Immigration police in Thailand arrested 280,937 foreigners who worked or entered Thailand illegally in 2003. Authorities rounded up 189,486 people on illegal work charges and another 91,451 on charges of illegal entry at the country's airports and 54 border checkpoints, said Thailand's national police spokesman Maj-General Pongsapat Pongcharoen

A total of 168,414 Burmese nationals were arrested, 155,633 for working here illegally and the rest for illegal entry. Of the 78,438 Cambodians arrested 54,738 were working illegally in Thailand. The third largest group was Laotians, with 19,115 nationals arrested.

Most of those arrested were repatriated to their home countries.

Pongsapat said that the Thai immigration police were to be more strict this year in examining visitors, whose numbers are predicted by tourism officials to swell to an all-time high of 12 million in 2004.

The Thai national police chief has instructed immigration police at all checkpoints to intensify their screening, especially among suspect groups, Pongsapat said.

In June, Labour Minister Suwat Liptapanlop announced there were more than one million illegal workers in Thailand, many of them posing a threat to national security.

Non-governmental organisations in Thailand, which expressed alarm over what they described as a major crackdown in 2003, say there are up to 2 million legal and illegal foreign workers in Thailand, the vast majority of them from Burma.