Cambodia: Returned Migrant Workers Face Hunger, Joblessness

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1. SS: Human Rights Watch, citing its deputy Asia director Bryony Lau, reports that after Phnom Penh urged Cambodians in Thailand to come home during the mid-2025 border hostilities, over 900,000 migrants returned to a state that lacks both the capacity and incentive to absorb them, leaving many jobless, hungry, and trapped under heavy microfinance debt that originally pushed them abroad; the report says promises of tens of thousands of jobs and social support largely failed to materialize, while predatory lenders and weakly enforced regulation keep borrowers paying through meal-skipping, medical neglect, and fear of losing land pledged as collateral, and Thai discrimination and violence during the crisis have shut off the usual escape valve of remigration; in HRW’s telling, Cambodia’s long-standing underinvestment in health, education, and rural livelihoods has produced a structural dependence on debt and foreign labor markets, so when interstate tensions cut access to Thailand’s economy the most vulnerable bear the costs, prompting HRW to call for rapid job placement, debt restructuring, and tougher controls on lenders as essential steps to prevent a politically destabilizing spiral of land loss and impoverishment.

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