In December 2009, Thai soldiers evicted more than 4,000 Hmong asylum seekers from a holding center and forcibly repatriated them to Laos [REF].
Despite their shared cuisine, language, and border, scholars have noted that anti-communist ideology after the 1950s encouraged the idea of "Thainess", a persistent belief in the superiority all things Thai, leading "the population of central and southern Thailand [to] look to their northern borders with contempt" [REF].