Over 4 million Myanmar refugees in Thailand face police extortion, aid cuts, and legal limbo in 2026. A landmark work permit policy offers hope — but millions of undocumented Burmese migrants remain dangerously exposed. A premium investigation.

The Street Becomes a Trap

Every morning, Naw Paw — a 34-year-old Karen woman who fled the Irrawaddy Delta shortly after Myanmar’s military coup in February 2021 — maps her walk to the garment workshop in Mae Sot with a single overriding thought: which roads have police checkpoints today. She knows most of the officers by the shifts they work. She knows which ones accept 200 baht, which ones demand 500. She has paid bribes she cannot afford more times than she can count.

“I never feel safe,” she told a rights researcher earlier this year. “Even when nothing is happening, I am afraid. I am always afraid.”

Naw Paw is one of an estimated 4 million Myanmar nationals now living in Thailand — the largest single-nationality migrant population in any Southeast Asian country. She is also among the roughly 1.7 million of them who are undocumented, meaning she exists in a legal void: unable to regularize her status, barred from formal work, excluded from the Thai government’s own refugee protection mechanisms, and left almost entirely vulnerable to the whims of local police. In border towns like Mae Sot, the informal extortion of undocumented Myanmar nationals has become so normalized that locals use a darkly revealing phrase to describe them: walking ATMs.

Four years after the generals in Naypyidaw seized power and set their country ablaze, the humanitarian fallout has reached a scale that Thailand — and the international community — can no longer manage by looking away.

Four Million People, and Counting

The numbers alone are staggering. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that more than 4 million Myanmar nationals currently reside in Thailand. Of those, nearly half — approximately 1.7 million — are undocumented, according to the Human Rights Watch July 2025 report, which documents their daily exposure to harassment, arrest, and forced deportation.

A further 90,000 mostly Karen and Karenni refugees live in nine government-administered camps strung along the Thai-Myanmar border — settlements that have existed since the 1980s and whose residents, in some cases, have now spent their entire lives inside the wire. The UNHCR registers more than 80,000 of these camp residents, along with roughly 5,000 urban asylum-seekers from more than 40 countries.

The scale of this population represents, in microcosm, everything that has gone wrong in Myanmar since February 2021: a military junta that has carried out crimes against humanity, a collapsing economy, fractured healthcare and education systems, and a countryside scorched by conflict. People are not crossing the Moei River into Thailand because they want to; they are crossing because staying has become unbearable.

What awaits them on the other side, however, is a protection system riddled with gaps — and, for far too many, a second layer of suffering.

“Walking ATMs”: The Extortion Economy

Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. It has no domestic refugee law applicable to all nationalities. Its 2023 National Screening Mechanism — hailed by Bangkok as a reform — was designed with an exemption so large it swallows the mechanism whole: it explicitly excludes migrant workers from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. Since the overwhelming majority of Myanmar nationals enter Thailand through migrant worker channels, they fall entirely outside the system’s protection.

The result is a population kept in permanent legal precarity — and Thai police have learned to profit from it.

HRW’s 48-page report, based on in-person interviews with 30 Myanmar nationals in Thailand in February 2025, documents a pattern of police stops, interrogations, and demands for bribes carried out with the implicit threat of arrest and detention. The phrase “walking ATMs” — used by residents of Mae Sot — captures not just the individual transactions but the systemic architecture: vulnerability is the product, and those who hold legal power over undocumented migrants are its sellers.

Many Myanmar nationals rely on brokers to navigate the “pink card” system — officially the Non-Thai Identification Card — which facilitates legal residence and employment. But the brokers charge exorbitant fees, the cards are often linked to fictitious employers, and a regularization window opened by the Thai Cabinet in September 2024 (extended in February 2025) has left most applicants in a renewal limbo that offers documentation but not genuine security.

“After fleeing conflict, persecution, and deprivation, Myanmar nationals need protection in Thailand,” said Nadia Hardman, refugee and migrant rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Instead, Thailand denies them secure legal status, and its authorities use that vulnerability to exploit and extort them.”

