Victoria (pseudonym) details some of the discrimination the post-coup Myanmar diaspora in Thailand face.
It has been three and a half years since the military coup in Myanmar propelled many thousands of people across the border into Thailand, and four months since the military activated its conscription law, breaking up families and forcing thousands more to leave their homes. As a migrant myself, I know firsthand the huge challenges staying legally in Thailand as a Myanmar citizen entails. This essay takes stock of the increasing Burmese population in Thailand and the discrimination we face in 2024 based on my personal experiences and discussions with fellow migrants.
While increasing rapidly in recent years, migration from Myanmar to Thailand is not new. A shift in relative economic power between Thailand and Burma began after the 1962 military coup, when Burma’s one-party and military administrations started their more than six-decade pillage of the nation at roughly the same time that Thailand began directly benefiting from its support of the United States and its many wars in the region. As a result, millions of people, possibly tens of millions, went on to migrate from Myanmar to Thailand in the succeeding decades. Some migrants move permanently while others stay in Thailand only temporarily, often travelling back and forth. Estimates of the number of Burmese people living in Thailand are challenging, but the Royal Thai Government and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have attempted to track the numbers of migrant workers in the country overall, as well as recent refugee arrivals in border provinces. As of 2023, there were more than 2 million registered migrant workers from Myanmar in Thailand, plus several hundred thousand more undocumented. At the recent Chiang Mai University International Conference on Burma/Myanmar Studies, Thai university researchers comfortably estimated up to six million Myanmar-born people currently live in Thailand.
The 2021 coup, just the latest in many political crises in Burma since its independence, resulted in another spike in emigration out of the country. Tens of thousands of people quickly and unexpectedly became migrants, many of whom never imagined being hunted by their country’s military in their own homes, threatened with torture, imprisonment, and death. Most were unprepared for exile. This spike partly offset the general disruption of migration between Myanmar and Thailand at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw mass returns of economic migrants from Thailand back to Myanmar as a consequence of the Thai state’s securitization policies.
Based on my observations as a post-coup revolutionary migrant in Thailand, where I come into contact with dozens of involuntary migrants every week, there are today four groups of involuntary migrants sheltering here from the predatory state in Myanmar and its ongoing conflict.
The first group is undocumented economic migrants, who did not have the means or opportunity to get passports or other documents in Myanmar before migrating, and who cannot yet afford to get documents in Thailand. They live in Thailand at the total mercy of their employers and the Thailand state’s enforcers, relying only on peer networks and a few non-government organisations for support. They have the least rights guaranteed by the Thailand state.[1]
The second group is documented economic migrants, who have some limited rights and access to services in Thailand. These migrant workers are discriminated against in broader society, often live in substandard accommodation, and must follow different procedures at immigration compounds to others. They are often forced to wait outside the office buildings in the heat, without air conditioning, for example, while tourists sit inside. But, in comparison to their undocumented compatriots, they have more security.
The third group is undocumented committed revolutionaries, who travel back-and-forth across the Myanmar-Thailand land border. Since 2021, many have split their time between liberated areas of Myanmar and Thailand towns like Mae Sot and Chiang Mai. Some have part-time jobs, but most rely on donations and external support provided through donors and anti-coup resistance groups to make ends meet.
The fourth group is documented committed revolutionaries, most of whom speak some English, have above-average education, have jobs in either Thailand or Myanmar, or perform remote work for international organizations and companies. These can be characterized as the “exiled middle class” of Myanmar, who were on stable career pathways that were disrupted by the coup. This group is one example constituting the latest manifestation of Myanmar’s long-entrenched brain drain.
I belong to this fourth group, along with most of my peers. While it is the most privileged, it is still by no means simple or easy to reside in Thailand. Most of us in these third and fourth groups cannot return to areas of Myanmar under military rule, as we are at direct risk of persecution.
Many of us in this fourth group have managed to navigate Thailand’s immigration system, with its bipolar contradictions, for three years now. But in truth, we have only survived through our ability to pay agents to arrange education visas for us. While receiving visas with six-month or one-year durations through this pathway provides us with some form of stability, my peers and I are still often interrogated at immigration offices and airports when re-entering the country after trips abroad—especially at the Bangkok airport. The most common line of questioning at airports is about how regularly we travel, if we have ever had an education visa with a Thai language school, and our proficiency in the Thai language.
We are also now at risk of losing our passports, as Myanmar embassies and consulates have just declared they will no longer renew passports for Thailand education visa holders, a policy intended to force revolutionaries and people of conscription age to return to Myanmar.
While people have long migrated to Thailand to escape forced recruitment from various armed organizations in Myanmar, the activation of the military’s conscription policy in February has forced many more Myanmar residents to flee their homes. Thailand immigration has responded by scrutinizing education visas for Myanmar citizens more closely. Starting in June this year, all education visa applications submitted by Myanmar citizens sponsored by at least one major university in northern Thailand have been outright rejected, according to one university administrator. The haphazard nature of the system is on full display, with officers using their discretion to extend and approve the visas of Myanmar passport-holders who speak Thai smoothly, pay favored brokers, and inhabit a meek manner, while denying others.
Last month, a friend of mine encountered blatant discrimination at a Thailand immigration office. They applied for a one-year education visa with a prominent university. Their visa was sponsored by a major social sciences department and was signed off by the president of the university. They were not the only person applying through that department; another (white) foreigner had received the exact same visa, with the exact same paperwork, just hours before. But instead of receiving the visa like that person, my friend was told they would have to immediately leave the country.
