What is Happening in Thailand?

I have been watching the news from Thailand with sadness and confusion. Once again, there are protests in the streets, calling for the government to resign. The current government came to power as the result of a coup, followed by a dubious election. But most of the protestors support the object of that coup, Thaksin Shinawatra, who is notoriously corrupt and has no respect for human rights or the rule of law. There is no good side in this story.

What saddens me is that not long ago, Thailand was a success story, both economically and politically. Democratic transitions can take a very long time, and Thailand’s was certainly incremental, but by the end of the 1990s, it seemed safe to categorize Thailand as a consolidated democracy.

Thailand was an absolute monarchy until 1932, when a military coup forced the king to relinquish much of his power. Over the next sixty years, the country held regular elections, and often looked like a democracy—until the democratically elected governments got too corrupt, or threatened the power of the military. When that happened, the military would stage a coup d’état, something they did every few years, usually with little violence or popular opposition. There was no question that the generals held the real power.

This led to a strange kind of stability, which, along with pretty good economic policies, helped Thailand to develop rapidly. The benefits of development were distributed unevenly though: Absolute poverty was reduced, but the gap between rural farmers and urban middle and upper classes grew. By the 1980s, the middle class (overwhelmingly in Bangkok) had grown, more Thais were educated, and there was increasing pressure for a more accountable government. In 1991, the military overthrew an elected prime minister because his administration was viewed as unacceptably corrupt, but promised to hold elections ASAP. In fact, they did hold an election in early 1992, but somehow the general who had led the coup won, which didn’t sit well with the people. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest, which was violently quashed by the military, who killed hundreds. Finally, the king stepped in to negotiate a compromise—a caretaker prime minister was put in place for a few months and new elections were held in September 1992. This time, a real civilian government took power, and began work on drafting a new constitution (another favorite pastime of Thai lawmakers).

Throughout the rest of the 1990s, Thai democracy flourished. Crooks were voted in and crooks were voted out. A massive economic crisis caused in large part by a real estate bubble in Thailand spread across the whole region. Thailand’s neighbors, particularly Burma and Cambodia, became increasingly authoritarian. But the Thai military let the civilian democratic process run its course. Finally, elections and peaceful transfers of power became the norm. By then end of the 1990s, when I was in graduate school studying democratization, Thailand was a poster child for a successful democratic transition in a region still ruled mostly by one-party states (the one other exception being the Philippines). It really looked like 1991 was the last of a long series of coups.

Then in 2001, Thaksin Shinawatra was elected prime minister. One of the richest people in the country, he ran a populist campaign and won the hearts of the rural poor. He helped spread development beyond Bangkok and a few other regional centers. He introduced a national health system that made health care affordable and accessible to almost everyone. He cracked down on the drug trade. But the anti-drug campaign, while popular among many Thais, consisted mostly of extrajudicial executions of hundreds of people accused of drug trafficking. Due process was for other countries, not for Thaksin’s Thailand. At the same time, Thaksin’s companies owned many of the newspapers and TV and radio stations in the country, and if the news outlets he didn’t own criticized the government, they risked being shut down. Free speech was for other countries, not for Thaksin’s Thailand. But it was Thaksin and his family’s corruption that finally brought him down. His relatives and cronies made untold millions from insider deals with the government.

By 2006, people were in the streets again—mainly the middle class, much like in 1991. But this time they were protesting against an elected leader. And then, after 15 years without a coup (a long time by Thai standards), the military once again decided that they knew better than the people, and took over the government while Thaksin was out of the country. He was convicted of various corruption charges, and has been unable to return to Thailand for fear of being arrested.

Elections were held again in December 2007, with Thaksin supporters managing to take power in a coalition with smaller parties. In 2008, there were more protests, and eventually the prime minister was forced to resign and his party disbanded because of conflict of interest charges. The Democrat party (which had been in power on and off through the 1990s) formed the government. So now Thaksin supporters are back in the streets, and it looks as if the government will be forced out yet again.

Why this mini-lesson in the convoluted recent political history of a country on the other side of the world (aside from my personal interest because I used to live there)? I think the tendency, when one hears about street protests, and coups, and unstable governments in developing countries is to write them off as inevitable. Those “Third World” countries just can’t learn to govern themselves. But what makes this case so troubling to me is that Thailand really seemed to have become a stable democracy. Even when people were unhappy with the government, they dealt with it in the next election, or through parliamentary processes and courts, not through military intervention or popular intimidation. But then for the last three or four years, they’re back where they were fifteen years earlier. Once again, the right to govern is based on raw might, not by elections and legal systems, and that saddens me.

I don’t know whom to blame. I blame the military leaders for going back to their old tricks of taking out the government when they don’t like it. I blame the middle class protestors who called on the military to oust Thaksin. I blame Thaksin for taking a new democracy and quickly dismantling accountability and the rule of law, and for being so corrupt that a coup seemed like a better option. I blame the rest of the world for letting it all happen.

Here's the latest from the New York Times.

Here is Human Right Watch's most recent statement.

