Illness, Poverty, and Abuse of Migrants on the Thai-Burma Border: The Vulnerability of a Displaced People

Migration is a principal contemporary issue, and related humanitarian issues are among the most challenging that society now faces. This is well illustrated among the many thousands of people from diverse ethnic groups from Burma living on the Thai-Burma border weighed down by multiple and cumulative adverse social determinants of health. Gross human rights abuses by Burma's military-dominated government, poverty, and armed conflict in recent decades have caused these people to flee from Burma to Thailand, many through Three Pagodas Pass on the border of Sangkhlaburi District. However, rather than finding safe refuge in Thailand, the migrants can find themselves in an equally bad, or worse, situation. As non-Thais, they are precluded from many rights and privileges of Thai citizens, and the majority - those who do not go to refugee camps - struggle to eke out a living in a state of fear and uncertainty. Unable to return to Burma for fear of repercussions, and in Thailand discriminated against as non-citizens, they suffer, and this suffering remains largely ignored by the affluent Western world.