Urban undocumented Burmese migrants self-restrict their movement so severely that many avoid seeking medical care for serious conditions, pulling their children out of school at the first sign of increased police activity. The fear of deportation — back to a country under military rule, back to forced conscription, back to airstrikes and burning villages — operates as a form of continuous psychological violence.

The Camps: Aid Collapse and a Generation in Limbo

If conditions for undocumented Myanmar migrants outside the camps are defined by fear and exploitation, conditions inside the nine border camps have been defined, since 2025, by hunger.

The Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID in early 2025 triggered a cascade of funding failures that landed hardest on the most isolated. The Border Consortium (TBC), which had provided food assistance to camp residents for decades, terminated standard food aid for over 80 percent of families on July 31, 2025, after US funding was cut. Primary healthcare services from the International Rescue Committee followed. As HRW reported in August 2025, the monthly food allowance for adults had already been cut to just 77 baht — roughly US$2.30 — before the complete termination of food aid.

“In the past, we had enough rations,” one 34-year-old camp resident told HRW. “But the funding’s been cut bit by bit. The cash decreased and prices went up. I get 77 baht a month, but you can’t buy anything with that.”

Between 2022 and 2024, chronic malnutrition among children under five in the camps had already increased for the first time in at least a decade. The aid collapse accelerated what was already a slow-moving emergency.

For the youngest residents — who make up nearly 30 percent of the camp population — the education system has been crumbling in parallel. In January 2026, Save the Children warned that access to education in the border camps had reached “breaking point,” with student numbers rising 33 percent — from roughly 18,000 in 2020 to 24,000 in 2025 — even as funding collapsed. Classrooms of up to 60 students share frayed textbooks. Teachers face legal constraints that prevent them from holding Thai teaching licenses. Many learning centres operate on rented land, with no security of tenure.

The human cost is concentrated in a generation that has known nothing but the camps. One 25-year-old named Jornay, born in Mae La and interviewed by Save the Children, put it with quiet devastation: “I was educated in the camps, but our education was not recognized, so after we graduate, we don’t have jobs.”

Mae La, the oldest and largest of the nine camps — a dense settlement of wooden houses on the hills near Mae Sot, carved through with narrow muddy roads — has residents who have been there since the 1980s. Hope of resettlement abroad, always fragile, largely evaporated after the Trump administration halted a new resettlement program in early 2025, forcing two dozen refugees back to Umpiem Mai camp when their flight was cancelled in February.

“Having the card means we can’t go anywhere, we can’t apply for jobs, we can’t study,” a teacher who had spent 17 years in the camps told HRW. “We have no future, no opportunities. Our lives are in limbo.”

A Landmark Step — and Its Limits

In this landscape of compounding crises, August 26, 2025 marked a genuine departure. Thailand’s Cabinet approved a landmark policy allowing Myanmar refugees living in the nine border camps to work legally outside for the first time in decades. It is a significant concession — driven, in part, by economic necessity.

The timing was not coincidental. An escalating border dispute with Cambodia in 2025 prompted the return of over 780,000 Cambodian migrant workers to their home country. Since Cambodians had represented approximately 12 percent of the Thai workforce, entire industries — agriculture, manufacturing, construction, food processing — found themselves facing acute labor shortages. With an aging Thai population and a structural deficit of low-wage workers, the refugee camps along the Myanmar border began to look less like a humanitarian problem and more like an untapped labor reservoir.

As HRW noted, the new permits will be available to approximately 80,000 camp refugees registered with the Thai government, of whom an estimated 42,000 are of working age. Refugees must apply for permission to leave the camps and for work permits valid up to one year, tied to employer sponsorship. It is a pilot program — cautious, conditional, and heavily mediated by bureaucratic process.

“As young people, we want to make a living, we want to use our knowledge and skills,” one refugee told HRW. “If there’s any chance for us to leave the camp to work, to get a job and provide for our families, I would take it.”

