maung Myint, told The Myanmar Times that the government planned to complete issuing temporary passports for about 1.2 million illegal Myanmar workers in Thailand by February 2012.

Last week the United Nations raised concerns over the possibility of mass deportations of migrants in Thailand back to Myanmar, Cambodia, and Lao People's Democratic Republic, which are also included in the process.

"A potentially large number of documented and undocumented migrant workers from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Lao People's Democratic Republic face the threat of deportation from Thailand after February 28, 2010," Jorge Bustamante, the UN human rights expert for migrants, said in Geneva.

In January, the Thai cabinet passed a resolution allowing for a two-year extension of work permits for some 1.3 million migrants provided that they were willing to submit biographical information to their home governments prior to February 28, 2010.

Human rights groups have noted that the lack of national identity documentation in countries such as Myanmar will mean many migrants working in Thailand will fail to meet the deadline.

They have also raised concerns that migrants who are fleeing their homelands for political reasons would be unwilling to seek verification documentation from their governments.

Andy Hall, the director of Thailand-based Human Rights and Development Foundation's Migrant Justice Program, told The Myanmar Times that migrant workers would continue to work in Thailand illegally after the deadline passed.

He said the Thai economy needs them and they will just come back, but they will be driven underground and subjected to even worse exploitation.

Workers rights groups have called for the deadline to be extended to avoid further exploitation of Myanmar workers in Thailand.

But Thailand's Labor Minister Paitoon Kaewthong told the Myanmar Times the registration process was an attempt to reduce, rather than exacerbate, exploitation of migrant workers.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/310429,myanmar-and-thailand-agree-on-registering-migrant-workers.html.