Thailand Braces for New Wave of Myanmar Migration

On February 19, Thailand’s Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin issued a warning to any Myanmar nationals planning on entering the country illegally to escape the military’s junta’s recent conscription order.

“They are welcome if they enter the country legally,” Srettha told reporters, according to the Bangkok Post. “But if they sneak into the country illegally, legal action will be taken against them. I already discussed the matter with security agencies.”

Srettha’s comments came nine days after Myanmar’s military administration said that it would begin implementing the People’s Military Service Law, which was passed by a previous military administration in 2010 but has never been enforced. Under the law, men aged 18-45 and women aged 18-35 can be drafted into the armed forces for two years, a period extendable to five years during national emergencies.

The military administration subsequently announced that it planned to draft 60,000 young men and women for military service each year, with call-ups to begin after the Thingyan new year festival in April. The first intake will involve 5,000 draftees, mostly men.

The activation of the law is a clear response to a series of significant battlefield setbacks that the Myanmar military has sustained over the previous four months. The biggest losses have taken place in northern Shan State, where a coalition of armed resistance groups launched a surprise offensive in late October, seizing numerous towns and border crossings with China. Meanwhile, the Arakan Army continues to make significant inroads in Rakhine State, in Myanmar’s west.

Since the mandatory conscription announcement, tens of thousands of young people have scrambled for ways to avoid service – and understandably so, given the military’s history of forcing civilians to serve as minesweepers and frontline porters.

While deferments and exemptions are available for students and Buddhist monks, the majority of young people have two choices. The first is to join one of the resistance groups or People’s Defense Forces opposing the military’s rule. The second is to flee the country entirely, worsening the significant brain drain that Myanmar has experienced in the three years since the coup of February 2021.

As The Irrawaddy reported, Myanmar expats have created Facebook groups where young people are now able to inquire about the cost of migration to foreign countries, and the job prospects and academic opportunities that are available there.

For those who opt to leave the country, and lack the means and connections to find sanctuary in the West, the most obvious destination is Thailand. Thailand is more accessible from Myanmar’s heartland regions than India and China, and has long served as a sanctuary for those fleeing the country’s conflicts.

Sure enough, the number of Myanmar citizens applying for passports and visas to enter Thailand has increased sharply since mid-February, with thousands of people flocking to passport offices across Myanmar and to the Thai embassy in Yangon to apply for visas to enter Thailand. On February 19, two women were killed in a pre-dawn stampede at a  passport office in Mandalay, as several thousand people attempted to squeeze into the line allowing them to apply for travel documents.

According to a report of the incident in The Irrawaddy, the number of passport applications has been limited to 2,500 a day in Yangon and 200 a day in Mandalay, creating business opportunities for “line sitters,” who stake out prime positions in the passport application queue overnight and then offer to sell their places in the line to applicants.

The Thai embassy has also been swamped by crowds, prompting it to announce on its Facebook page that it is only accepting 400 visa applications per day, effective February 15.

Just how many people will depart for Thailand remains hard to calculate, and depends in large part on how zealously the conscription law is enforced. But according to recent calculations by Surachanee Sriyai, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS Yusof-Ishak Institute in Singapore, if 5 percent of those eligible to be drafted into the military choose to leave for Thailand, that would amount to more than 336,000 people, in addition to the existing population of displaced civilians living along the Thai-Myanmar border.

With the supply of visas likely to be restricted, many of those unable to obtain proper documentation could well decide to go to Thailand via informal channels. But while the country has long been home to a population of an estimated 5 million migrant workers from Myanmar, a sudden influx of undocumented arrivals could create opportunities for predatory employers.

Htoo Chit, executive director of the southern Thailand-based Foundation for Education and Development, told The Irrawaddy that “there will be more labor rights violations when there are more illegal migrant workers.”

In her article, Surachanee said that the large number of people willing to pay hefty sums to secure passage out of Myanmar could also create opportunities for human traffickers. (People smugglers have played a similarly prominent role in ferrying Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh and Myanmar to other parts of Southeast Asia by sea, with sometimes deadly consequences.)

Surachanee argued that with its current migrant processing channels already overburdened, the Thai government needs to prepare for a likely wave of migrants in the months to come. “Without proper preparation and clear guidelines, local authorities, who find themselves overwhelmed by the movement of people, may resort to the usual tactics via immigration measures without regards to international human rights obligations,” she wrote.

While Srettha’s government has pledged not to “interfere” in Myanmar’s internal affairs, Thailand has never been immune from the backwash from the country’s conflicts. Since the coup, however, the Thai policy toward refugees from Myanmar has remained mostly the same. Security forces have pushed some civilians back over the border, and turned a blind eye to the presence of others. There have also been reports that illegal migrants have been arrested and deported.

Srettha’s comments give no indication that the Thai government is set to shift its approach significantly – though it has a couple of months to get things right before the full impact of Myanmar’s disastrous conscription order is felt.