UNHCR welcomed the Cabinet resolution as a meaningful step toward refugee self-reliance. For rights advocates, the challenge now is ensuring the application process remains free, transparent, and insulated from the broker networks and extortion dynamics that plague the broader migrant worker system. Every previous Thai regularization scheme has created new opportunities for intermediaries to extract fees from desperate people.

But even if the permit scheme functions flawlessly, its scope exposes the deeper problem: it covers roughly 80,000 people. The other 3.9-plus million Myanmar nationals in Thailand — the vast majority, living in urban areas, border towns, and informal settlements — remain entirely outside it.

The Urban Millions: Left Exposed

For undocumented Myanmar nationals in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Samut Sakhon, and cities across Thailand, the August 2025 Cabinet resolution changed very little. They remain in legal limbo: too numerous to ignore, too undocumented to protect, and too economically essential to deport en masse — yet subjected to systematic harassment that extracts money while reinforcing their powerlessness.

Thailand’s structural reliance on Myanmar labor creates an inherent contradiction at the heart of its policy: the government needs these workers, but it has built no legitimate pathway for most of them to exist legally. The broker economy — which charges Myanmar nationals thousands of baht for pink cards linked to employers who may not exist — fills the gap, funneling money upward while leaving workers more exposed than before.

Human rights organizations, including UNHCR, have called for a temporary protection regime for all Myanmar nationals in Thailand — a status that would halt deportations, allow movement, and extend basic legal protections without requiring Thailand to adopt full refugee status determination procedures. Bangkok has not moved in that direction.

There is also a more sinister dimension: credible reports of junta informants operating within Myanmar migrant communities in Thailand, monitoring diaspora political organizing and reporting back to Naypyidaw. For those who fled specifically because of their political activity or ethnic identity, even the relative safety of Bangkok can feel provisional.

What Thailand Must Do — And Why It Should

The economic case for extending legal protection to Myanmar nationals in Thailand is not merely humane — it is hard-headed. Thailand faces a demographic crunch. Its workforce is aging rapidly. Industries that drive export revenue — including agriculture, seafood processing, and construction — are structurally dependent on low-wage migrant labor. A rights-respecting integration framework would not just alleviate suffering; it would stabilize a labor supply that the Thai economy cannot function without.

Rights groups and the UN have converged on a set of concrete demands:

• Introduce a temporary protection regime for all Myanmar nationals, halting deportations and extending legal status regardless of how people entered Thailand
• Expand the work permit program beyond camp residents to undocumented Myanmar nationals in urban areas
• Ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention, or at minimum adopt domestic legislation creating genuine asylum procedures applicable to all nationalities
• End police extortion through accountability mechanisms, independent monitoring, and criminal consequences for officers who exploit migrants
• Restore humanitarian funding for border camp services — food, healthcare, and education — through diversified donor commitments that reduce dependence on any single government
• Integrate camp schools into the Thai national education system so that children’s qualifications are recognized and pathways to the workforce open

The ASEAN dimension matters here too. Thailand is not alone in hosting Myanmar refugees — Malaysia, Indonesia, and India all carry portions of the load, and all face similar tensions between economic pragmatism and rights commitments. A regional framework for temporary protection, brokered through ASEAN mechanisms, would distribute pressure more equitably and reduce the incentive for any single host country to maintain exploitative conditions as a deterrent.

The international community, meanwhile, must recognize that the aid funding collapse of 2025 did not just harm individual refugees — it destabilized one of Southeast Asia’s most fragile border regions, creating conditions for trafficking, organized crime, and further political radicalization. Penny-pinching on humanitarian budgets in periods of great-power political realignment costs far more in the long run than the contributions foregone.

Conclusion: The Arithmetic of Exposure

The arithmetic of this crisis is brutal in its clarity. Thailand hosts more than 4 million people from Myanmar. Ninety thousand live in official camps that have just — tentatively, conditionally — been given the right to work. The other 3.9 million live in a system that is designed neither to protect them nor to acknowledge their presence with any dignity.

