Paper Title
The Impact of the ASEAN Economic Community on Migrant Labor on the Thai-Malaysian Border

Abstract
The advent of the ASEAN Economic Community (hereafter, AEC) in 2015 heralded a new era of economic integration in Southeast Asia. The AEC’s most ambitious measure, and the measure which had the most immediate and dramatic impact on the region’s economy, was the single market. The goal of the single market was to reduce tariffs on trade between ASEAN countries to as close to zero as possible in order to create an integrated market and production base spanning the entire ASEAN region. On the Thai-Malaysian border, this created a unique situation. Thailand and Malaysia are countries with a similar level of economic development, and as such, cross-border labor migration between the two seems unlikely. However, as the AEC incorporates the entirety rather than just Thailand and Malaysia, labor migration on the Thai-Malaysian border does not only involve nationals of Thailand and Malaysia, but nationals of all AEC countries as well. The result is that many of the migrants who cross the Thai-Malaysian border for the purpose of work, as well as the migrant laborers employed in border economic zones, are from relatively underdeveloped ASEAN countries such as Cambodia and Myanmar rather than Thailand and Malaysia. Keywords - Migrant Labor, ASEAN Economic Community, Thailand, Malaysia