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without switching it.

But as we move our economic development wider,
Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and others, Thailand has found

that we don’t have cheap labor anymore. What do we do?
Thailand cannot import labor from the Philippines; it’s too far

and the Filipinos won’t come to work in the fishery industry
of Thailand. The countries that Thailand attracts cheap labor
from are countries immediately connected with Thailand: Laos,

Cambodia, Myanmar. We talked to a construction company.
They said that we would like to import Bangladeshian and

Indonesians, but that has not been decided. So, a lot of low
skilled and low wage workers come to ASEAN. That is entirely
another area that ASEAN will have to work on. How to help?

How to protect? How to sustain?

Here is my observation. Countries that export would

like a stronger regime and regulations to promote and to protect
the rights, the privileges and the welfare of their own people.
That’s why the Declaration on Migrant Workers is to take place

in the Philippines because Philippines has eight or nine million
people working around the world and there are Filipinos working

in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippine government looks at
this army of workers outside the country as heroes bringing in
foreign exchange into the economy, 25-26 billion US dollars a

year, so countries that export workers would like to have their
rights, their privileges and their welfare protected or improved.

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