The wage results shown in Table 2 refer only to private employees. This raises the
question of how immigration is affecting other workers, such as those in the informal
sector. An indirect way of assessing the effects on other workers is to examine the
relationship between migration and the sectoral distribution of Thai workers. If migration
has a different effect on private employees than on other types of workers, then migration
should induce Thais to leave or enter private employment. We test for this possibility by
regressing the percentage of the labor force (other than government employees) working
as private employees against the same set of variables as earlier, again instrumenting on
distance to the border As can be seen in column 3 of Table 4, migration appears to have
a negative relationship with private employment. The estimated coefficient and the semilog
form of the specification imply that a ten percent increase in migrant numbers is
associated with a 0.1 percentage point reduction in the proportion of the district labor
force working as a private employee