Migrant Workers
Many Isan people have sought work elsewhere. In the first half of the 1990s, 420,000 workers moved elsewhere in Thailand (60% of them to Bangkok). Many of the taxicab drivers, shop and factory workers and construction workers in the capital are from Isan. The economic advantages of migrant labour have come at a social cost: while some workers migrate annually, other families are divided often for many years.
Other workers from Isan move abroad, with 108,000 emigrating in 2002. In that year migrant workers overseas remitted 29.5 million baht.
Rural Isan is a disproportionate supplier of workers to the sex trade: this is partly a legacy of the Vietnam-era US bases, and partly due to the region’s poverty. The Thai government’s National Economic and Social Development Board estimates remittances from Isan women overseas to amount to $35m per annum (equivalent to 6% of the region’s economic output) .
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Isan
Famous quotes containing the words migrant and/or workers:
“As soon as the harvest is in, you’re a migrant worker. Afterwards just a bum.”
—Nunnally Johnson (1897–1977)
“In former times and in less complex societies, children could find their way into the adult world by watching workers and perhaps giving them a hand; by lingering at the general store long enough to chat with, and overhear conversations of, adults...; by sharing and participating in the tasks of family and community that were necessary to survival. They were in, and of, the adult world while yet sensing themselves apart as children.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)