For Naw Paw, planning her route to work in Mae Sot around police checkpoints, the August 2025 Cabinet resolution is abstract comfort. She is not in a camp. She is not registered. She does not have a pink card linked to a real employer. She has what millions of Burmese refugees in Thailand have: a daily calculation of risks, a practiced ability to disappear, and the knowledge that if something goes wrong, the system will not save her.

Four years on from the coup, Thailand stands at a choice. It can continue managing Myanmar’s displaced millions through a combination of selective legalization, systematic exploitation, and willful blindness. Or it can build something that actually works — for refugees, for Thai industry, and for the region’s long-term stability. The landmark August 2025 work permit policy is a proof of concept. The question is whether Bangkok has the political will to scale it.

The answer matters to millions of people who are still running out of road.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: How many Myanmar refugees are currently in Thailand as of 2026? According to IOM estimates, more than 4 million Myanmar nationals currently live in Thailand. Of these, approximately 90,000 reside in nine official border camps, while the vast majority — including an estimated 1.7 million who are undocumented — live and work across Thailand in legal limbo.

Q: Are Myanmar refugees in Thailand allowed to work legally? As of August 2025, Thailand’s Cabinet approved work permits for approximately 80,000 registered camp refugees — the first such authorization in decades. However, the estimated 3.9 million Myanmar nationals living outside official camps, including nearly 1.7 million undocumented individuals, remain excluded from legal employment pathways and are vulnerable to exploitation.

Q: Why are undocumented Myanmar migrants in Thailand called “walking ATMs”? The phrase, used by residents of Mae Sot on the Thai-Myanmar border, refers to the practice of Thai police extorting money from undocumented Myanmar nationals — stopping, interrogating, and demanding bribes under the threat of arrest and deportation. Human Rights Watch documented this systemic extortion pattern in its July 2025 report, “I’ll Never Feel Secure.”

Q: What has the US aid funding cut meant for Myanmar refugee camps in Thailand? The Trump administration’s dismantling of foreign assistance in 2025 led directly to the termination of standard food aid for over 80 percent of camp families by July 31, 2025, as well as the collapse of primary healthcare services. Monthly food allowances had already been slashed to approximately US$2.30 per adult before full termination. Save the Children separately reported in January 2026 that education in the camps had reached “breaking point” due to underfunding amid rising student numbers.

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Sources

1. Human Rights Watch — “I’ll Never Feel Secure”: Undocumented and Exploited Myanmar Nationals in Thailand (July 2025): https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/07/14/ill-never-feel-secure/undocumented-and-exploited-myanmar-nationals-in-thailand
2. Human Rights Watch — Thailand Allows Myanmar Refugees in Camps to Work Legally (August 2025): https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/08/27/thailand-allows-myanmar-refugees-in-camps-to-work-legally
3. Human Rights Watch — Thailand: Aid Cuts Put Myanmar Refugees at Grave Risk (August 2025): https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/08/11/thailand-aid-cuts-put-myanmar-refugees-at-grave-risk
4. Save the Children — Education in Refugee Camps on Thailand-Myanmar Border Reaches ‘Breaking Point’ (January 2026): https://www.savethechildren.net/news/education-refugee-camps-thailand-myanmar-border-reaches-breaking-point-report
5. UNHCR — Thailand Country Page: https://www.unhcr.org/us/where-we-work/countries/thailand
6. Center for Global Development — A Breakthrough for Refugees’ Work Rights in Thailand and Malaysia?: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/breakthrough-refugees-work-rights-thailand-and-malaysia
7. Reuters — Leaving Border Camps for Orchards: Myanmar Refugees Join Thai Workforce (November 2025): https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/leaving-border-camps-orchards-myanmar-refugees-join-thai-workforce-2025-11-19/
8. The Guardian — Thailand to Let Myanmar Refugees Work Amid Aid Cuts and Labour Shortages (October 2025): https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/oct/22/thailand-to-let-myanmar-refugees-work-aid-cuts-labour-shortages