One photograph in a recent Nikkei Asia report says more about Southeast Asia’s tech economy than most investor decks I have read this year. It shows Myanmar refugees working on a data centre construction site in Chonburi, eastern Thailand.
Sit with that for a moment. People who spent years, sometimes decades, in border camps without the legal right to earn a baht are now pouring concrete for the server halls that will train and run the region’s AI models. The cloud, it turns out, still stands on very human shoulders.
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Thailand did not arrive here out of generosity. It arrived here because it ran out of workers. And the way it handles that shortage is a test, not just of its human rights record, but of whether the region’s startup ecosystem is building for the economy it actually has, or the one it pitches.
A labour model held together with border passes
The trigger was the deadly Thailand-Cambodia border conflict that erupted in July 2025. Cambodian workers began heading home in their hundreds of thousands. A Thai Labour Ministry analysis later cited a Cambodian estimate of 780,000 returns, including undocumented migrants and family members, according to the South China Morning Post. The exact figure is contested, but nobody disputes the hole it left in construction, farming and fisheries.
The bigger story is how exposed Thailand was in the first place. In one recent Department of Employment count, Myanmar nationals made up 2.27 million of the 3.14 million legal workers Thailand drew from nine Southeast Asian countries. Add an ageing population and a low birth rate, and you have an economy whose factories, building sites and fishing boats run on neighbours who can be sent home, or scared home, by a single border flare-up.
Bangkok’s response has been a scramble: holding on to Myanmar workers already in the country, a pilot scheme to bring in Sri Lankans and, most consequentially, opening the refugee camps.
A historic door, opened a crack
Credit where it is due. In October 2025, Thailand let long-staying refugees in its nine border camps work legally outside them for the first time. Some of these camps date back to the 1980s. The UN refugee agency called the move a turning point, and it was. It came just as US aid cuts forced groups such as The Border Consortium to halt most assistance, leaving more than 100,000 camp residents short of food and healthcare.
Now look at the numbers. Roughly 42,000 people of working age were deemed eligible. One year in, the Thai government says 6,800 refugees have joined the labour force, according to Deutsche Welle. That is about one in six.
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The reasons are not mysterious. Rights groups report that many participants receive no contract, and that conditions and pay are worse than promised. Some refugees repay employers through wage deductions for medical checks, permits and transport, which means they start work already in debt.
If that sounds familiar, it should. Debt-financed recruitment is the oldest trap in Southeast Asia’s migrant labour system. Thailand has opened a historic door, then left the old toll booth standing in front of it.
Robots are not coming to the longan farm
The tech industry’s instinctive answer to a labour shortage is to automate it. Some Thai economists even urged the government to adopt new technologies to cut reliance on labour-intensive work after the Cambodian exodus. Physical AI is the hottest pitch in the region, and plenty of decks doing the rounds promise robots for warehouses, construction and agriculture.
Some of that will happen, slowly. But be honest about the timeline and the economics. The jobs the Cambodians left (the so-called 3D jobs: dirty, difficult and dangerous) sit on longan farms in Chanthaburi, on fishing boats and on scaffolding. These are messy, unstructured environments, run by small employers on thin margins. They will not be buying humanoids at robotaxi prices any time this decade.
The automation pitch also carries a quiet assumption: that the people doing this work are a temporary inconvenience to be engineered away. Thailand has more than 3 million documented migrant workers and, by most estimates, a large undocumented population on top. They are not a gap to be closed. They are the economy.
The unglamorous stack that would actually help
Here is the contrarian bet: the bigger opportunity is not replacing these workers but formalising them. Thailand’s refugee scheme is failing at exactly the points where good software works best.
Start with identity. Refugees began receiving non-citizen Thai ID cards in June, a step away from statelessness. One card can unlock a bank account, a phone contract and a wage. Pair that with e-KYC built for people whose documents come from a camp, not a junta, and you remove the first wall.
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Then fix the debt. Recruitment fees and deductions survive because they are invisible. Digital contracts in Burmese and Karen, earned-wage access and payroll that itemises every deduction would make the toll booth visible, and visible fees are much harder to inflate.
Then remittances. The informal hundi network still moves much of the money from Thailand to Myanmar, and UNESCAP has noted that strict KYC rules push migrants towards it. Formal rails already exist: DeeMoney, TrueMoney and 2C2P’s Wave app all send money into Myanmar wallets. What they lack is reach among workers that banks still treat as a compliance risk.
Finally, worker voice. Issara Institute’s Golden Dreams app already lets migrants rate employers and recruiters in Burmese and Khmer, a Tripadvisor for bosses. That model deserves venture-scale ambition, not grant-scale budgets.
None of this is a moonshot. It is fintech and HR tech, the two categories Southeast Asian investors claim to understand best, pointed at the customers they have mostly ignored.
Dignity is also a business model
The refugees now working legally in Thailand earn roughly 3,000 baht (about US$90) a week on some farms, a life-changing sum for families who lived on rations. They want to send money home, build credit and change jobs without paying a broker. That is a customer base with clear needs and no good products.
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The lesson travels. Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand all run on migrant labour, and each has its own version of the debt trap. The region’s founders love to talk about the unbanked. Very few of them build for the workers pouring the concrete under their data centres.
Thailand has shown that a government can change a 40-year-old policy when the economics force its hand. The question now is whether the startup ecosystem will help that policy work, or wait for the robots.
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