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Receiving countries don’t want to do anything with
that. We don’t want responsibilities, accountabilities or more
burden on us. As a caring and sharing community, ASEAN, we

have to think about it, too. As a landscape of ten economies
mutually dependent on each other, we have to take care of our

workers, we have to protect their rights, we have to promote
their interests and we have to maintain their welfare because
they have to be a part of a legal protection of each and every

economy that they move into. Otherwise, this landscape is not
going to be a caring and sharing society of community as the

words are enshrined in our ASEAN anthem. The last paragraph
of the ASEAN anthem is “we dare to dream and we care to
share”.

A forum like this is going to make that phrase, as the
rational phase in the ASEAN anthem, a reality. So, the other

problem is this: in spite of the fact that my driver is a foreigner,
my gardener is a foreigner, a nanny of my children is also a
foreigner, my cook is a foreigner, UNHCR made the survey around

ASEAN, 80-90 percent of employers of those unskilled laborers
said foreigners are a nuisance. Attitude has to be changed.

I hope you take that. Perception and mindset about each other
have to be changed and that is we know we have to depend on
foreign workers, those countries, those member states including

Thailand. So, we have to streamline labor market coming in
and going out of this country. I use Thailand as an example.

We cannot leave it under a dark cover.

Policy Forum 29

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