In Thailand, the path to legal work can push Myanmar migrants into debt

Getting a work permit in Thailand is too complex for most Myanmar migrants to manage alone. Brokers fill that gap – at a price that can leave workers in debt before they have earned their first legal wage.

Published 10 May 2026
5 min read

Mae Sot – In the village of Khang Phi Ban, on the outskirts of Mae Sot, a town on the Thai-Myanmar border, Daw Nyein Chan spends her days hauling bricks, sand and gravel at a construction site.

Under a scorching sun, she is driven by an obligation that reaches across the border: the monthly parcels she sends to her husband, a political prisoner held somewhere inside Myanmar.

She earns 350 baht a day, roughly ten US dollars, but the job lasts only ten days. When it ends, she must pay 500 baht to a labour broker, what workers here call “tea money”, just to be placed in the next one.

“We aren’t needed permanently,” she said. “They call us when they’re short-staffed.”

After her shift, she collected her two children, an eleven-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son, from their tutoring sessions, then stopped at a neighbourhood market. For about 100 baht, she bought a jar of Burmese fish paste, a multipack of instant noodles, water spinach and a small portion of minced chicken. When she asked her children if they wanted a snack, they quietly shook their heads.

“They know,” she said. “They know their father needs his parcels. And they know I’m still paying off the debt I took on just to get my work papers.”

From civil servant to refugee

Daw Nyein Chan’s life in Thailand is a sharp contrast to what she had before. In Myanmar, she was a gazetted civil servant and her husband was a secondary school teacher known in their district in Bago region as one of the best in the area. The family owned a home.

That changed after the military coup in February 2021. Both refused to serve under the new administration and joined the Civil Disobedience Movement. In early 2023, her husband was arrested. When soldiers came looking for her as well, she took her children and crossed the border to Mae Sot. Their property was seized. She sold what jewellery remained and began taking whatever manual work she could find.

She is now in her mid-forties, maintaining a family in a town she never planned to stay in.

“Rain follows the unfortunate”

When Thailand opened a registration window in December 2024 for undocumented migrants to obtain legal work authorisation, Daw Nyein Chan moved quickly. The document in question is commonly called a “pink card” – an identity and work permit card issued by Thailand’s Department of Provincial Administration. She liquidated her emergency savings and paid a broker to handle the application.

The broker disappeared with her money just before the fingerprinting appointment.

“They say rain follows the unfortunate,” she said. “I walked this path myself, so I won’t complain. But I still have to keep my children in school, send those parcels and pay off what I owe.”

With her application incomplete and her money gone, she turned to what brokers call the “VIP route”, an expedited, higher-cost pathway available to applicants who hold a passport, allowing them to bypass the standard queue. The expedited processing alone cost 17,000 baht. Adding the visa stamp into her passport brought the total to 21,000 baht (645 USD), roughly six weeks of earnings at full employment.

To manage the expense, the family moved from a 2,500 baht apartment to an 800 baht room: two by three metres, with a small corner for cooking and the remaining space taken up by a bed and two boxes of clothes. Forty rooms share 17 toilets. The shower consists of two large cement troughs divided by a plastic tarpaulin, one side for men and one for women. Cooking with electrical appliances is not permitted.

“I hesitated so much before moving here,” she said. “My daughter is reaching puberty.” She paused. “My children are so understanding, and that’s what hurts the most.”

Her situation is not unique. Advocacy groups say that virtually none of them pay the official government rate for a work permit – and that the gap between what the law says a permit should cost and what workers actually pay has spawned an industry of its own.

The cost of papers

The official cost of a pink card, processed directly by an employer on behalf of a worker, is approximately 3,700 baht, covering the work permit fee, a mandatory health examination and one year of health insurance under the government’s migrant scheme. For a two-year renewal of an existing permit, the Thai government’s published rate is 6,000 baht.

Because employers typically prefer to hire workers who already have documentation, undocumented migrants must often find a “hired employer” first – a labour contractor who agrees, for a fee, to appear on the paperwork as the nominal employer. That arrangement alone pushes the minimum cost of obtaining a new pink card to around 7,500 baht, according to multiple sources familiar with the system in Mae Sot.

