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“We left Burma because of the poverty there, but now this has happened.”

Fortune rarely favors Burmese workers in Thailand, as they must run a daunting gauntlet of obstacles from the moment they enter the country. This includes not only the smothering discomfort of being packed into tiny spaces as they are being smuggled into the country, but also a host of workplace hazards that few Thais would be willing to accept. And then there is the constant menace of employers who do not pay and corrupt officials who demand bribes. When disaster strikes, it comes as no surprise, but only confirms the magnitude of the risks illegal migrants must take when they leave the certainty of economic hardship at home for the possibility of a marginally better life abroad.

This was not the first time that large numbers of Burmese migrants had died while seeking jobs in Thailand. In March 2002, the bodies of 13 Burmese, including children and teenagers, were found in a garbage dump in the northeastern province of Prachinburi. Police suspected that they had suffocated while being transported across the country.

The December 2004 tsunami, which struck some of Thailand’s most popular tourist areas, including Phuket and neighboring Phang Nga Province, also took an enormous toll on the country’s Burmese migrant community. Rights groups believe that most of the 1,320 unidentified victims in Phang Nga, where some 4,224 people died in the disaster, were undocumented Burmese workers. Meanwhile, those who survived were left jobless and without government assistance.

Although nature and criminal neglect have both played a major role in reducing many migrants’ lives to unimaginable depths of misery, most observers say that the real culprit is Thailand’s migrant policy.

In Burma, the ruling junta has commandeered the country’s economy for its own benefit, leaving millions of Burmese to fend for themselves in an endless struggle against destitution. But critics say Thailand’s migrant-labor policy has been equally self-serving, ignoring the rights of foreign workers while favoring powerful commercial interests that are often linked to high-ranking government officials.

Another factor driving Thailand’s handling of the Burmese migrant issue is Bangkok’s desire to foster favorable ties with the regime in Naypyidaw. The poverty of its people notwithstanding, Burma possesses considerable natural wealth, and Bangkok has consistently overlooked its neighbor’s human rights record in exchange for access to its abundant resources. Thai leaders therefore tend to tread softly when addressing the root cause of the mass migration of Burmese into their country.

Ironically, friendly relations between the two governments have only served to create a more hostile environment for ordinary Burmese, at home as well as in their host country.

“Our hunger for Burma’s natural resources has caused the locals much suffering,” wrote political commentator Sunisuda Ekachai in the Bangkok Post, a leading English-language daily. She noted that the construction of pipelines which carry natural gas to Thailand and plans to build a mega-dam on the Salween River to help meet Thai energy needs have resulted in various forms of state-sponsored violence against ethnic minorities living in affected areas, forcing many across the border, either as refugees or as dispossessed farmers seeking work as unskilled laborers.

In Thailand, Burmese migrants are viewed unsympathetically by the general public and as a nuisance by many officials who do not directly profit from their presence. Police routinely extort money from them under threat of arrest and deportation. But an insatiable demand for cheap labor in Thailand and a deepening economic crisis in Burma mean that migrants will continue to flow across the border, inviting further tragedy.

In the wake of the mass suffocation incident in Ranong, the International Labour Organization and local labor rights groups in Thailand called on the government to overhaul its immigration policy. Specifically, this would involve expanding the migrant registration system to give more Burmese and other foreign workers in Thailand legal status, reducing their reliance on crime syndicates to get them into the country.

Some, such as activist and former Thai senator Jon Ungphakorn, would go even further, urging the government to open Thailand’s borders to migrant workers from neighboring countries with very few restrictions. The only losers, he argues, would be the human-smuggling mafias.

In the absence of a realistic, forward-thinking migrant labor policy, however, the Thai authorities have fallen back on their standard practice of treating migrants as criminals.