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Article

30 Jan 2019

Author:
Savi Khorn, The Phnom Penh Post

Cambodia: Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand remain vulnerable to access to public health care and education for their children

"Cambodian workers ‘vulnerable’ in Thailand", 29 January 2019

The Office of the UN Resident Coordinator expressed concern … that some migrants working in Thailand are not enrolled in public health insurance schemes and that their children are unable to attend school.

The Thailand Migration Report 2019 estimates that the country currently hosts about 4.9 million non-Thai residents, with some 3.9 million being documented and undocumented workers from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam…

“While the situation for migrants in Thailand has improved in some ways since the last report in 2014, many challenges remain the same. Policy responses risk leaving migrants vulnerable and unsure of their legal status in Thailand,” said the report’s editor Benjamin Harkins.

Moeun Tola, the executive director of the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, said based on the most recent estimates, there are about 1.7 million to two million Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand, with 20 per cent being undocumented…

Nai Sambath, a worker in a towel factory in Thailand’s Chonburi province, said … that in the past two or three years, human rights violations and violence against Cambodian workers have reduced ...

“The situation of migrant workers in Thailand seems to be quiet. I mean it is stable because most of them are legal. But in some factories, their income is lower because Thailand’s economy is not very good either,” he said.

Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training spokesman Heng Sour said the government has worked with the Thai government to achieve 100 per cent legality for the more than one million Cambodian migrant workers, …