Chapter Three

The English That Opened the World

2 minute read · 4 paradoxes

Thailand has 70 million people. Bhutan has 777,000. Both modernised across the second half of the twentieth century. Both built education systems, road networks, hospitals, broadcasting infrastructure. Both sit at the edge of the same regional labour market that pulls workers from poorer countries toward Australia, Singapore, and the Gulf.

Roughly 1.4 percent of Thais live abroad. Roughly 5.5 percent of Bhutanese do.

Per capita, the Bhutanese diaspora is four times the size of the Thai one. The Bhutanese diaspora is growing. The Thai diaspora is not.

Same region. Same wage pressures. Same visa pipelines, more or less. So what is different?

The answer is in your high school classroom.

In 1964, His Majesty the Third King, in his wisdom, chose English as the medium of instruction in government schools. Not Dzongkha. Not Hindi, which was the practical lingua franca at the time. Not Tibetan, which carried the country’s religious and literary heritage. English.

It was the right decision for the country at that moment. A small mountain country with limited trade and almost no international presence could not afford linguistic isolation. English would integrate Bhutan into global commerce, science, diplomacy, and trade. It would let Bhutanese students study anywhere. It would let Bhutanese professionals work anywhere.

That last sentence is what this chapter is about.

Pem grew up in Bumthang. Her father is an apple farmer. Her mother teaches at the local government school. Pem finished higher secondary at Jakar, did a nursing diploma at the Faculty of Nursing and Public Health in Thimphu, worked at the national referral hospital for two years, and in late 2022 flew to Brisbane on a student visa.

She now works as a registered nurse on a cardiology ward.

She earns roughly ten times what an entry-level Bhutanese nurse earns at home. She sends her parents more in a year than both of them, combined, earn from teaching and farming.

This is not a sad story. Pem is doing well. Her parents are doing better than they were. Multiplied by forty thousand, the remittances from Australia equal something like seven percent of Bhutan’s entire banking deposit base. The diaspora is, by cash flow, one of the most loyal contributors to the Bhutanese economy.

But notice what made her path possible. Her transcripts arrived in Queensland in English. Her IELTS score was high enough to skip the language requirement most foreign nurses spend a year preparing for. Her CV read naturally to an Australian admissions panel. She moved into a Brisbane job without re-credentialing.

A Thai nurse with the same clinical training would have needed twelve to eighteen months of intensive English preparation before applying. Most do not bother. Thai nurses stay in Bangkok.

The single largest factor is not wages. It is not aspiration. It is not visa policy. It is language.

There are roughly forty thousand Bhutanese in Australia. That is about five percent of the country’s population. They send home, by the most careful estimates available, somewhere between USD 200 and USD 280 million in annual remittances.

Bhutan’s total banking-system deposits, in 2026, run about USD 3.5 to 4 billion. So Australian remittances alone equal something like six to seven percent of the country’s entire deposit base, every year.

By another measure: the average Bhutanese household that has a relative in Australia receives between Nu 200,000 and Nu 400,000 a year from that relative. That is one to two times the median Bhutanese household income from all other sources combined.

The diaspora is, by these numbers, the country’s third or fourth largest source of foreign exchange — behind hydropower exports and tourism, roughly tied with cardamom and other agricultural exports.

The diaspora is also one of the most stable foreign-exchange sources the country has. Hydropower exports fluctuate with monsoon hydrology and Indian grid demand. Tourism fluctuates with global travel cycles. Remittances rarely fluctuate. They go up, year on year, as more Bhutanese leave and as the leavers’ careers in Brisbane and Perth and Melbourne progress.

In 2005, about nine thousand Bhutanese lived abroad. In 2017, fifteen thousand. By late 2023, forty-three thousand.

The acceleration matters. Between 2005 and 2017, the diaspora grew at roughly four percent a year. Between 2017 and 2023, at over twenty percent a year. The exit ramp did not get easier — it has been roughly the same shape since the mid-2010s. The decision to use it changed.

Something shifted around 2021. The pandemic forced a generation of Bhutanese to think about whether the country they were living in was the country they would still be living in five years on. The hydropower-debt arithmetic of the previous chapter became visible. The civil-service queue of the chapter before became uncomfortable. The wage gap with Australia, which had always existed, became actionable in a way it had not been before.

In 2022, about seven thousand Bhutanese left for Australia. In 2023, about twelve thousand. The single largest annual outflow in the country’s history.

Forty thousand Bhutanese in Australia is roughly twice the population of Paro town. The country’s fourth-largest concentration of Bhutanese sits not in Bhutan but in suburban Brisbane, Perth, Sydney, and Melbourne. The fifth-largest is in Adelaide, where the cookery diploma programmes are. The sixth is in regional Queensland, where the meat-packing plants and tourism operators recruit aggressively.

