Controlling borders is not always easy. Note the difficulties with “irregular migrants” leaving North Africa and trying to enter Europe. Cambodia hardly even tries to it right. In this article the Interior Minister–in charge of the borders–estimates that 100 to 200 Cambodian people cross the Thai border daily without going through the formal procedures. The U.N. estimates that the number is about 3,000 to 4,000. Believe the U.N.
Numbers aren’t the problem, though. It’s the system. An Interior Ministry official said “authorities had already begun shutting down illegal checkpoints on the border. ‘We don’t want to have informal border checkpoints because it is hard for us to control.’….The informal border checkpoints are the nexus of all forms of crime, and so we already closed down some, and now we are going to study them again and will decide which ones will be closed down, why and how,” she said.
Note that logic. The government knows of the illegal checkpoints. But they want to choose which ones to close. Why not CLOSE ALL THE ILLEGAL CHECKPOINTS? Could it be they could be influenced by getting money from the 3,000+ who cross irregularly every day?