Asia: Despite crisis, labour migration continues

Bangkok, Feb 2 (IPS/Andrew Nette) - From Cambodia to Indonesia, millions of migrant labourers are on the move in a region-wide trend that strains health and social services, increases social tensions, and could ultimately threaten region stability, say NGO workers and academics.

Two decades ago, economic migrants in East Asia and South-east Asia numbered around one million. While their real numbers are unknown, the United Nations Development Programme says at least six million people are today work outside their countries of origin in the region, at least half of them illegally.

Experts add that labour-related migration will increase across the region due to globalisation. Asia's recession also drives the jobless to look for work overseas, even as domestic pressures and economic problems in once-rich economies mean the welcome for foreign labourers has cooled.

"Most countries in East and South-east Asia are undergoing a mobility transition" associated with massive economic changes, says a study released late last year by the Institute of Population and Social Research at Bangkok's Mahidol University. The nature of much of this movement is changing, the study says.

Prior to the eighties, transnational labour movement was dominated by organised, formal labour contracting. The economic boom of the eighties and early nineties, which brought large regional inequalities and a decline in the agricultural sector, saw a flood of internal rural-urban migration. It saw workers from poorer countries, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, flock to richer countries like Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Hong Kong to compensate for acute labour shortages.

This coincided with the breakdown of border controls and movement throughout much of the Mekong sub-region - Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma and southern China - producing a flood of trade and transport connections, and a growth in migrant labour.

Thailand alone hosts some 1.4 million migrant workers, the vast majority Burmese, but also Lao, Cambodian, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani. Only a fraction are legal.

Malaysia has more than 700,000 migrant workers, mainly Bangladeshi, Filipino and Indonesian. Most migrant labourers continue to be mainly young, rural males, preferred by employers as a cheap and easily controlled source of labour.

"Many of these people have no choice but to take the lowest, dirtiest jobs in factories or the lowest charge prostitution," says Robert Bennoun, programme officer at UNICEF Bangkok and coordinator of the UNAIDS Taskforce on Migrant Labour and HIV. "They are removed from family and village support structures, have little education and no rights, so they are really exploited," he adds. But while poverty remains the key reason why most migrants will cross a border to work in another country, they are also influenced by the flood of foreign media brought about by globalisation, which is shifting cultural and social mores.

Women make up an increasing proportion of those on the move, a result of growing opportunities for them in the industrial and service economies, said the Mahidol study. It is a situation ripe for abuse, particularly for young women and children who are entering the sex industry, some voluntarily, others against their will in conditions of near slavery. While in better times police and authorities turned a blind eye to illegal jobseekers, growing economic turmoil has seen governments crack down on their migrant populations.

Thailand has deported an estimated 250,000 migrants - mostly Burmese. When South Korea granted an amnesty for illegal foreigners to leave voluntarily, 50,000 did so. Malaysia has deported large numbers of foreign labourers, including 50,000 Indonesian migrants. Thai government officials estimate that unemployment has already topped two million. Of these, 1.3 million are believed to be villagers who used to work in cities and have returned home.

China has a huge floating internal labour force, many of them migrants from the country's industrial hinterland. In Indonesia, there is an enormous movement out of depressed areas to outlying regions like Bali.

Prior to the crisis, the Philippines' two to four million overseas workers sent home more than $750 million annually, or the country's third-largest source of foreign exchange. Twenty-three percent of
Bangladesh's foreign earnings came from migrant labourers.