1.1 Statement of Problem
“RGC has set out 2 objectives: … reduce the gap between urban and rural areas, and improve the living standards of people as well as reduce migration from rural to urban areas and to foreign countries to seek jobs.” (RGC, 2014:163).
Cambodia has experienced a rapid increase of migration both within and across border during the past two decades. However, the issue has just recently become a topic of the main concerns despite rising tensions since 1999. In early June 2014, Thai military junta moved to curb and deported more than 225,000 Cambodian illegal migrant workers back to their homeland, according to the data provided by IOM (2014). As a consequence of this unprecedented exodus, the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) urgently negotiated with the Thai government to legalize those workers so that they could go back to their workplace. Meanwhile, Cambodian urban citizens were criticizing the legalization method to have encouraged rather than mitigated migration of people at risk. As a response, the National Strategic Development Plan 2014 – 2018 was passed in late July 2014, and the RGC redirected its policy toward reducing migration.
Labor migration in Cambodia can be traced back to the political crisis there in the last forty years. The political situation in Cambodia has become relatively stable after gaining a membership in the ASEAN in 1999. However, the stability of Cambodian political arena has contributed little to reduce migration. Poverty and agricultural problems have played a major role in pushing people to search for a job in the urban city or other countries of better development, such as Thailand, Malaysia, and South Korea. Until this last decade can we see the migration concern listed as a priority to the public. Since then, some few constructive studies have been done; but they have focused mainly on remittances and poverty reduction in response to the state’s interest then (Chan, 2009; Tong, 2011). As a result, the causes of migration and factors that contribute to migration decision at the individual level of concerns were not paid much attention to until mid-2014, when the debates about migration heated up.
While I also agree that remittances can be used to improve a family’s living standard, their contribution alone does not go without any side effect. Even though Cambodian rural household’s income increased from less than 2,000 Baht before their international migration to more than 5,000 Baht later (Jampaklay & Kittisuksathit, 2009), migration does not always lead to more development. Although remittance might be able to contribute to economic growth, other factors also determine to what extent this potential is realized. Under some unfavorable conditions and constraints, remittance hardly succeeds its anticipated purpose. These include poor infrastructure, corruption, and absence of appropriate policies, which are likely to play a role in preventing remittance from contributing to the country of origin, and it may as well lower migrants incentives to return and participate to their home economy (Massey, 1988; De Hass, 2005). Betancourt et al. (2013) sees migration in India as a problematic issue rather than a potential solution to poverty reduction and describes it as a disaster. In the long-term development perspective, labor migration in Cambodia may cause more troubles, given these three-folded reasons.
First, although Cambodia is one of the nations with the longest remaining demographic dividend period in ASEAN, it is reaching its end in approximately 3 decades (Mason, 2005; Wongboonsin & Kinnas, 2005). As a result, the state should instead try to take this unique advantage of its large working age population to boost the economic growth now to provide resource for the future after the window fades away instead of exporting labor force to elsewhere. As a sending country, Cambodia loses this favorable moment to capitalize their manpower to maximize demographic dividend, and once these workers return home after entering old age, it can be expected that they will turn into financial burden rather than bonus to the society (Wongboonsin, 2004). Likewise, it is important to examine why rural population keeps moving away in order to reduce migration rate including the rural-urban because even internal migration can swell urban labor forces and deplete rural human capital creating an uneven development and result in a large difference in the dividend between regions. Moreover, if the first dividend is not strong enough, triggering the second dividend remains almost impossible to achieve (Mason & Lee, 2006)
Second, Cambodia can be expected to experience a slow growth of the stock of the young population, who will later turn into human capital to contribute to the rural labor market once they reach their working age. The notion refers not only to those who become dependent migrants themselves and those who were born in receiving areas, but also to those left beh