ASIA: Bleak Future Awaits ‘Stateless’ Children

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK , Feb 9 2006 (IPS) - While in South-east Asia’s capitals there is talk of regional integration and easier movement of people within the region, the border towns are home to thousands of stateless children with little expectation from such stirrings of regional solidarity.

These are the offspring of migrant workers who have crossed international boundaries to find work or escape repression. They lack identity papers in the foreign country they were born in while the home countries of their parents refuse to recognise them as citizens.

Stateless children in Thailand stand out as a distinct group within the migrant worker community in a vast area that spans southern China’s Yunnan province and stretches into Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Burma.

”It is in Thailand and Yunnan that stateless children are most noticeable,” Reiko Harima, Mekong Coordinator at the Asian Migrant Centre, a Hong Kong-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), told IPS.

There could be close to 100,000 such children in Thai border towns such as Mae Sot and Ranong, add migrant rights activists like Jackie Pollock of the Migrant Action Programme (MAP), a non-governmental group based in Thailand’s northern town of Chiang Mai.. ”The Thai government says that between 3,000 and 15,000 children are born every year to migrant workers.”

”If these children cannot speak the local languages of their country, then they will not be recognised by the government,” she told IPS. ”They end up not having any citizenship and are stateless.”

And their numbers are increasing in the wake of greater migration within the region that shares the Mekong River. Currently there are an estimated two million migrant workers who have left their homes for neighbouring countries in search of jobs, states a report released Thursday by the Mekong Migration Network.

”From the 1960s to 1980s, the migrants from the GMS (greater Mekong sub-region) were mostly refugees; in the 1990s, this group is a mix of refugees and migrant men, women and families seeking work across borders,” states ‘Migration in the Greater Mekong Subregion.’

Of the six countries studied in the report – Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, China’s Yunnan province and Vietnam – the bulk of the migrant worker flow has been to Cambodia, Thailand and China’s Yunnan province.

Thailand has the largest migrant worker population – over a million -due to the work opportunities in its comparatively successful economy. In 2003, states the report, the per capita income in Thailand was 2,291 US dollars, which was 12 times higher than Burma’s, which was 179 dollars.

Currently, there are over 900,000 migrant workers from Burma working in agriculture and the fishing industry, in construction, factories and as domestic workers. Cambodian workers number some 183,000 and Laotians, about 179,000.

Cambodia, meanwhile, hosts anywhere between 150,000 to an unofficial estimate of 1.2 million Vietnamese workers employed mostly in the construction sector and small trade while many of the women are in the sex industry.

”Poverty is the reason that pushes people from the rural areas to go to the urban areas in Vietnam or to other GMS countries,” says Huynh Thi Ngoc Tuyet of Vietnam’s Institute of Southern Social Sciences. ”Most live in low-quality housing, in slums.”

And the children born to Vietnamese migrant workers in Cambodia appear to be facing lesser hurdles to get birth certificates than the thousands deprived of them in Thailand and parts of southern China. That is due to the presence of Vietnamese communities in Cambodia.

”For the children to get birth certificates, the most important is recognition by the community they were born into,” Chou Bun Eng, director at the Cambodian Women for Peace and Development, told IPS. ”It is more difficult if the community does not accept the parents as one of theirs.”

The plight of these children has been compounded by the reluctance of the Mekong sub-region countries to sign a 1990 U.N. convention to protect the rights of migrant workers. Consequently, the governments avoid being held accountable to the standards set by this convention, which came into force in 2003.

”It is dangerous to have a large stateless people growing up in any country,” says Christopher Lowenstein-Lom, spokesperson for the International Organisation of Migration’s Asia-Pacific region. ”If these children are excluded for public health programmes, education and employment, it could lead to alienation and disenchantment.”

Governments tend to sidestep migrant issues because they view it as a ”political hot potato,” he adds.

Yet, none of the Mekong sub-region countries displays the low tolerance to migrant workers having children as is the case with the governments of Singapore and Malaysia. Both affluent countries insist on female migrant workers taking pregnancy tests ahead of employment and evict those found pregnant before expiry of work contracts.