Far From Home
Coming Soon…
“The key human rights issue within Thailand and more broadly within the region is migration related,” says Ben Harkins, a veteran labor rights and migration expert in Southeast Asia. With over seventeen years of work across the region, Harkins has come to see migration as the defining human rights issue of our time— one that cuts across borders, economies, and politics.
Harkins began his work on the Thai-Myanmar border in the late 2000s as a field coordinator for Première Urgence Internationale, providing healthcare in sprawling refugee camps like Mae La and Mae Ra Ma Luang. Tens of thousands of refugees—mostly from ethnic minority groups such as the Karen—lived in limbo, confined to bamboo huts and ringed by barbed wire. Entire families fled violence with only what they could carry, surviving years of uncertainty. “It's only been this year, in fact, that we've finally seen a major transition in refugee policy in Thailand, where they are allowing at least the camp-based refugees to legally start working outside of the camps,” he notes. For Harkins, this long-overdue policy shift offers a glimpse of long-denied freedom.
After his humanitarian work, Harkins transitioned into research, joining Chulalongkorn University’s Asian Research Center for Migration in Bangkok. “The initial thing that came up for me was that the flows from Myanmar are so complex. These are very heterogeneous flows of migrants,” he explains, capturing the intricate web of displacement, labor, and survival that characterizes Myanmar’s migration crisis. At Chulalongkorn, he mapped the massive labor flows sustaining Thailand’s economy—millions of migrants from Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia performing the hardest and least visible work. He came to see migration as not just an economic story but an existential one: a fight for survival in systems that exploit need. His later research with the International Labour Organization (ILO) revealed the persistence of forced labor and human trafficking, particularly in the Thai fishing industry, where he documented conditions akin to modern slavery.
During Myanmar’s brief democratic opening, Harkins moved to Yangon to head the UNOPS Livelihoods and Food Security Trust Fund’s Decent Work and Labour Mobility programme. He hoped that reform would bring meaningful change for workers—but found that exploitation simply took new forms, such as the widespread suppression of independent unions, the intimidation of workers who tried to organize, and the quiet coercion built into everyday labor practices. Garment workers were often forced into unpaid overtime, documents were routinely confiscated, and labor inspectors looked the other way, illustrating how reform had changed the language of exploitation but not its essence.
When the 2021 coup dismantled Myanmar’s fragile progress, the shock was personal and immediate. “Just overnight, my entire world was turned upside down, basically,” Harkins recalls, describing how years of trust and collaboration with colleagues vanished overnight and how the personal bonds he had built through his work were suddenly replaced by fear, loss, and dislocation. The movement he had supported for years—trade unions, migrant networks, and labor activists—was driven underground or destroyed. His reports on labor resistance were publicly denounced in the junta’s propaganda outlet, the Global New Light of Myanmar, which accused him of spreading false information and pressured the ILO in Geneva to retract his findings. The attack only underscored how threatening his documentation of labor abuses had become under military rule. Migration, once a coping mechanism, now became a means of escape from persecution. “Migration itself has become weaponized in many ways by the military junta,” he says, describing how the regime taxes workers abroad, seizes remittances, and uses migration policies to control dissent.
In the years following the 2021 coup, new debates emerged over whether international businesses should continue operating in Myanmar under military rule. Some argued that a continued presence could protect jobs, prevent total economic collapse, and preserve some measure of corporate responsibility amid chaos. But Harkins rejects that argument outright. “You just can't have responsible business if you don't have fundamental labor rights for workers,” he says. For him, the idea that international companies could help safeguard workers under a regime defined by repression and fear is little more than an illusion. The junta’s destruction of trade unions, suppression of collective bargaining, and systematic use of forced labor meant that no enterprise—foreign or local—could operate ethically. Without freedom of association, fair contracts, and legal protection, every investment risked enabling the same system of abuse it claimed to oppose. In this light, Harkins sees post-coup business engagement not as a solution, but as complicity in the junta’s exploitation.
Now based in Bangkok, Harkins continues to advocate for migrant rights and reform. He often points out the deep irony in Thailand’s dependency on Myanmar labor. “There should be an understanding that it's a great thing for Thailand's economy that there are so many Myanmar workers that are coming here, looking to work, often doing jobs that Thai nationals don't want to do,” he says. Yet he also exposes the moral failure at the heart of this relationship: “They're willing to make use of the labor. But they're not willing to admit migrants as human beings.” His words cut to the heart of a quiet hypocrisy—an economy that depends on workers it refuses to recognize.
Reflecting on the broader historical context, Harkins stresses that “migration is so fundamental to the Myanmar experience for many decades.” It has shaped livelihoods, families, and the national psyche, serving as both survival strategy and act of endurance. From the refugee camps of Mae La to the factories of Yangon and the ports of Samut Sakhon, Harkins’s work documents this continuum of movement—how migration defines a nation perpetually in motion.
Today, as a Technical Specialist for the ILO’s Ship to Shore Rights South-East Asia program, Harkins continues to fight exploitation in the fishing and seafood industries. He knows the challenges are enormous but believes advocacy within large institutions still matters. “The least I can do is make use of the voice that I have within the UN system to try to support these principles of social justice as much as I can,” he says. For him, even within the constraints of bureaucracy, that voice remains a tool of resistance—and of hope.