Thailand Emigration and Immigration

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Emigration and Immigration

Thai nationals make up the majority of Thailand's population, 95.9% in 2010. The remaining 4.1% of the population are Burmese (2.0%), others 1.3%, and unspecified 0.9%. Increasing numbers of migrants from neighboring Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia, as well as from Nepal and India, have pushed the total number of non-national residents to around 3.5 million as of 2009, up from an estimated 2 million in 2008, and about 1.3 million in 2000. Some 41,000 Britons and 20,000 Australians live in Thailand.

• The largest foreign community are the Burmese, followed by the Cambodians and Laotians.
• As of March 2018, Thai government data showed that over 770,900 Cambodian migrants, meaning five percent of the total population of Cambodia, currently live in Thailand. Some NGOs estimate that the actual number may be up to one million.
• Laotians are particularly numerous considering the small size of Laos' population, about seven million, due to the lack of a language barrier.
• The Chinese expatriate employee population in Thailand, mostly Bangkok, has doubled from 2011-2016, making it the largest foreign community in Thailand not originating in a neighbouring country. Chinese hold 13.3 percent of all work permits issued in Thailand, an increase of almost one-fifth since 2015. *Japanese expats are on the decline, and now rank sixth, behind Chinese and British. One in every four foreigners working in Thailand formerly were Japanese, and the figure has now dropped slightly to 22.8 percent of the foreign workforce as of late-2016.
• In 2018, Thailand issued almost 80,000 retirement visas, an increase of 30% from 2014, with Britons accounting for the majority of the new visas.
• In 2010 there were 27,357 Westerners living in the northeastern region, 90 percent living with Thai spouses.