"Every year, around 50,000 people reportedly leave Burma in search of work elsewhere. Estimates of the number of Burmese migrant workers who live outside Burma?s borders have varied greatly however, and depend on whether both registered and illegal workers are taken into account. While Burma?s Prime Minister, Thein Sein, claimed in December 2008 that a mere 46,057 Burmese migrant workers were legally employed abroad, Burma Economic Watch has estimated that around two million migrant workers and refugees live elsewhere. In contrast, Irrawaddy has reported that, of the estimated three million Burmese migrant workers who are employed abroad, around half work illegally.3 In contrast to this figure, Moe Swe of the Burma Workers? Rights Protection Committee (BWRPC) has put the overall figure at four million. It has also been estimated that up to ten percent of the Burmese population resides outside of Burma. Such patterns of migration are likely to persist, as the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has stated that it expects the flow of Burmese migrant workers to increase in the coming years...Many Burmese migrant workers have not fled for a single reason or because of a single event. Rather, many have left as a result of what Andrew Bosson has described as the ?cumulative impact” of coercive measures and economic conditions, which push down families? incomes until they can no longer survive in their present locations.14 For instance, the Burmese junta?s policies of forced labour, land confiscation and compulsory cropping have further impoverished an already desperate rural population. The result, Bosson argues, has not been a dramatic or spontaneous exodus of migrant workers and refugees, but rather a slower process of ?gradual displacement.”..."