Three years ago, worried that his earnings as a builder were barely enough to feed his family, Seuy San began to contemplate his prospects over the border in Thailand.
Like the hundreds of thousands of his fellow Cambodians who migrate in search of work each year, he had a simple but powerful motivation: “I heard there were better jobs in Thailand and I knew bahts were worth more than riels, so I decided to go.”
It was a decision that nearly cost him his life. After chatting with others in his village who had made the journey before him, San waited at the border for two days. When night fell on the second day, he crossed the border into Thailand and then waited another day on the other side. Eventually, a group of men appeared in a large pick-up.
“They used their mobile phones as torches to see which of us looked strong, then they laid us next to each other and on top of each other in the back of the pick-up,” says San.
“There were three layers of us, with the strongest at the bottom. There were about 20 of us in the back and they put a plastic sheet over us and told us not to make any noise.”
Eight suffocating hours later, the pick-up stopped in a forest and San and five other Cambodians were herded into a cage and “locked in so that the police wouldn’t find us”. Behind bars in an unknown forest in a strange land, the negotiations began. San and the others were offered $200 (£132) a month – far more than they would make at home – to work on construction sites in Bangkok.
They accepted, only to discover that they would have to pay their captors-cum-employers $80 for transporting them to the Thai capital, $80 for the correct documents, and $30 a month for basics such as mosquito nets.
After working on the site for a month and realising they would never get the salary they had been promised, San and the others ran away – and promptly got lost in the city.
“I asked a Thai taxi driver to take me back to Cambodia,” says San. “I gave him $12 but he drove off without me.”
Desperate and exhausted, San headed into a police station. If he could get himself arrested as an illegal immigrant, he reasoned, they might just deport him home.
But, not for the first time, things weren’t quite what they seemed. The policemen were, in reality, security guards, who turned San and a friend over to a man who said he could help them earn enough money to get back to Cambodia.
They spent two days in a strange house before being loaded into a container, which was loaded on to a truck for what San thinks was a 15-hour journey. When the container was opened, they found themselves on a fishing boat at sea.
“I worked on the boat for about a month, pulling in the nets and collecting the fish,” he says.
“For the first two weeks, I still had some energy but then it faded as I was only sleeping for one hour a day. When we got tired, they gave us a powder to dissolve in water and drink. I threw it away the first time they gave it to me and the second time, but when they saw I hadn’t taken it the third time, they beat me. I knew if I didn’t take the powder, they’d kill me. I don’t know what it was, but when I took it, my energy came back and I didn’t need to eat any rice.”
The food and the drugs – probably amphetamines – weren’t enough to sustain all those on board. One day, the crew lost patience with a Laotian man who was too ill to work.
“They threw him overboard as an example to the rest of us. I was there for a month and I thought I’d die there. They said all the Cambodians on the boat would die.”
Had the boat’s cook not taken pity on the Cambodians and helped them to escape when the boat next put into port, San is sure that he and his friend would have met a similar fate to the Laotian.
Their luck held: after running off the boat and hiding in the bush, the pair eventually stumbled across some genuine Thai policemen who were kind enough to deport them.
While San’s experiences were extreme, they are not unheard of among the legions of Cambodians who head to Thailand in search of work each year. Estimates vary, but the total number of annual migrants is put anywhere between 660,000 and 1 million.
Without the right documents, the migrant workers are easy targets for sexual exploitation, forced labour and modern-day slavery. They are also subject to political upheavals: in June last year, 220,000 labourers fled Thailand amid fears of a crackdown on illegal labour by the military junta.
Migration is common in San’s district, which lies about an hour from the city of Siem Reap in north-western Cambodia. So common, in fact, that he and two dozen others have gathered in the brightly decorated hall of a local temple to share their stories of trafficking and migration.
The self-help group is part of a safer migration programme run by the Italian NGO Gruppo di Volontariato Civile (GVC). The participants, who sit on mats close to a jumble of golden Buddha statues, offer the same reasons for leaving: there’s not enough work to enable them to support their families and even when there is, it’s seasonal and the wages are too low.
The men and women take turns to share their experiences and offer advice or just a sympathetic ear. Many, like San, had found themselves denied the salaries they were promised; others had fled the police and gone into hiding. One man said he had been cheated into handing over $200 for a fake passport in Phnom Penh; a woman had been fined 500 baht (£9.22) a day for being in the country illegally.
Stefania Pirani, who heads the Migra-Safe project for GVC, says the aim of the programme is not to discourage migration, but to educate people about the dangers they could face.
“People really lack basic information: they live in remote areas and all they know is that there’s work in Thailand,” she says. “The decision to go is made in a couple of hours and when people run out of money, they just get in a taxi and go over the border. They don’t know what a passport is or what it looks like.”
As well as facilitating the self-help groups, the project also informs people about how to begin the long, expensive and complicated process of getting a passport, and provides them with information and hotline numbers for the Cambodian embassy in Thailand.
Pirani says that while the regularisation efforts from both the Thai and Cambodian governments have helped to reduce the dangers facing migrants, far more still needs to be done to make migration simpler, cheaper and safer.
Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand need not only a passport, but a work permit visa, an overseas Cambodian worker card and an employment contract.
Although the Cambodian government launched a package in June that offered migrant workers all the necessary documentation – plus transport to the border and food – for $49, the true cost of working legally over the border remains far higher.
“As we know from the villagers, it has been very difficult to get a passport at this price due to the lack of clear and comprehensive information and corruption,” says Pirani.
“It’s not easy to estimate the total cost of the process, but we can say that it can go from $200 up to $500 – and can take from four to six months.” The average annual income in Cambodia is around $1,000 (£665).
Given the cost, the delay and the need to apply in the capital, Phnom Penh, she adds, most Cambodians are still choosing to cross the border without the correct legal documents.
The Migra-Safe project, which has run for two years and reached around 40,000 people, can only do so much.
“If the procedures become easier and cheaper and there’s also the possibility of obtaining documents at a provincial level, the majority of migrants will become regular,” says Pirani.
“The Cambodian government also needs to enforce the laws that already exist to combat human trafficking and labour exploitation, and to respect UN conventions and action plans that have been prepared together with international organisations.
“Most of the time, some of the good initiatives and laws are only on paper and not enforced.”
She points out that both Cambodia and Thailand have much to gain from making migration as safe and easy as possible.
“There are, of course, positive effects for the economy of Thailand, a country that needs a labour force from its poorer, neighbouring countries,” she says. “In the medium- to long-term, there could be also great benefits for the Cambodian economy if there are instruments and policies in place to reintegrate those skilled workers in the country.”
Until then – regularly or irregularly – most of the participants in the self-help group are planning to return to work in Thailand. They have little choice.
However, Seuy San will not be among them: “I would never go back to Thailand, even if I had the right legal documents.”