Three different reasons were given for the rejection: The first was that my friend’s previous Thailand visa had fallen onto a “watch list” for “abuse” and all recipients of that visa (which was sponsored by a different major university) were being targeted. Education visas sponsored by institutions offering various programs are the most common option for all people seeking long-term stay in Thailand, and many thousands of Chinese, Russian, and other citizens use this pathway. The second was that their current university had made a mistake in its advice and immigration could not approve the visa based on procedural grounds—even though the white foreigner had received the identical visa hours before. The third was that my friend had travelled outside Thailand too often to be deemed a “legitimate student” and was under suspicion of abusing Thailand’s immigration laws.
What was the real reason?
In my opinion, it is that my friend had dared to step outside of the institutionalized corrupt pathways of Thailand immigration.
The truth of the matter is that when Thailand bureaucrats see a Myanmar passport, they expect kickbacks. By that, I do not mean obvious wads of Thai baht handed over at the counter of immigration offices, which have “no gifts” posters widely displayed. Rather, this money flows through agent fees and backdoor deals at immigration offices across the country. My friend’s previous visa—an education visa to learn Thai online at another university for 2023—was organized through an agent. The agent fee: 55,000 Thai baht (over 1,550 USD), distributed between immigration, the agent, the university.
The 2024 visa they attempted to apply for was arranged directly with a different university, fully supported, endorsed, and sponsored, the legal and standard pathway without an agent. At immigration, the fee was 1,900 Thai baht (with separate but low university course fees). There were no trickle-down corruption fees, no benefits for bent administrators, and no one paid to help with the paperwork.
This legal system works fine for Germans, Americans, and Australians, but Myanmar citizens can never expect to be seen as equals by the Thailand state. Just recently, the cabinet of the government in Thailand approved a raft of new visa rules benefiting other nationalities. Now, if you’re from Laos, you can stay in Thailand without a visa for 60 days. For Myanmar citizens, the maximum stay remains at 14 days. The newly announced “Destination Thailand Visa” perfectly suits employed, documented revolutionaries from Myanmar and would save us a huge amount of inconvenience. But it requires proof of funds of US $15,000 in a savings account, far out of reach of most Myanmar passport holders.
The treatment we temporary migrants endure degrades us and significantly affects our mental health. Not only must we deal with the guilt of leaving our country, and the grief from losing our loved ones to the coup, but we have to balance the financial burden of supporting family at home, the stress of coping with the precarity of our friends’ and families’ lives in the war-affected countryside and military-run towns and cities, and the challenge of trying to achieve positive change in Myanmar from abroad. But now, we also have to struggle with the fact that our place of refuge actively discriminates against us. It does so all the while taking advantage of our compatriot migrant workers to do the dirty, dangerous, and demeaning jobs of Thailand,[2] keeping Thai people out of menial jobs. Migrant labor from Myanmar also fuels Thailand’s standard of living and economy,[3] which relies heavily on manufacturing, construction, and tourism—three sectors dominated by legal and illegal Myanmar workers.[4]
The current difficulties faced by Myanmar citizens in Thailand are also threatening to fracture the anti-coup resistance movement. There is a sense by many who left Myanmar after the military started killing unarmed protesters in 2021 that the huge numbers of people escaping conscription and moving to Thailand in 2024 are to blame for the pressure and problems the rest of us now face from immigration. Some migrants from the 2021 generation resent the newcomers, accusing them of “doing nothing for the revolution,” and only leaving their normal lives in Myanmar when they were finally directly threatened by the military—in this case, for conscription. These newcomers are characterized as selfish, disingenuous, and at worst, as having collaborated with the military for these last three years.
Thailand benefited for decades from the conflict and instability in the countries it borders due to its close relationship with the United States throughout the Cold War. But in the second half of the twentieth century when Thailand was more of an American client state, it processed refugees and allowed support activities within its borders. In the current geopolitical era, freed of the ideological and alliance constraints of the Cold War, it is unclear what the now-unmoored Thai nation stands for. It is clearly happy to benefit from the exploitation of Myanmar migrant workers and receive the explicit transfer of personal wealth from Myanmar to Thailand due to the coup. For we Burmese revolutionaries in Thailand, our country of refuge feels more and more like an opportunistic predator, with its elites and bureaucrats much more aligned with those in the militarized state of Myanmar than we had previously realized.
Thailand’s immigration system needs urgent reform. While everyone affected by long wait times and the complexity of navigating the system without paying tea money concurs with this, as evidenced by the legion of international Facebook groups dedicated to complaining about Thai immigration, not every alien in Thailand is at the same level of risk as we Myanmar revolutionaries. We are uniquely threatened by the discretion of Thai immigration bureaucrats. When denied or insulted, it is not uncommon to hear the most committed revolutionaries, who fled Myanmar because of their fight against injustice, say through tears something like, “I would prefer to return home and be tortured or sign the pledge ‘not to do politics’ than endure this treatment a moment longer.”
There are so many commonalities between Myanmar and Thailand. Our cultures, religions, languages, our very ways of life, are synergetic. The geography of this region, our shared land border, is vast and beautiful. When there is no discrimination or bigotry, people from Myanmar living in Thailand find it a familiar, understandable, pleasant place to be, and are happy to contribute to making Thailand a more prosperous and successful nation.
Even if Thailand takes the most cynical and callous perspective on our country’s political problems, surely what we migrants deserve, and have the right to request, is a little respect in return.
Victoria (pseudonym) is a Myanmar researcher and activist living in Thailand since 2021.
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