The traffickers have gone underground, but they will come back, villagers and brokers say, with the deaths of 39 migrants in a truck in Britain unlikely to deter the country’s vast pool of rural Vietnamese from making perilous journeys abroad.
The dead are yet to be formally identified, but many are feared to be Vietnamese from the impoverished central provinces where the pull of a better life outweighs the risk of passage west.
Trafficking networks reach deep into the remote communities.
Photo: AFP
Brokers arrange flights — often into Russia — and plot the route into the UK on trucks, where many villagers end up working on cannabis farms tucked into suburban houses or in nail salons.
For now, the networks have vanished from the remote central Vietnamese towns stained by dread that their loved ones are among the British truck dead.
However, they “are not going to disappear” said one broker in Hong Linh District in Ha Tinh Province, where several of the missing people came from. “They might just temporarily stop.”
Photo: Reuters
Towns in that part of the country are largely bereft of young people — many have already left for overseas. The money they send home has been used to fund house renovations, and buy vehicles in an area where most people are farmers or fishers.
The ones who remain still harbor dreams of going overseas, enticed by success stories that ricochet across the quiet, cutoff communities.
“I want to go abroad when I finish school next year,” said 17-year-old Tran Manh Thang in Hong Linh, whose father is a farmer. “It’s easy to earn money and I can have a better life.”
He says he will try to go to South Korea first and from there set his sights on Europe, where he hopes to work as a waiter.
“It’s nicer in Europe, from what I see on the Internet and hear from neighbors,” he said.
While the UK deaths are a warning, young villagers “still have the exact same options and the same beliefs that they had before,” independent trafficking expert Mimi Vu said.
“They’re still poor, they still lack access to opportunities in Vietnam,” Vu said.
There is a grim precedent for the dangerous journeys. During the Vietnam War, people mostly in south Vietnam boarded boats to escape violence that engulfed the country.
Horror stories of deaths en route to safety filtered back from the hundreds of thousands of so-called “boat people.”
“That didn’t stop people from still trying to send their families out,” Vu said.
Many these days head for Britain, able to hide their illegal status inside its large Vietnamese community and black economy.
Even for those who have come back from the UK — deported for working illegally in cannabis farms or caught living in the country illegally — life overseas still appeals.
Speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity, one migrant deported from Britain in 2008 after he was caught growing weed said that the allure of money in the UK outweighs the risks.
“For sure people will still keep going,” the 41-year-old said.
The UK truck dead “were unlucky and it was very unfortunate,” he said, but “it doesn’t mean anyone else will die.”
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