The unemployment numbers also ignore foreign workers. While there may be up to 3 million migrant
workers in Thailand from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), they
are mostly undocumented. The government is taking steps to register foreign workers, but the language
barrier is a challenge to increasing their numbers in more skilled sectors, unlike Singapore, which has
addressed its labor force crunch partly with more open borders.With no major labor-market policy changes planned and with the inflation rate falling in January for the
first time since 2009 — and forecast to breach the lower end of the central bank's target range of 1% to
4% this year — there are no signs yet that the government or the monetary authority [overseeing
monetary policy] is unduly worried about the jobless rate. So that rate is going to stay very low.