Migration

In the ‘crisis’ involving the displaced Rohingya people in Southeast Asia, the preferred institutional label is “irregular migrants.” It is a term which implies that migration is well-regulated, which is not the case in South East Asia.  The ‘labeling’ or construction of identities of social groups ...

Cambodian human trafficking authorities have charged a Chinese national with attempting to illegally transport 18 men to work in China in what one government official said was the first such case of trafficking Cambodian men to the country. Anti-human trafficking police, who are part of the ...

Migrant rights groups have slammed the latest strategy to regularise undocumented Myanmar workers in Thailand as a money-making scheme. The current efforts to verify the Myanmar migrants and supply those eligible with passports has yet to even get under way, as the process is still mired in ...

Immigration teams from Myanmar have arrived in Thailand to conduct a long-awaited nationality verification process meant to regularise the status of over half a million workers caught in immigration limbo.  The current plan involves sending out newly arrived representatives from the labour ministry, immigration department and ...

The Diplomat, in collaboration with concerned stakeholders around the world, is launching a new series entitled “Southeast Asia: Refugees in Crisis.” In May 2015, thousands of Rohingya refugees from the Rakhine State of Myanmar and economic migrants from Bangladesh were found stranded in the Strait of ...

Local officials have been promising for several years to send illegal foreign workers back home but so far this hasn’t happened. Director General of Labour Management Department of the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, Mr Phongsaysack Inthalath spoke to Vientiane Times at a meeting in Vientiane ...

Six ethnic Montagnard Christians who fled Vietnam and illegally entered Cambodia to seek refugee status have arrived safely in the capital Phnom Penh, the provincial coordinator for Adhoc has said. The coordinator said the group fled Gia Lai province in Vietnam’s Central Highlands on 16 July and arrived ...

The Burmese government says it will repatriate 165 out of what it claims are more than 500 Bangladeshi nationals who were found abandoned at sea off Burma’s coast in May and have been living at temporary camps in Arakan State. Soe Naing, deputy director of the ...

A dozen ethnic Montagnards who sought refugee status in Cambodia willingly returned to their home country of Vietnam Thursday after Hanoi gave assurances it would not punish or discriminate against them, according to rights group and United Nations officials. The 12 were part of a group ...

The Myanmar navy has rescued more than a hundred Bangladeshi boat people from an islet near the country’s southernmost region, an official report said on 14 July. They were left on the small islet in early June and the Myanmar navy is searching the area for ...