In Thornlie, a neighbourhood in south-eastern Perth, there is a Bhutanese grocery store that stocks ema datshi ingredients, suja butter, dried fish from Mongar, and ara brewed by a Bhutanese family in Gosnells. The store opens at seven in the morning and closes at ten at night. It has a community noticeboard inside the door. The noticeboard advertises BCSE coaching for Bhutanese in Perth preparing to return home — and rental rooms for Bhutanese newly arrived in Perth preparing to stay.

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Bhutan’s median age in 2000 was 21. In 2026, it is 30. By 2040, on current trajectories, it will be 36 — roughly today’s Chinese median age, and well above the South Asian regional average.

The country is aging fast. The combination is unusual: a low-income country, mountain geography, traditional family structures still common, and a population age profile heading toward the wealthy world’s pattern.

The aging is driven by two forces, not one. The fertility rate has dropped from over five children per woman in 1980 to about 1.4 today — below replacement, below India, below Bangladesh, below Nepal. And the emigration of the working-age cohort accelerates the aging by removing the people in their twenties and thirties who would otherwise be having children in Bhutan.

What happens demographically when a low-income country ages this fast, with its working-age cohort emigrating, has not been thoroughly modelled. There are no clean precedents. The Philippines emigrated a significant share of working-age population but maintained higher fertility. South Korea aged fast but kept its working-age population at home. Bhutan is doing both at once.

The country has roughly fifteen years to build the social-insurance institutions that an aging population needs — pensions, eldercare, chronic-care medical capacity — before the demographic burden becomes unmanageable. The Australian remittances will help. They will not, by themselves, fund the institutions.

Look at the path Pem followed, step by step, and you can see why it is so efficient at extracting Bhutanese.

Step one: English-medium schooling from primary onward. Standard for almost every Bhutanese under fifty.

Step two: a tertiary qualification in a globally portable field. Nursing. Engineering. Information technology. Accounting. Hospitality management. The Royal University of Bhutan and the Bhutanese diploma colleges produce graduates whose credentials translate, with minor adjustment, into the qualification frameworks of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Step three: IELTS or equivalent. The English-medium schooling means that an academic IELTS score of 7.0 to 7.5, which would be a stretch for most Thai or Vietnamese or Mongolian applicants, is routine for Bhutanese. The country’s IELTS pass rates are higher than India’s, despite India having a much larger English-using elite, because in Bhutan English is not the elite language — it is the school language. Almost everyone has it.

Step four: a student visa to Australia. Most often through a one-year diploma programme at an Adelaide, Perth, or Brisbane college. The cookery programme. The community services programme. The aged-care diploma. These are the cheapest entry routes, but any student visa works.

Step five: two-year graduate work visa after the diploma.

Step six: permanent residency under the skilled-migration pathway.

Each step has thousands of Bhutanese predecessors who have mapped the route. The information flows back to Bhutan instantly — through WhatsApp groups, through Facebook communities, through phone calls home, through visiting relatives. By the time a young Bhutanese decides she wants to apply for the Adelaide cookery diploma, she has eight people in her phone book who have done it, three of whom went last year.

In the absence of Step One — the English-medium schooling — none of the rest of the pipeline functions. A Thai nurse cannot do this without spending a year on English. A Mongolian engineer cannot do this without spending a year on English. An Indonesian hospitality graduate cannot do this without spending a year on English. The year-of-English barrier is what keeps most regional emigration smaller, slower, and more selective. Bhutan does not have that barrier. The country built around it in 1964.

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Bhutan has between forty and fifty thousand foreign workers on labour permits — the same order of magnitude as the Bhutanese diaspora in Australia.

Almost all are in construction. The road crews, the building sites, the dam projects, the southern industrial estates, the Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC) ground-works — the physical infrastructure of modern Bhutan has been built, and continues to be built, by Indian and Bangladeshi labour on labour permits.

Other sectors with chronic vacancies — hotel reception, plumbing, electrical work, automotive trades, drivers, agricultural extension — are not filled by these foreign workers. They are filled, when filled at all, by older Bhutanese workers, by part-time and informal labour, and by the under-staffing that is now visible in every Bhutanese hospitality and service business.

The numbers are unstable because the labour-permit system is imperfectly tracked, and informal cross-border movement is common. But the order of magnitude is clear. The country imports approximately as many construction workers as it exports university graduates.

The two flows are different in composition. The foreign workers are doing the physical work that Bhutanese graduates would not consider taking even if they were unemployed. The graduates are leaving the country in search of work commensurate with their education.

The country runs a labour market that imports physical labour for its building sites and exports its trained graduates to other countries’ service economies. The two flows pass each other at the Phuentsholing border. They do not exchange.

