US First Lady Laura Bush yesterday visited IOM's refugee
resettlement operations at Mae La camp in Tak province on the
Thai-Myanmar border.

The First Lady, who was accompanied by her daughter Barbara, saw
IOM cultural orientation trainers preparing refugees for
resettlement in the US and saw off 11 families leaving the camp
with IOM en route to Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport and new lives
in America.

IOM provides medical screening, cultural orientation and
transport for Burmese refugees accepted for resettlement by the US
and nine other resettlement countries.

Mae La, established in 1984, is the largest of nine closed
border camps, accounting for some 35,000 of the 120,000 refugees
living in the camps, which are run by the Thai Ministry of the
Interior, supported by international NGOs.

In the first seven months of 2008, IOM moved over 4,000 mainly
ethnic Karen refugees from Mae La to new lives in the US, with
funding from the US State Department's Bureau of Population,
Refugees and Migration (PRM). Nearly 700 more were resettled to
Australia.

This year IOM has resettled over 12,200 refugees from eight of
the nine, often remote and inaccessible Thai border camps. This
follows some 15,000 departures in 2007 and 52,000 from Thailand
since 2004.

While the most of the refugees have opted for resettlement in
the US, other resettlement countries have included Australia,
Canada, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the
Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

For more information please contact:

Chris Lom

IOM Bangkok

Tel. +66.819275215

E-mail: "mailto:clom@iom.int" target="_blank" title="">clom@iom.int