A Change of Guard

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Tuesday 16 November 2010

Expensive passport, but few pages for Cambodian immigrants in Thailand

Dear Khmerization,

There are around 100,000 Cambodia immigrants who have worked in Thailand to date. Most of them do not have work permit cards and workers passports (blue color). There are at least two reasons that cause them not to have these documents: cost and illiteracy.

In this e-mail, I would like to focus only on the price and irregularity of those documents. Many immigrants complained that the price of the documents and processes are too expensive. They have to spend around 10,000 Bath or 333 USD to get these documents done. Surprisingly, the passport that is provided by Cambodian authorities has very, very few pages (around 4 pages in total). So, they can make only a few re-entry visas then the pages of the passport will be used up. Again, they have to pay another 1520 Bath or 50.62 USD to have a new book/passport. This is different from passports for Burmese and Laotian immigrants that have up to 20 pages.

With current passport, Cambodian immigrants can make a few re-entry visas only. This is one of the reasons that illegal border crossing is frequently happened. Illegal border crossing causes a lot of imprisonments and casualties so far. Therefore, providing a passport with more pages will reduce some illegal border crossing since there is no one wants to risk their live.

Please note that Cambodian immigrants orally complained this issue (page limitation and cost) to Cambodian competent authorities in Bangkok already, but they have received no respond.

After receiving this e-mail, I greatly appreciate if you could look into this matter at your earliest convenient.

Thank you very much in advance.

Sincerely,

Khmerization Reader

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