Global atlas

South Eastern Asia · data through 2024

Thailand

Thailand is the main destination in mainland South East Asia, hosting millions of workers from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.

Twenty five year view

Movement in both directions

These lines show migrant stock, meaning people living outside their birth country at each point in time. They do not show annual arrivals.

Why people move

Leading documented drivers

  • • Wage differences with Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos
  • • Conflict and conscription in Myanmar
  • • Labour demand in fishing, farming, and construction
  • • Long open borders and established broker networks

Registration schemes and memoranda of understanding with neighbouring countries move between formal and informal status, and large numbers of workers hold irregular status at any moment. Fishing, construction, agriculture, and domestic work are the main sectors.

Connections

Where movement connects

Common destinations

United States, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Australia

Common origins

Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China

Adapting and finding support

What helps

Irregular status leads to wage theft and arrest risk, and children of migrants face barriers to schooling despite formal entitlement. Registration deadlines change often.

Migrant worker rights organisations and the labour ministry registration process are the practical routes.

Use the support guide

Research that explains this pattern

What the scholarship says

Anthropology

Why corridors keep themselves alive

Each person who arrives lowers the cost and risk for the next, through housing, jobs, information, and trust. The route becomes self sustaining.

Corridors persist long after the original cause has faded, and policy alone rarely closes them.

Douglas Massey and colleagues, cumulative causation and network theory

Psychology

Minority stress and everyday exposure

Repeated discrimination, vigilance, and the expectation of rejection accumulate into a chronic health burden.

Health outcomes worsen with time in a hostile setting, even as income and language improve.

Ilan Meyer, minority stress model, extended to immigrant populations

Behavioural economics

Scarcity and mental bandwidth

Living with too little money, time, or certainty consumes attention itself, leaving less capacity for planning and paperwork.

Missed appointments and delayed applications are effects of hardship rather than proof of carelessness.

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity, 2013

Read the full scholarship library

Support inside and beyond Thailand

Organisations people actually use

Migrant Working Group and partners

Rights information, legal referral, and advocacy for migrant workers.

Migrant workers in Thailand

Open

IOM country offices

Assistance, voluntary return, reintegration, and counter trafficking support through the local office.

Anyone moving, arriving, or returning

Open

UNHCR Help

Country by country guidance for refugees, people seeking asylum, and stateless people.

Refugees and people seeking asylum

Open

These are public organisations. The project is not affiliated with them and cannot guarantee outcomes. Nothing here is legal advice or an emergency service.

Ask for support in Thailand

This is guidance and connection to organisations. It is not legal advice and it is not an emergency service.

Sources and reading

Thailand data in the UN DESA International Migrant StockThailand data in the IOM World Migration ReportThailand data in the Migration Policy Institute data hubUNHCR Global Trends

Figures are rounded published estimates. Causes and adaptation differ within every country and should not be read as a verdict about any person.