Last week, 54 migrants died while attempting to cross the border from Myanmar to Thailand.

Reuters reports on the conditions that leads to the thousands of Burmese migrants who are attempting to be smuggled into Thailand.

From Reuters:

The fate of the 120 people smuggled in a stifling hot 20-ft container truck last week — of whom 54 suffocated — has again focused attention on the migrant labour issue in Thailand.

Sharing a 2,400 km (1,490 miles) porous border with Myanmar, Thailand is home to some 2 million migrant workers, mostly from its western neighbour, and only a quarter of them are legally registered.

With Thais shunning mundane, dirty and dangerous work on farms, fishing boats and building sites, and Myanmar’s generals refusing to fix a crippled economy, Thai officials say the influx of cheap, migrant labour will continue.

“As long as people are struggling to find a better life, we cannot stop them from entering Thailand,” Ranong Governor Kanchanapa Keemun told Reuters.

Human smuggling brokers arrange the transportation logistics to bring migrants over the border.

Employers across the country, from hotels on the resort island of Phuket to factories in Bangkok and fishing boats in the Gulf of Thailand, place orders for migrants through brokers in Ranong and Victoria Point, Suwat said.

Once the brokers gather enough workers, they are smuggled across rivers or through forested hills to Ranong from Victoria Point, he said.

Various tactics are used to evade border checks. The illegal immigrants are jammed into container trucks, hidden under fresh produce in pickup trucks, or in fishing boats.

The 54 who died last week were trapped for several hours in a 20-ft container after the refrigeration system broke down.

The Migrant Worker Group, a coalition of NGOs, said it has documented 10 cases in which more than 100 people had died being transported to Thailand in the past year.

Ranong, the least populated of Thailand’s 76 provinces with 180,000 Thais, is home to 50,000 registered and 20,000 unregistered Myanmar migrants, Governor Kanchanapa said.

But Suwat said other estimates suggest the entire Myanmar population in Ranong could be three times higher as most employers under-report the number of migrants they hire.

Globally, Human Smuggling is a $10 billion market.