Officials from more than a dozen countries meet in Bangkok today to discuss South-East Asia’s migrant crisis. Since early May, when a crackdown in Thailand began obstructing routes used by people-smugglers, around 3,000 poor and oppressed people from Myanmar and Bangladesh have scrambled from rickety boats onto foreign beaches. More than 2,500 may still be at sea, some abandoned and left to drift by their traffickers. Campaigners hope the gathered governments will expand their paltry searches, and that more countries will follow Indonesia and Malaysia in agreeing to shelter the rescued. The hardest task is to persuade Myanmar to soften its persecution of the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority living in squalid conditions in Rakhine, in the west of the country, who make up many of those now at sea. Myanmar’s government has agreed to attend the talks, to the surprise of some. But it looks in little mood for compromise.