BANGKOK, Thailand – Mong Thongdee is a rare champion.

The 12-year-old boy lives just behind Chiang Mai airport, in northern Thailand, and makes paper planes for hobby. That’s where he gets scolded by his father for littering the place and wasting papers.  

"I barely have enough money to buy notebooks for school and there he was, tearing papers to make airplanes," said his father, Yoon Thongdee.

Mong’s parents, who came from Shan state in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, earn $7 a day from construction work to feed their family of four. They all squeeze into a tiny square room in a row house where their neighbors are other migrant workers.

Mong Thongdee, left, poses with Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and paper airplanes during a meeting in Bangkok, Thailand on Sept. 3, 2009.

At the national paper plane contest late last year, Mong’s dart floated 12.5 seconds in the air and made him a winner. Ever since that victory, he’s been training two hours a day to prepare for the origami airplane competition in Japan this month, where he will represent Thailand.

But when Mong requested to have a travel document to go Japan he was rejected. Even though he has lived in Thailand since he was born, he is still a son of migrants and doesn’t have citizenship. Like his parents, Mong resides on a temporary permit – which will be terminated when he leaves the country, and turns him into an illegal immigrant if he returns.