Randall Chamberlain, Lobbyist

I’ve never been a big fan of Washington, DC. On my first visit there, the government buildings, especially the Capitol, turned me off. The big imposing structures, designed to awe and even intimidate, rather than to welcome the populace into the workings of government, seemed to me the antithesis of “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Since moving to New York 14 years ago, I’ve been to Washington many times for many different reasons, and my opinion didn’t change much. As an adopted New Yorker, I am required to regard our neighbor to the south with a degree of disdain: The District of Columbia does not have the diversity, the vibrancy, or the grit of New York; it barely even qualifies as a city.

So I was surprised to find how much I appreciated Washington on a recent visit. Perhaps part of the change in my opinion came from the reason I was there: I traveled to Washington to take part in the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s (AILA) National Day of Action. Several hundred immigration lawyers converged upon the capital to meet with congressional staffers (and a few members of congress themselves) to press for passage of comprehensive immigration reform. That’s right, I was a lobbyist for a day! (More about that below.) Previously, I had gone to Washington to attend conferences, to meet with colleagues, to visit friends, and even to go to a couple of swim meets. But this was my first time there directly related to the town’s raison d’être, the democratic process.

I’ve had a bit of a change of heart about the city, starting with the architecture. The Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, and the buildings surrounding them and housing the various other functions are all clearly designed to convey the message that “This Is An Important Place.” While I wish they had found a way to communicate that message without also expressing exclusivity, it is true that governing a huge country is important; I have begun to appreciate that the buildings themselves help to preserve the gravity and specialness of what goes on inside them.

Walking around Washington, I even came to appreciate the city—at least as an appropriate place for the seat of government, if not as a place I’d like to live. Washington in many ways mirrors the rest of the country quite well. It is a pretty big city, but like most American cities has many more people in the suburbs than in the urban core. The city itself has beautiful mainly white residential neighborhoods, but more than half of the population is African-American. It sits right on the border between the North and the South (although Maryland is below the Mason-Dixon Line, it did not join the Confederacy, and I’ve never met a Marylander who considered herself a Southerner). So while New Yorkers (particularly the eight million of us who live in the five boroughs) walk around in a physical and social environment quite different from the rest of the country, Washingtonians’ day-to-day lives look a lot like those of much of the country, which I guess is a good thing for the people making decisions about those lives.

Like the United States as a whole, Washington is also full of immigrants. As of the last census, 11.9% of people living in the United States and 12.9% of Washingtonians were born in a foreign country. (Check out this publication from the Census Bureau for all kinds of nifty facts on the “foreign-born population.”) And that brings us back to why I was in our nation’s capital. Along with a few hundred other lawyers, I spent the day meeting with congressional staffers to encourage them to pass comprehensive immigration reform this year.

The immigration system in the United States is broken. More than 10 million immigrants are undocumented. (The number is impossible to measure accurately, but estimates range from 10 to 20 million. The figure I heard most often was 11 million. See this paper by the Immigration Policy Center for estimates of where they live by congressional district.) Many immigrants seeking permanent residence based on a job offer are forced to wait up to seven years—even after everything is approved!—before getting a green card. Up until last year, all of the H-1B visas available for temporary skilled workers were used up on the first day they were available. (In 2009 and 2010, because of the economy, there were far fewer applicants.) For family-based immigration, the wait to bring a relative to join you ranges from four years for a spouse or child of a permanent resident (spouses and children of citizens can get a green card immediately) to 22 years if you want to bring a brother or sister from the Philippines. And immigration for same-sex partners? Try Canada. (More on LGBT immigration soon; if you can’t wait for my take on it, check out Immigration Equality.)

Nobody believes this is a good situation, but there is a lot of disagreement over what to do about it. The biggest controversy is over what to do about undocumented immigrants. Many advocate simply deporting them all. Aside from being heartless, and completely impractical, it would have devastating economic consequences: most undocumented immigrants are working, many in jobs that nobody else wants to do. And then there’s the question of letting in more skilled workers: most of the people who would like to come to this country on an H-1B or other work visa would do jobs that we don’t have enough qualified domestic workers to fill. In most cases, they have to prove this to get a visa. And yet, we have arbitrary limits on the number of visas available each year, unrelated to the actual demand for foreign labor.

The argument against immigration reform tends to boil down to this: If we allow more foreigners into the country, they will take jobs away from Americans. But the truth is the opposite. More immigration tends to expand the economy because legal workers earn more, pay more in taxes, and spend more. And the experience of the last couple of years has shown that when there are fewer jobs available here, there are fewer immigrants—either legal or illegal.

President Obama has committed to making immigration reform a priority, but there have been a few other things on the legislative agenda. My day in Washington happened to coincide with the final House vote on health care reform, which was interesting timing for me, but wasn’t great for the lobbying effort. Virtually everyone we spoke to in Washington was so shell-shocked from the battle over health care reform that they did not expect the House and Senate leadership to take on another controversial issue before mid-term elections this fall.

Yesterday, however, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised to take up immigration reform when Congress returns to work this week. Chuck Schumer, our senior senator here in New York, and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina are working on a bill to be introduced in the Senate. So far, no other Republican senator has shown interest in the issue, but immigration does not necessarily cut across party lines in the same way as other issues. Some “pro-business” Republicans see the economic benefits of a more rational immigration process, while organized labor leaders, who overwhelmingly support Democrats, tend to want to keep foreign workers out. It should be interesting.