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But the prime minister's intervention does nothing to solve the massive problem which Mong Thongdee briefly came to represent on the front pages. Thailand is now home to a massive number of people who do not have citizenship. Because the numbers are so large, the problems they suffer pop up with predictable regularity. Two weeks before Mong Thongdee's brief fame, two young Rohingyas died of hopelessness. Before that came protests over the Labour Ministry's decision to stop registering the children of migrant labourers. Every month or so there is another episode in the saga over Hmong repatriation. And so on.

There are now around 3.5 million people living in Thailand without citizenship. The figure is an estimate. There may be more. Nobody is really sure. The number has grown very rapidly over the past ten years. The problem is not new, and not different. All over the world, states are struggling to manage migrants. But the problem changes with scale, and in Thailand the scale is now significant. That 3.5 million is over 5 per cent of the population. In the modern world, citizenship is vital. People without it lack rights and get exploited. People who get exploited become unhappy. A country playing host to a lot of unhappy people starts to become nervous. That is what is now happening.

Many of the 3.5 million are here because Thailand has been a welcoming host for the unfortunate. For over half a century, it quietly provided sanctuary for those fleeing war and disorder in neighbouring countries. There are Chinese nationalists left over from the second world war, many groups displaced by the Indochina War, and ethnic minorities persecuted by the Burmese government. Many have applied for Thai citizenship, but the process has tended to be glacially slow. There are still around 350,000 without full nationality, including around 80,000 children.

There are others who are stateless and rootless because they slipped past the bureaucratic process of registration. Many are hill peoples who have difficulty proving their origins. There are now good laws and procedures for overcoming this problem, but the implementation is sometimes hobbled by inefficiency and prejudice. The total number is not known. But there are at least 190,000 stateless people among students and schoolchildren alone.

Next there are the refugees from recent wars and disorders. Thailand refuses to sign the UN Convention on Refugees and to call these people "refugees." It prefers to label them as "displaced persons" and their facilities as "shelters" rather than camps. But this sensitivity does nothing to change the reality. International agencies estimate there are around 400,000 refugees and asylum-seekers in total. Less than half of these are in shelters. Many more fade into the larger society and survive on their wits.

The largest group are migrant labourers, mostly from Burma, but also Cambodia, Laos, and China. In the late 1980s, the political crisis in Burma coincided with an economic take-off in Thailand. Many Burmese wanted somewhere else to go. Many Thai businesses wanted more people to employ. From 1996 there has been a system to register labour migrants, but it operates only on an annual basis and keeps changing. Now, people come across the border illegally, but then must get a job and register, or risk being deported as illegal migrants. Last year around 1.6 million were registered. At least another million are probably here without registration. Their fortunes are very mixed. They welcome the jobs. They may get well treated by Thai authorities which have a policy of providing access to such services as health and education. But they know they are being exploited with low pay, and they can be very vulnerable to corruption and maltreatment, especially at the hands of the police.

The motives that have created this large social phenomenon are a complex mixture of humanitarian kindness and ruthless exploitation. The policies for managing this phenomenon are a complex mix of well-meaning pragmatism and concerns over security. Mong Thongdee's teacher was his biggest friend and advocate. The foreign ministry was flexible. But the interior ministry believes that denial of rights is a tool to deter an even larger in-migration.

Mong Thongdee's case symbolizes the waste of human potential created. Maybe missing a chance to make a competitive paper dart does not seem such a great loss. But multiply it by 3.5 million times and it becomes something else.

But the miseries imposed on the outsiders is only part of the complexity. A few months ago, Chang Noi visited a province where the migrant labour population has ballooned to four hundred thousand. Leaders of the local host community spoke about the pressure on local services of health, education, and waste disposal. They feared problems of crime and disease. But they did not blame the labourers themselves who they saw as helpless victims. Rather they pointed at the entrepreneurs that profited from cheap labour, the sharks that provided slum housing, and the police and petty officials who skimmed a profit. They were also afraid. One suddenly said: What if the migrants one day surrounded the provincial office, the banks, the police stations, and just took over? The scenario may not be so realistic, but the fear underlying it is real.

Mong Thongdee's brief fame is just a glimpse of a much bigger issue. How will Thailand manage 3.5 million people who suffer as outsiders, and are beginning to make insiders feel insecure too?