By Jason Tan
Bangkok | 18 July 2025 — A report released this month by the New York based Human Rights Watch (HRW) says there are over 4 million refugees from Myanmar living in Thailand, more than half of them undocumented, with law enforcement authorities in the borders areas of northern Thailand referring to them as “walking ATMs” because they can be easily coerced into paying bribes and fees to remain in the country.
The HRW report released on July 15th at a well-attended press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok, focus on the abuse face by Myanmar nationals in Thailand, as they flee military repression back home. With over 1000 km of a porous border between the 2 countries, a lucrative extortion business has developed in Thailand claims the report, that expose the refugees to arrest and detention, and constant risk of deportation.
HRW found that Thai police frequently stop and interrogate Myanmar nationals, extorting them with the threat of arrest and detention if they fail to pay bribes. “(It is a) considerable sums for those with little income,” says the report. “(So) Myanmar nationals self-restrict their movements, living in hiding and out of sight”. HRW found this practice to be prevalent in the border town of Mae Soi in Tak province, where a lucrative business of threats and bribes exists.
Interviewees have told HRW that these practices left them scared and intimidated; having fled human rights abuses, armed conflict and a humanitarian crisis in Myanmar, they felt marginalized and exploited in Thailand.
Nadia Hardman, refugee and migrant rights researcher of HRW told the press briefing that they conducted most of the interviews in the northern cities of Chiang Mai and Mae Sai.
“Most of this undocumented population do not have pathways to protection that is legal status or documentation in Thailand, and they are therefore vulnerable to harassment, arrest, detention, exploitation and sometimes deportation by the Thai authorities,” she said. “While the migration flows are often mixed and people are fleeing conditions in Myanmar, they are also coming here to find work but this does not make them exclusively economic migrants as the Thai authorities often assume.”
“The underlying reality driving much of the migration is the need for protection,” added Hardman. ”All those that we interview for this report said they could not and would not return to Myanmar. All said reasons relating to the oppression and the conflict in Myanmar from individual fears of persecution to generalize fear of conflict.”
On 1st February 2021, Myanmar’s military staged a coup and arrested the country’s elected civilian leaders, including de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint. Mass protests quickly proliferated in cities and towns nationwide. The protests quickly developed into armed conflicts between the military and protest groups who have been armed from foreign sources and other avenues like the drug trade. To stem the violence, the military junta quickly started making mass arrests using deadly force.
Myanmar, strategically located between China and India is an important link between the two countries and for Asia’s ambitious rail and road networks. Both China – with its railway-based Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – and India with a pan-Asian highway project – need a stable Myanmar for its success.
While outside powers who are threatened by Asia’s rise seem to be using Myanmar to thwart this emergence, it is the people of Myanmar that is suffering, and unfortunately exploited by its own neighbours.
A devastating 7.7-magnitude earthquake on 28th March this year, near Mandalay resulted in more than 3,500 deaths and widespread destruction. The United Nations estimated that the number of people needing humanitarian services surged from 1 million to 5.2 million in the affected areas. HRW report claims that the military junta has “severely hindered the delivery of humanitarian aid to communities most at risk”.
Referring to the large number of Myanmar refugees that have crossed the border to Thailand in recent years, Angkhana Neelaphaijit, senator and chair of the Senate Human Rights Committee, speaking at the press briefing said that they have no desire to be settled in a far away European country. “Their hopes are modest. They simply want to eat and live peacefully in the same place with the hope of returning home someday,” she said. “They ask how long can we stay here? And when can we start working to support our families back home?”
As the HRW report points out, Thailand does not recognize refugees, and the limited measures it has in place for “protected persons” are effectively closed to most Myanmar nationals. As a result, many Myanmar nationals, including children, have no legal access to basic health care, education or work.
Thailand is not a party to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees or its 1967 Protocol. The country has no refugee law or formalized asylum procedures that are applicable to all nationalities. Instead, in 2023, the government introduced a new National Screening Mechanism under which some individuals who are unable or unwilling to return to their countries of origin due to fears of persecution can seek protection.
Over 80,000 Karen refugees from Myanmar have been living in refugee camps on the Thai-Myanmar border for decades and their humanitarian aid may cease soon due to US foreign aid cuts. Hundreds of thousands more Myanmar nationals have fled oppression and armed conflict to cross the long and porous border into Thailand. The Thai government has allowed new arrivals to stay in informal temporary stay areas near the border, but has at times pushed them back. None of the arrivals since the coup have been permitted to enter existing refugee camps.
Lin (not her real name), a Myanmar national who has spent 8 years as a student in Thailand, and currently works for a humanitarian NGO here told IDN that most young Myanmar people who live here don’t want to go back because they can be conscripted into the army. “Even women fear that because the army is planning to conscript women,” she said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen (to our country). Some people, they ask us, are your family safe? The only thing we can answer is yes. For now, yes. But we don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the uncertainty that we live with”.
Thailand is facing a severe ageing crisis with not enough young people to work, especially in the service and informal economy, where most young Myanmar refugees have been absorbed into. When IDN asked the panelists at the press briefing, why cannot the politicians see this as an economic issue, and legislate to allow Myanmar refugees to work in those jobs which cannot be filled with Thais, senator Neelaphaijit said it has been discussed in parliament but politicians are slow to move.
Sunai Phasuk, a senior Thailand researcher with HRW told IDN that all political parties are now gearing up for a snap election and all of them are using the immigration card in their campaigns. “They take the populist anti-immigration platforms as the problem for Thailand’s ills,” he noted. “They will dare not argue that refugees need to be absorbed into the economy to compensate for the country’s decreasing fertility rate”.