There is a category of decision that the country has not yet made: the diaspora strategy.

Most countries with significant diasporas have one. India has a Ministry of External Affairs office for Non-Resident Indians. The Philippines has the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration. Ireland has an extensive diaspora-engagement programme that runs through embassies and consulates and cultural institutes. Nepal has labour-migration bureaucracy. Vietnam has a sophisticated programme to channel diaspora remittances and skills back into domestic investment.

Bhutan does not yet have one. There is no diaspora ministry, no diaspora engagement office, no formal channel for the forty thousand Bhutanese in Australia to participate in Bhutanese policy debates, contribute to Bhutanese investment vehicles, or maintain meaningful connection to the country beyond the WhatsApp messages they exchange with family.

This is not from neglect. The country’s diaspora is recent enough — most of it has formed since 2020 — that the institutional response has not had time to catch up. But the absence has consequences. A diaspora without an engagement framework is, eventually, a diaspora that drifts. The first generation sends remittances and visits home. The second generation sends fewer remittances and visits home less often. The third generation, if there is one, has Bhutanese ancestry but no Bhutanese connection.

The country is twelve to fifteen years away from its first second-generation Bhutanese-Australians coming of age in Brisbane and Sydney. What they decide about Bhutan — whether they invest, whether they visit, whether they keep the language, whether they raise their own children with any Bhutanese identity — will depend partly on what Bhutan does in the next decade. That decade is the window. The window is closing.

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Bhutan’s total fertility rate crossed below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman around 2015. In 2026, it sits at roughly 1.4 — comparable to South Korea, lower than China, lower than every other country in South Asia.

On current projections, the country’s population peaks around 2035 at approximately 820,000 to 850,000 citizens, then begins to decline. By 2050, the population is projected at 750,000 to 780,000. By 2075, somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000.

These projections assume the current emigration rate is stable. It is not. The emigration rate has been rising. If the post-2022 acceleration continues, the population peak comes sooner and lower, the decline begins faster, and the 2050 number is closer to 700,000 or below.

The country has not held a national conversation about this. There has been no political party platform on population policy. There has been no academic or institutional projection that has been widely discussed. The numbers are in the National Statistics Bureau’s projection files. They are not in the public consciousness.

A country that does not know it is shrinking cannot easily plan for the consequences. The consequences include school capacity, retirement system financing, labour-force composition, geopolitical posture, and the size of the domestic economy that has to support the institutional infrastructure built for the larger population.

The five-year plans currently in force assume continued population growth. They will need to be revised. The revision has not happened yet.

Pem video-calls her mother every Sunday morning Brisbane time, which is Saturday night Bhutan time. Her mother answers from the kitchen in Bumthang. Pem can see, in the background, the wood-fired stove her grandmother used.

Her mother is sixty-two. She has another six years on her teaching contract before retirement. She has been a primary-school teacher in the same school for thirty-one years. Her pension will be modest but secure.

Pem’s father is in the apple orchard most days. He is sixty-six. He does not have a pension. He has the orchard, which produces a small income, and Pem’s remittances, which now exceed the orchard’s income by a factor of four.

When her parents are gone — fifteen years from now, on average actuarial trajectories — Pem will inherit the orchard, the house, the small landholding. She will not return to manage them. Her brother, who is twelve years younger than her and currently studying in Perth, also will not return.

The orchard will be leased out, or it will go fallow. The house will be rented to a young teacher’s family from elsewhere in Bhutan on a school posting, or it will sit empty. The landholding will eventually be sold to a neighbour who is still farming. The neighbour’s children will probably be in Brisbane too.

This is the structural pattern. Not just Pem’s family. Thousands of Bhutanese families. The country built a school system that taught the children to do well anywhere in the world. The children went anywhere in the world. The houses where the children grew up are now staffed by their parents until their parents cannot live there, then by foreign tenants or distant relatives, then by nobody.

The villages in Bumthang, in Trongsa, in Mongar, in Lhuentse, in the eastern dzongkhags that the next chapter will examine, are gradually emptying. The country’s population peak is still nine years away. The hollowing-out is already underway.

The Pem trajectory is the first-generation cohort the country has been quietly tracking. Brisbane nurse. Sydney accountant. Perth IT graduate. All sending remittances, visiting parents, raising children with two cultural feet. The structural questions about this cohort — diaspora-engagement frameworks, returning-professional policies, second-generation cultural retention — are real and pressing.

There is a second cohort, smaller in numbers but larger in implication, that is harder to see from Bhutan. It is now beginning to become visible at GMC.

A high-net-worth family that recently completed land arrangements for a GMC residential estate has the following passport composition. Father: Singaporean. Mother: United States. Son: Australian. Daughter: Canadian. None of the four holds the citizenship of any of the others. None lives in their passport country.

