MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES Hoàng Ngọc NguyênSàiGòn Weekly Online - Văn Hóa – Chính Trị - Xã Hội

MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES
Hoàng Ngọc Nguyên

Eventually, we have learned the terrifying truth. The police of Essex, England, have confirmed the 39 bodies found in a lorry container in this English town on 23 October are all Vietnamese. And most of them came from northern provinces of the country, which had lived under the communist rule for 65 years, compared to only 44 years of southern provinces.
Initially, it was believed that the victims are Chinese nationals coming from China with Xi Jingpin’s “China’s Dream” in mind. We have heard a lot of similar stories of Chinese migrants seeking a new life in a new land in this way, but their “promised land” in most cases is the United States, which is attracted more and more Chinese from the upper class or upper middle class.
It is really hard to believe that such a trafficking business could have the Vietnamese trademark. With some ideas about this region’s geo-politics, we could guess it is much more difficult to devise such a long and highly risky jouney, which would take the Vietnamese across the border into Chinese land, and from China they would be flown or driven to any European country, and so on...
The Vietnamese skills and guts are amazing, having rallied a lot of people with “the Vietnamese Dream”. There must have been “support” from local Vietnamese authorities in the first place; and “collaboration” between Vietnamese and Chinese traffickers with the “consent” of border authorities from both sides. That’s why the Vietnamese passengers had to pay handsomely for this venturesome trip into England. The total amount the criminals may have received could come to $1.5 million.
The Vietnamese government has voiced its condolence with the victims’ families and vowed to take action against “human traders”, a ranmpant business in this country. However, General Nguyen Huu Cau heading the provincial Police Force told the National Assembly in Ha Noi that “this is not a human trafficking case. These people wanted to go overseas to do business and they have also paid generously ... Nobody spends such a huge sum of money (about US$43,000) to be trafficked.”
This statement tells a lot about the Communist regime in Hanoi, the materialistic culture of “socialist” capitalism, and the Vietnamese people today. There are more questions than answers since we learned this hard truth.
            According to the reverend who led the service in memory of the dead at the church in east London, these people had died "seeking freedom, dignity and happiness". Many of us have shed tears at hearing about this tragedy. More than four decades after the end of the war, and more than three decades after the communists began the “socialism-oriented market economic transformation”, many people still seek to flee this “paradise”. But are they really seeking “freedom, dignity and happiness?”
          We should not be mistaken between the today lorry people and the boat people of yesterday.         These lorry people could come to a couple of thousands, presumably belonging to the “privileged” upper middle class in both political and economic terms. Without the common “labor export policy” of the communist rulers (hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese are working in South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore - even in the prostitution trade), and the wealthy state of these migrants and/or migrants’ families, these people would not have a chance. These people may not belong to the ruling class, but they don’t belong to the abused or exploited class, either.
            The boat people are quite different. They were known world-wide shortly after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and Hanoi imposed its retaliatory persecution in the south. Hundreds of thousands of people were sent to “re-education camps”, and hundreds of thousands of other people, who were treated as “second-class citizens”, had to flee the country risking their lives because of the abuse and oppression of the new rulers. These boat people in no way could be compared to the lorry people in terms of wealth. Most of them could spare no more than some $3,000 for a space in the boat, and had only a few bucks in their pockets when they reached any safe land in the vast sea of the Pacific. And up to 400,000 of them died at sea, according to formal statistics of the United Nations.
That’s why Ronald Reagan has always been the greatest U.S. president in the eyes of the older generations of the Vietnamese Americans.
And that’s why the lorry people are but migrants, but the boat people are justifiably called “refugees”.

MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES Hoàng Ngọc Nguyên

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