From there, the fees compound. Health insurance, physical examinations and multiple appointments across different government offices are all required. Workers without a Myanmar passport must also first obtain a Certificate of Identity (CI), a travel document issued by Myanmar consular authorities that establishes a migrant’s identity and allows them to obtain a visa and, with it, a work permit. Workers with passports bypass this step but may still pay for expedited processing if, like Daw Nyein Chan, their circumstances require it.

“The process is opaque and bureaucratically exhausting,” said a representative of the Migrant Worker Rights Network (MWRN), who asked not to be named because he regularly travels between Thailand and Myanmar. “The language barrier makes workers almost entirely dependent on brokers.”

Expensive renewals

Renewals present a separate set of obstacles.

For workers who registered in 2024 and whose permits were set to expire on 31 March 2026, the Thai government launched an online renewal platform intended to streamline the process and reduce dependence on intermediaries. Technical failures took the site offline for weeks, leaving workers in legal limbo and again reliant on brokers, who were charging between 9,000 and 18,500 baht for a renewal the government priced at 3,000 to 6,000 baht.

“This year there was confusion about whether renewals would be granted for one year or two,” said U Khaing Gyi, director of the Aid Alliance Committee for Myanmar Workers (AAC). “Then, suddenly, a ‘calling letter’, a sponsorship document from an employer, was also required. In reality, this is just the Immigration Department creating extra steps for the Labour Ministry to administer. But every additional requirement, however minor, becomes an immediate excuse for brokers to raise their fees.”

He has worked with migrant workers long enough to see the pattern repeat. “The entire process, new registration, renewal, Certificate of Identity, is far too complicated. And that complexity does not exist without consequence for someone.”

The Ministry of Interior did not respond to requests for comment before publication.

The Foundation for Education and Development (FED), which has supported Myanmar migrants in Thailand since 2000 across education, legal assistance and emergency health care, encourages workers to apply directly where possible.

But U Htoo Chit, FED’s executive director, acknowledges the limits of that advice. Without Thai-language skills and familiarity with the procedural steps, employer registration, health screening, online fee payment at a 7-Eleven, immigration biometrics and district office card collection, direct applications are beyond the reach of most workers who have arrived from Myanmar since 2021.

Contributing to two systems

Thai authorities estimate that hundreds of thousands of undocumented Myanmar nationals are living and working in the country. According to figures cited by the Human Rights and Development Foundation (HRDF), drawing on data from meetings with Thai government agencies, nearly 100,000 migrant workers apply for new pink cards in Thailand each year.

Myanmar nationals account for an estimated 80 percent of those applicants. Of that group, at least 30 percent are believed to be based in Mae Sot. These figures cover new applicants only and do not include the considerably larger pool of workers seeking renewals.

As registered workers, they contribute to Thailand’s social security system, paying mandatory contributions that fund health care, disability and pension benefits. According to the International Labour Organization, migrant workers collectively contribute an estimated four to six percent of Thailand’s GDP. They also, in effect, sustain a parallel broker industry that profits from the same registration system they are required to navigate.

“By the time your permit finally comes through, it’s almost time to renew,” a staff member at HRDF said. “It’s a xf And since the coup, the number of new arrivals without documents has made the situation considerably worse.”

One debt settled

For Daw Nyein Chan, the 31 March deadline arrived with the renewal still unresolved. She had borrowed to pay for her original registration at a monthly interest rate of ten percent, a rate that had consumed her repayment capacity entirely and left the principal untouched. A renewal would mean borrowing again.

“The renewal costs 9,000 baht, and I don’t have it,” she said in early March. “Right now I can barely cover the 3,000 baht monthly interest on what I already owe. I’ve asked several organisations for help, but so far there has been no response.”

On 25 March, that changed. A civil disobedience support organisation operating under Myanmar’s National Unity Government, which could not be identified for reasons of safety, agreed to sponsor her renewal. She paid a broker 12,000 baht and her permit was secured.

Her immediate aim, she said, is to clear her debts within a year and move her children to a safer and less cramped environment. The larger questions – her husband’s release, any return to the life they had – remain unresolved.

When she heard that the support had come through, she called the reporter’s mobile. Her voice was unsteady.

“I’m crying because I’m so happy,” she said. “Do you know?”

Notes: Daw Nyein Chan is a pseudonym. She spoke on condition of anonymity for her safety.

This story is part of a collaborative reporting project between HaRDstories and Delta News Agency, supported by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.