When 21-year-old Van* arrived in Malaysia, he hoped he could finally catch his breath. He had spent almost a month trekking through the jungle to escape the civil war ravaging his village in Myanmar. “The worst thing was that it was constantly raining, and there were leeches and mosquitoes at night,” he said. “We couldn’t use the light, otherwise people would spot us.”
Van soon found that daily life was arduous for refugees in Malaysia. The country is not party to the 1951 Refugee Convention nor its 1967 Protocol, which constitute the main pieces of international law outlining refugee rights and member state obligations. Neither are Thailand and Indonesia, which have in recent years also seen an influx of refugees from Myanmar. National laws in all three countries treat refugees as illegal immigrants.
In Kuala Lumpur, Van started working illegally as a teacher for refugee children. “I was always the person who tried very hard in school,” he said, laughing. “That’s why I really enjoy teaching the kids.” Even though refugees are technically not allowed to work or attend school in Malaysia, many are forced to break the law in order to survive. Some find informal employment in the construction or hospitality sectors, while parents try to send their children to “community learning centers,” informal schools run by refugee communities.
The Malaysian government is aware that refugees like Van are working jobs or attending community learning centers. They have mostly been willing to look the other way as long as refugees register with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the U.N. Refugee Agency. Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia have allowed the UNHCR to operate country offices and protect refugees in their territories.
The UNHCR screens asylum applications and provides refugees with registration documents that, for the most part, shield them from police harassment or detention. Currently, there are about 190,000 registered refugees in Malaysia, 90,000 in Thailand, and 14,000 in Indonesia, many of them from Myanmar. But the wait time for a UNHCR appointment can be months, if not years, leaving tens of thousands of unregistered refugees in a precarious situation.
Deep Cuts
Now, the Trump administration’s USAID funding cuts have drastically undermined the already stretched operational capacities of UNHCR. With 40 percent of its donations coming from the United States, the UNHCR announced in March that it had been forced to freeze $300 million in planned activities globally. Country operations in Southeast Asia will have to reduce programming budgets and let go of staff, affecting the scale at which they can register refugees and provide other services.
But the U.S. funding cuts did not stop with the UNHCR; they crippled an entire ecosystem of refugee NGOs in Southeast Asia.
“The sudden funding cut felt like a bomb to us,” Rosemary Chong, director of A Call to Serve (ACTS), told The Diplomat. ACTS is one of many local NGOs that serves refugees and has worked with the UNHCR. Founded in 2003, ACTS has offered primary care services to about 18,000 refugees in Malaysia last year through its mobile clinics, permanent clinic, and convalescent home – the only one admitting refugees in the country. ACTS has also trained refugee community leaders as health educators, reaching in turn an additional 10,000 refugees.
For the past ten years, ACTS has relied on yearly grants by the U.S. State Department. Now that these grants are gone, ACTS has suspended its health workshops, is decreasing its number of mobile clinics, and will reduce the permanent clinic’s number of operating days from five to three. But Chong is determined to keep the convalescent home running. “We have to continue with the home because there are many refugees who are seriously ill… and they have no other home to turn to,” she said.
The Kachin ethnic group is of the many refugee communities that have relied on ACTS’s services. The secretary of the Kachin Refugee Committee (KRC) is very worried about the decline of ACTS. “We are afraid to go to the official, local clinics because they demand a lot of money or a lot of documents, so now we are facing severe medical problems in our community,” said the secretary. The KRC was founded in 2003 by Kachin refugees in Malaysia and currently serves more than 10,000 members. It helps Kachin refugees to register with the UNHCR and access medical care, and it tries to protect refugees against police harassment and detention. Even though refugee-led organizations like the KRC haven’t received direct funding from the U.S., they have worked closely with a range of U.S.-funded NGOs providing services like healthcare, education, and shelter.
Another critical partner NGO was the International Catholic Migration Network (ICMC), which was forced to close its operations in March due to the U.S. funding cuts. In the past, KRC referred survivors of gender-based violence to the ICMC, which would offer shelter and mental health resources. The KRC’s secretary warned that the closure of the ICMC has had detrimental effects on women and girls: “We recently had a case of a domestic worker who faced sexual harassment by her employer,” said the secretary, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The girl is undocumented, she couldn’t do anything to address this issue. We are no longer able to refer this kind of case [to the ICMC]. Many women in our community are facing this kind of issue.”
The U.S. funding cuts have put the safety and well-being of many refugee women and children in ASEAN at risk. The Myanmar Ethnic Women Refugee Organization (MEWRO) has felt the brunt of these cuts. Every month, refugee women – many of them single mothers and survivors of gender-based violence – approach MEWRO for financial and administrative support or shelter. “Refugee women are so vulnerable,” said MEWRO’s spokesperson. With the closure of the ICMC, only two shelters remain that MEWRO can refer refugee women to. MEWRO also provides monthly stipends to vulnerable women for food and rent, but funds are drying up quickly.
Despite her determination to continue protecting refugee women, MEWRO’s spokesperson is tired: “We can’t even imagine the future. We are very lost. Where do we send women who need shelter?”
A Legal Limbo
In addition to its USAID cuts, the Trump administration has also indefinitely suspended its global refugee resettlement program. The United States has taken by far the most refugees from Myanmar among any country in the world. Between 2001 and 2019, the U.S. resettled over 170,000 refugees from Myanmar, the highest number of any country of origin. Other countries, like EU members or Australia, have only resettled a small number. The vast majority of Myanmar refugees in ASEAN countries will be stuck for at least the next four years, as was the case during the first Trump administration.
