The other foreigners

There are roughly four to five million migrant workers in Thailand, depending on which count you use — and the counts differ by more than a million, for reasons worth understanding before quoting any of them.

On IOM’s estimate they are more than 10% of the labour force, and they contribute an estimated 4.3% to 6.6% of GDP.

And when a foreign resident in Bangkok says “foreigners in Thailand” (the visa rules, the dual pricing, the bank accounts, the permanent residence quota, most of this website) he does not mean them.

Nor, and I’d rather say this myself than have someone else say it about us, do Thais. When we say ต่างชาติ, we usually mean a Westerner. Migrant workers get a different word and a different set of assumptions.

Two conversations about foreigners in Thailand, running in parallel, and the larger population by an order of magnitude appears in neither.

The numbers

There is no single number, and this article previously printed one as though there were. Three different counts circulate, they measure three different things, and the gap between the smallest and the largest is over two million people.

They are not alternative estimates of the same quantity. A permitted-to-work count is an administrative record and excludes everyone irregular by construction — which is why it moved from about 3.1 million in March 2025 to 3.9 million by November: a Cabinet resolution of 24 September 2024, extended on 4 February 2025, let previously irregular workers from the four neighbouring countries register, and 1,983,399 of them were in that process in November 2025, 1.83 million of them from Myanmar. A non-Thai-national count includes people who are not working at all. The middle row is the one this article is about, and where a single figure is needed, that is the one to use — with its date attached, because it is from December 2023.

Reconcile by labelling, not by choosing. The earlier version attached “close to five million” to March 2025; March 2025 belongs to a permit count, and no five-million migrant-worker figure has a date on it anywhere I could find.

The composition, from IOM data:

• Around 72–75% from Myanmar
• About 12% each from Cambodia and Laos
• With Vietnamese workers making up much of the remainder

The Ministry of Labour’s own count skews further: of the 3,643,038 workers from the four countries it had on its books in November 2025, 2,934,379 were from Myanmar — 80% — against 396,930 from Cambodia, 302,740 from Laos and 8,989 from Viet Nam.

On registration status: roughly 3.14 million were in a regular situation in January 2024, while IOM estimated a further 1.8 million irregular Myanmar migrants — and the 2024–25 regularisation appears to have brought most of that second group onto the register, which is what the November 2025 count shows. The two figures are from different exercises and should not simply be added.

That Myanmar concentration is not a historical constant. It reflects both Thailand’s labour demand and the political and economic crisis in Myanmar following the February 2021 coup, which pushed very large numbers of people across the border into whatever work was available.

Where the work is

Construction. Fishing and seafood processing. Agriculture. Manufacturing. Domestic work. Service work in places tourists visit without noticing.

Article 33 established that the average Thai farmer is 58, that more than a quarter of agricultural holders are now over 65, and that nobody is replacing them.

Migrant labour is a substantial part of the answer to who actually does the work. Not a marginal supplement — a structural component of Thai agriculture, fishing and construction, without which those sectors do not function at current cost.

The same is true of the food chain in article 31 Where the ฿50 plate actually comes from. Somebody harvests what arrives at Talaad Thai at three in the morning, and increasingly that somebody was born in Myanmar.

The demographic connection nobody makes

Here is the piece that belongs alongside article 09 One point oh.

Thailand has a fertility rate Mahidol’s population institute estimates at 0.86, births at a seventy-five-year low, and a working-age share the National Economic and Social Development Council projects falling from 65% in 2020 to 56% in 2040. That is the central economic problem of the country.

Migration is already partially offsetting it. More than 10% of the labour force, 4.3–6.6% of GDP, concentrated precisely in the sectors where Thai workers have become scarcest.

Which means Thailand is already running a demographic mitigation strategy through immigration — it simply doesn’t describe it that way, doesn’t plan it as such, and grants the people doing it very little.

And it introduces a dependency that is rarely stated: the Myanmar situation is a variable in Thai economic planning. If conditions there change materially in either direction, the Thai labour supply changes with them. That’s a substantial exposure to a neighbour’s politics, and it sits outside most economic commentary about this country.

What they send home

The mirror of article 37 The pension system is called your children, which described Thai adult children sending money to parents in the provinces.

Migrant workers do the same thing across borders, at scale. Remittances from Thailand represent around 5.5% of Cambodia’s GDP.

So the remittance pattern that funds old age in Isaan also funds households in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar — the same mechanism, one border further out. Thailand is simultaneously a country whose rural households depend on transfers from its cities, and a country whose cities send transfers to its neighbours’ rural households.

That’s the same informal financial architecture described throughout the parallel economy series, operating regionally.

The part that should be uncomfortable

I’m not going to write a piece that treats four million people as an economic input and stops there.

Migrant workers in Thailand, particularly those in an irregular situation, occupy a position of real vulnerability. Irregular status means limited recourse when something goes wrong, and 1.8 million people in that position is not a rounding error.

International organisations document the risks in this sector at length, and I’d point readers to IOM and ILO material rather than summarise it badly here. The trafficking corridors described in article 03 How the romance scam industry actually works — and who is actually in the compounds, people moved through Thailand toward compounds across the borders, run through some of the same routes and prey on some of the same vulnerabilities.

What I’d say from here is narrower and I think fair: a country that depends on four million-odd people for 10% of its labour force and up to 6.6% of its GDP has an obligation to think about them as people rather than as an input, and Thai public discourse (mine included, until I looked at the numbers) mostly hasn’t.

What this means for a foreign reader

Your position here is not the foreign experience of Thailand. It’s a minority one.

Everything on this site about visas, dual pricing, bank accounts and permanent residence describes the situation of a relatively small, relatively wealthy group of foreigners. Several million other foreigners are having an entirely different experience of the same country, governed by different rules, with far less room for complaint.

That’s not a reason to stop caring about the yellow book or the 30+30 lease. Those are real and this site will keep covering them.

It is a reason to hold the word “foreigner” a bit more carefully — and to notice, when the foreigner-price argument comes round again, that the ฿2,000 a year it costs a Western resident is a rounding error next to what the other several million are navigating.

Common misconceptions

“Migrant workers are a small part of the economy.” Over 10% of the labour force and 4.3–6.6% of GDP.

“Most are undocumented.” The majority are in a regular situation, and the 2024–25 regularisation moved close to two million more onto the register: 3.9 million held a work permission in November 2025.

“They take Thai jobs.” They are concentrated in sectors where Thai labour has become scarce (agriculture, fishing, construction) as article 33 The average Thai farmer is 58 describes.

“It’s a recent thing.” Long-standing, though the Myanmar share rose sharply after 2021.

“Thailand should just formalise everyone.” Registration systems exist and are used by millions. The gap between systems and reality is the hard part, as it is everywhere.