The Asean Economic Community (AEC), a free trade area of 10 countries forming the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, will be launched at the end of 2015. It will allow the partial free movement of skilled labour between participating nations, something that stands in stark contrast to the current migrant crisis in the region, reports menafn.com.

Indeed, it is wrong to assume that labour movement within Asean will be “free”. Unlike the model of the European Union, which is based on the free movement of people and labour regardless of education or professional background; labour movement within Asean will be “managed”.

The region is home to a workforce of more than 300 million, which will have strong implications in terms of labour migration and human resource development. It also seems to make a clear distinction between the good (skilled workers), the bad (semi-to unskilled migrant workers) and the ugly (boat people).

Labour movement within Asean will be, at least for now, confined to skilled workers and to eight professions; including doctors, dentists, nurses, engineers, architects, accountants, surveyors and tourism industry professionals. The Asean Secretariat calls this "managed flow of labour".

The latest available statistics on migration corridors in Asean, at present, show unsurprisingly that labour migration predominantly takes places from the poorer to the wealthier countries in the bloc. Flows of skilled labour remain small. 

The majority of emigrants have only primary education, and in less developed countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, unskilled migration is significantly higher than skilled migration. Also, there is still no agreed-on system of mutual recognition and certification of qualifications region-wide for migrants with better skills.

"The majority of migrants are low-skilled, and many are irregular," says Adam Heal, Associate Economic Affairs Officer at Bangkok-based UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). “Large income disparities among geographically-close Asean members, differential rates of population growth and ageing and the absence of regional redistributive mechanisms create large labour deficits and surpluses. These are a powerful spur to migration with labour flowing mainly from the poorer countries to the richer."

Former Asean secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan, one of the architects of the AEC, believes that free movement of labour should "not be rushed" but made "step by step" because otherwise countries with stronger economies such as Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, would be "engulfed."