A young professional couple at the GMC Authority project office, both Bhutanese by ancestry, hold between them four foreign passports — husband German and American, wife Chinese and Korean. Their child, born last year in Singapore, holds a fifth.

This is no longer unusual globally. Among internationally mobile high-net-worth families, multi-jurisdictional citizenship is now the working assumption rather than the exception. The Singapore-resident Indian businessman whose wife is a Hong Kong permanent resident and whose children attend boarding school in Switzerland is, by 2026, a familiar profile. The Chinese tech executive with a Canadian passport and an Australian residency permit is, in some cities, statistically common. People do not bat an eyelid.

Nationality, in the way most Bhutanese still think about it — as identity, as belonging, as the box one ticks on a form — is becoming, for an increasing share of the global mobile class, something else. A legal instrument. A jurisdictional choice. A passport is, in this frame, a protective agent for wealth and mobility, selected the way one would select a bank or an insurance carrier. It is not, in the way the country still thinks of citizenship, the marker of who one is.

The trend has not arrived in Bhutan at scale. It is arriving, in 2026, at GMC. The early residents and early professional staff are precisely the cohort for whom multi-passport family architecture is normal. The institutional question for Bhutan is whether this cohort is welcome and, if so, on what terms. The political question is whether Bhutanese identity — as the country has historically constructed it, through language, lineage, citizenship in a constitutionally defined way — can accommodate a generation that is moving toward identity as plural rather than singular.

The country has not yet had this conversation. It will need to.

There is also a quieter version of the same question, and it sits inside ordinary Bhutanese families.

Bhutan has approximately forty thousand citizens in Australia — far and away the largest single concentration. The numbers beyond Australia are softer, but a reconciliation of census migration data, Five-Year-Plan figures, embassy-registration counts, and second-country visa data points to roughly fifteen thousand across the Gulf, close to fourteen thousand in India, three to four thousand in the United States, and perhaps five thousand more scattered across some hundred other countries — Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Singapore, continental Europe, Japan, Korea. A reasonable total estimate of Bhutanese living abroad is approximately seventy-seven thousand — close to one in ten of the country’s citizen population, and higher still if the most loosely-counted cohorts of recent students and undocumented stays are included.

How many children, born in foreign hospitals to Bhutanese parents, have automatic foreign citizenship by jus soli or jus sanguinis? The number is not formally tracked. Against the diaspora age profile and observed fertility patterns, a reasonable estimate is somewhere between five and eight thousand children to date, growing by perhaps one thousand to fifteen hundred a year. Most of these children will, when they are old enough to choose, hold a passport their parents do not.

How many Bhutanese have married non-Bhutanese in the past decade? The estimate, from immigration registries and embassy records, runs to two to four thousand documented marriages — predominantly Bhutanese-to-Australian, Bhutanese-to-American, Bhutanese-to-Indian, with a tail across other nationalities. The children of these marriages hold, on average, more than one passport from birth.

The diaspora is not, as the country’s discourse sometimes implies, a temporary phenomenon that resolves when the wage gap closes. It is a structural realignment of what ‘Bhutanese’ is going to mean across the next two generations.

A pattern is now common enough among the Brisbane and Sydney cohort that it warrants naming.

The young Bhutanese professional, settled in Australia, with children in Australian school, no longer flies home to Bhutan for family gatherings. Instead, she invites her parents to Bangkok. The family meets in a Sukhumvit hotel for two weeks. They visit Erawan. They get medical check-ups at Bumrungrad or Bangkok Hospital. They eat in nice restaurants. They shop. The parents return to Bhutan refreshed. The Australia-based daughter flies back to Sydney. She has not, in this sequence, set foot in Bhutan.

The Bangkok meeting is the new family ritual. Not the village tshechu. Not the harvest festival. A two-week stay in a third country, halfway between the diaspora child and the resident parent. The medical checks are the practical part — Bangkok’s hospitals are better than Thimphu’s, and the parents get to use them. The shopping and restaurants are the social part. The family connection is maintained. The connection to the country is not.

Multiply this across a few thousand diaspora households in any given year, and you have several hundred Bhutanese families per year for whom Bangkok-as-meeting-point has, in effect, replaced village-as-meeting-point. The flights to Bangkok land. The connections happen. The orchard in Bumthang, the house in Mongar, the family land in Trongsa — these are increasingly the things the parents maintain and the diaspora children visit, if at all, in imagination.

The country is, in 2026, becoming a country that more and more Bhutanese think about than live in.

The cultural decline the next chapter measures is not separate from the diaspora the present chapter has described. It is the same story. The school that taught the language that opened the world is also the school that emptied the village. The framework that measured the village’s emptying is in the next chapter.

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