Thai

About 3,000 Thais live in Egypt, nearly all of them Muslim students at Al-Azhar and other Egyptian universities. Most come from Thailand's far south, where most Muslims speak Patani Malay at home and Thai at school, and they spend years in Cairo learning Arabic, Islamic law and the Quran on Al-Azhar scholarships or their families' savings. The Thai Students' Association in Cairo, active since the mid-1950s and under royal patronage, runs a student centre, meets new arrivals and organises study circles, sports and festivals. Many graduates return to teach in the Islamic schools and mosques of southern Thailand.

Thai farm workers, around 38,000 people, do much of the planting, picking and packing on Israel's farms and are the country's largest foreign agricultural workforce. Nearly all are young men from the poor rice-farming villages of Isan in north-east Thailand, who come on five-year contracts under a bilateral agreement and send most of their wages home. They live in caravans and barracks beside the greenhouses of desert and border communities, from the date and pepper farms of the Arava to the kibbutzim beside Gaza. On 7 October 2023 Thais were the largest group of foreigners killed and taken hostage, yet the workforce has since grown past its pre-war size.

About 6,300 Thais live in Saudi Arabia, and most of them are Muslims from Thailand's south living in Mecca and Jeddah: students at the Islamic universities, spouses and long-settled families, and workers in the pilgrimage trade. Many come from the far south, where most Muslims speak Patani Malay at home and Thai at school and with officials. A smaller group of Thai workers, many of them men in their fifties and sixties who have stayed for decades, is scattered from Riyadh to the Eastern Province, Tabuk and Najran. Relations froze for three decades after a Thai servant stole jewels from a Saudi prince's palace in 1989 and Saudi Arabia stopped issuing work visas to Thais; ties were restored in 2022 and a labour agreement signed, so new Thai workers, most of them Buddhists, have begun to arrive. Buddhist Thais have no temple in the kingdom and keep their faith in private.

About 19,000 Thais live in the United Arab Emirates, more than half of them in Dubai, working in hotels, restaurants, spas and airlines, and as technicians at the oil refineries of Ruwais and in the factories of Musaffah. They come from every part of Thailand, including many from the north-east who speak a Lao dialect at home, and a minority of Muslims from the south. With no Thai temple or resident monks in the country, Buddhist rites gather at the Thai embassy in Abu Dhabi and the consulate in Dubai, where at the April New Year festival of Songkran Thais pour water over Buddha statues and over the hands of their elders to ask their blessing. Recruitment for spa and massage jobs has drawn some Thai women into trafficking, and many workers lack proper papers.