Migrant workers send Bt37 billion home a year
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Expected to return to Myanmar as industry develops, economy picks up
Migrant workers from Myanmar sent back up to Bt37 billion to their families each year and many with skills from long experience in Thailand would return home in the next four years to develop their own economy, according to a research paper released yesterday.
The study, by Chulalongkorn University’s Institute of Asian Studies (ISA), found about half of migrant workers earn between Bt5,000 to Bt10,000 a month.
Some 30 per cent received more than Bt10,000 while the other 20 per cent got paid less than Bt5,000 per month.
The migrants worked in Tak’s Phop Phra district, Samut Sakhon and Bangkok.
Some one million migrants have legal permits to work in Thailand and their annual remittances are estimated from Bt7.4 billion to Bt37 billion.
The computation excluded some two million illegal workers. If the number of illegal Myanmar migrant workers was included, the remittance would be much higher than Bt37 billion, ISA researcher Premjai Wangsiripaisarn said.
At Thailand Research Development Institute, labour research director Yongyuth Chalemwong said Myanmar has yet to develop an industrial sector to employ many workers.
But with the growth of tourism, construction and services in Myanmar, which is now opening to foreign investment, some migrant workers in Thailand should be able to start returning to their homeland within the next four to five years, Yongyuth said.
Myanmar is expected, however, to need 10 to 15 years in order to develop an industrial sector, he said.
In 2015, Myanmar’s gross domestic product would be $28 billion, 10 times less than the Thai economy, he said and noted that the growing Myanmar needed more skilled labour to upgrade its economy. This would coincide with projections that Thailand would still have to rely on migrant workers for the next 10 years.
He urged the authorities to make social services available and allow migrants to adopt Thailand as their second home.
In regard to illegal workers, he said he believed the problem would resolve itself. The faster the rate of economic expansion in Myanmar, the quicker illegal workers would go back to work, he said.
In the next five to 10 years, Thailand was likely to employ only legal migrants who can access to the same protection and benefits as those of the locals, he said.
