Business brings in illegals to take jobs from locals

Chinese workers man a drilling machine for soil analysis in preparation
for the building of a railway linking China to Laos.

This Sounds So, So Familiar

• To save on labor costs businesses claim a "labor shortage" and then import foreigners to do menial labor or work in the construction industry. 
• The story is the same the world over - "We need to bring in foreigners to do the work locals won't do."  You bet the locals don't want to work at slave wages.  But desperate foreigners sure will.  

(Vientiane, Laos)  Lao authorities have launched a pilot program in the capital Vientiane to regulate foreign workers in the country, who are taking thousands of low-skill jobs away from locals, according to officials.

As part of the project, the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare is collecting data on foreign workers in the city and setting up a “one-stop service” where undocumented workers can go to sign up for permits, a senior official from the ministry told RFA’s Lao Service.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, did not say whether the documentation process was part of an amnesty for those working illegally, but local news reports did not rule out the prospects of deportation for some reports Radio Free Asia.

Efforts to regulate the city’s undocumented foreign workers—many of them from neighboring Vietnam, China, and Thailand—will be used to help develop similar programs in the rest of the country, he said.

There are an estimated 4,900 illegal workers in the city of Vientiane, many of them engaged in menial labor or in the construction industry.  

“Right now we don’t have a model that other provinces can follow. The capital Vientiane will be the test case, because it is central and administered by the Ministry of Home Affairs,” the official said.

Many Lao provinces, particularly those bordering China and Vietnam, face problems with foreigners entering the country on tourist visas and staying to work, he said.
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According to recent statistics from the ministry collected as part of the pilot program, the city has some 7,500 foreign workers, 4,900 of them undocumented.

More than 3,200 of them are from Vietnam, 2,500 from China, 600 from Thailand, and 1,000 from other countries.
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