BANG KOK: The government’s policy to encourage more births of “Thai” children to help offset the cost of a rapidly approaching ageing society reflects deep-rooted racial prejudice in policy formulation. Of course, the authorities would fiercely deny it. They would argue it’s simple economy.
Thailand is ageing rapidly. Within the next two decades, the number of the elderly will rise to over 20 million, or one-third of the total population. More than 12 million of them, according to the Thailand Development Research Institute, will be older than 70 years old. With a heavy healthcare burden ahead, the country urgently needs more young able-bodied people to work and pay enough tax to support the elderly. A tax policy to encourage more births is necessary, so the argument goes. Of course we should have policies to cope with an ageing society but I doubt this tax break policy will work. According to this policy, parents will get a tax break of 30,000 baht for their second child born from this year onwards, starting next year. It will take another 20 years for these second-born children to be able to work and pay tax to meet the policy objective. While the government has revealed it would lose about 1.25 billion baht in revenue from the tax break policy, it fails to realise that the tax break privilege has little or nothing to do with parents’ decision to have children, given the exorbitant costs overall involved in child rearing.
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Meanwhile, there are now hundreds thousands of children waiting to be embraced and supported by the state. Many were born in Thailand but undocumented. Many are abandoned at birth in hospitals. Many are homeless. Many are migrant children rejected by their parents’ home countries. All of them end up stateless in Thailand. Being stateless, you do not exist legally, so you cannot have access to healthcare services and any state-sponsored aid schemes.
Lacking life and job security, stateless people mostly end up being exploited by employers, extorted by corrupt police, or pushed into the underground economy run by mafia.
At present, adopting abandoned stateless babies or homeless children is not possible by law. Adoption is only possible if those stateless children are already in orphanages. Even when they are, adoption remains difficult due to red tape.
Similarly, migrant children who grow up here and want to remain in Thailand face an uncertain future with no security, vulnerable to all forms of exploitation.