In light of ever-rising numbers of Myanmar refugees with dwindling livelihood support, some are calling for ASEAN countries to grant refugees legal status, including the right to work and the right to formal education. “There are activities that cost money, but there are also things that governments can do that don’t really cost them very much money,” said Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director at the advocacy group Human Rights Watch. “The best example of this in the region we’re discussing is legal status.”
In the past, ASEAN countries have refused to grant refugees legal status to deter them from entering the country. But these deterrence strategies have not succeeded. No matter how terrible conditions are for refugees in Malaysia, they are much worse in Myanmar and Bangladesh, which hosts around 1 million Rohingya Muslims driven out of western Myanmar in 2017. Refugees have not stopped fleeing war crimes, crimes against humanity, or the chaos and crime of the refugee camps in Bangladesh. Myanmar is experiencing one of the most protracted and complex civil wars in modern history, with no end in sight. The crisis ranks third on the International Rescue Committee’s 2025 Emergency Watchlist, trailing only Sudan and Palestine.
Legal status would not only make refugees’ lives significantly easier; it could also benefit ASEAN countries’ economies. The Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS), a leading Malaysian think tank, estimated in a 2019 report that “if refugees are given the right to work, their contribution to annual GDP would increase to over RM3 billion [$690 million] by 2024 through higher spending” and “could increase to over RM6.5 billion each year by 2040 with annual contribution in taxes of over RM250 million.” Although the report lacks Malaysia-specific data, its general findings are intuitive: refugees who work legally have a higher purchasing power because their employers are required to pay them minimum wage. Refugees who work legally also have to pay taxes to the government.
The current government practice in Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia – prohibiting refugees from working legally, but looking the other way once they have U.N. documents – has no real benefits. First, the status quo incentivizes employers to hire refugees over working-class nationals since the former are willing to work for lower salaries and in worse conditions than the latter. Second, the government delays the entry of unregistered refugees into the workforce, even though unemployment rates are as low as 1 percent in Thailand, 3 percent in Malaysia, and 5 percent in Indonesia. Why make refugees, employers, and the UNHCR jump through administrative hoops just to ultimately let refugees work anyway?
Malaysia and Indonesia should also allow refugee children to attend public schools. Thailand has already done so. Under its “Education for All” policy, in effect since 2005, refugee children have the right to 12 years of free education in the public school system, plus three years of preschooling. Although the policy still lacks implementation, in principle it offers refugee children a pathway to gain literacy, proficiency in the local language, and basic skills. It helps transmit the host country’s civic values and facilitates integration with the local community.
“Kids need to know that they have a future and that they have some way of making their future a reality through education,” said Dr. Priya Pillai, director of the Asia Justice Coalition. Pillai, who has supported legal proceedings against the Myanmar military in international courts, has warned that an entire generation of Myanmar refugee children are growing up with little to no access to formal education. This generation of refugee children will eventually enter the labor economy in ASEAN countries – most of them illegally. From ASEAN countries’ perspective, this should be an opportunity to invest in refugee children’s future through education.
All Quiet on the ASEAN Front
So far, however, experts have been skeptical about ASEAN’s management of the regional refugee crisis. Lau of Human Rights Watch said that since the Rohingya boat crisis of 2015, when thousands of people from Rakhine State undertook dangerous ocean journeys in a bid to reach Malaysia and other Southeast Asian nations, “there has been a very consistent call for ASEAN to take steps to provide some kind of a regional protection framework.” Despite the situation inside Myanmar growing worse, “we haven’t seen ASEAN make any progress towards creating some sort of a regional framework that would provide protection,” she said. ASEAN member states rely on the group’s non-interference principle to justify their relatively weak response to the Myanmar refugee crisis.
Pillai agreed that “ASEAN has never been very effective where human rights are concerned.” She doesn’t think ASEAN should be the “lead agency in spearheading a protection entity,” but added that “we still have to keep pushing ASEAN” on other fronts.
Regional change may be best achieved through domestic changes. One successful example at the member-state level was Singapore’s significant reduction in weapons exports to Myanmar in response to a 2023 report by U.N. Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews exposing the country’s weapon trade. Upon Malaysia’s assumption of the ASEAN chairmanship, Andrews opined: “I think there’s a real opportunity because the Malaysian government [has an] interest in addressing this crisis because it impacts Malaysia directly.” In that sense, instating legal status for refugees in Malaysia, Thailand, or Indonesia could have a real effect on the region.
Van recently changed jobs to take a break from teaching. “My current work is related to the mental health of refugees,” he said. “I will always choose to work for the refugees.” In his day-to-day life, Van tries to counter the stigma against Myanmar refugees in Malaysia. “When the Malaysian government hears Myanmar, they think that Myanmar people bring a lot of problems, troubles, and headaches,” he said. “They think Myanmar people fight and drink alcohol and commit crimes.”
But Van knows the character of his people. Remembering Myanmar’s democratic transition in the 2010s, Van asserts that “we’ve had a good education system, we were taken care of by good teachers and parents. We know common sense and how to respect others, how to commit to our work and to take care of our families.” Van hopes to return to a democratic Myanmar within his lifetime. But for now, all he wants is for him and his former students to be able to study and work legally and peacefully in his new home.
*Some names have been changed to protect the real identities of those interviewed for this article.