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Boat people

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This redirect is about asylum seekers travelling by boat. For people living on fishing boats, see Tanka (ethnic group).

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Boat people is a term (usually) referring to illegal immigrants or asylum seekers who arrive en masse in old or crudely-made boats. The term came into common use during the late 1970s with the mass departure of Vietnamese refugees from communist-controlled Vietnam, following the Vietnam War.

It is also a widely used form of migration or escape for people migrating from Cuba, Haiti, Morocco, Vietnam or Albania. They often risk their lives on dangerously crude and overcrowded boats, to escape oppression or poverty in their home nations. In 2001, 353 asylum-seekers sailing from Indonesia to Australia drowned when their vessel sank. Many of the political refugees have also been attacked by pirates on the high seas or upon isolated islands, or have been turned away by unsympathetic governments and forced to return.

Boat people are frequently a source of controversy in the nation they seek to immigrate to, such as the United States, Canada, Italy, Spain and Australia. Boat people are often forcibly prevented from landing at their destination, such as under Australia's "Pacific Solution", or they are subjected to mandatory detention after their arrival. Unlike the wave of Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s and early 1980s, most boat people arriving in Western countries, Australia or the USA have purchased their passage on large and overcrowded sea-worthy boats.

Vietnam war boat people

Vietnamese refugee in a camp in Malaysia

Events resulting from the Vietnam War led many people in Cambodia, Laos, and especially Vietnam to become refugees in the late 1970s and 1980s, after the fall of Saigon. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge regime murdered millions of people in the "Killing Fields" massacres, and many attempted to escape. In Vietnam, the new communist government sent many people who supported the old government in the South to "reeducation camps", and others to "new economic zones." An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal charges or trials.[1] 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's re-education camps, according to published academic studies in the United States and Europe.[1] Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed.[1] These factors, coupled with poverty, caused millions of Vietnamese to flee the country. In 1979, Vietnam was at war (Sino-Vietnamese War) with the People's Republic of China (PRC), and many ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam, who felt that the government's policies directly targeted them also became "boat people." On the open seas, the boat people had to confront forces of nature, and elude pirates.

Refugee camps

The plight of the boat people became an international humanitarian crisis. The UNHCR, under the auspices of the United Nations, set up refugee camps in neighbouring countries to process the "boat people" and was awarded the 1981 Nobel Peace Prize for its work. There were untold miseries, rapes and murders on the South China Sea committed by Thai pirates who preyed on the refugees who had sold all their possessions and carried gold with them on the trips.

Camps were set up in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Indonesia. According to stories told by the Vietnamese refugees, the conditions at the camps were bad. Not much of the generous aid money actually got to the refugees. And in particular, refugees at Thai camps were maltreated and many were brutally bullied by the Thai guards. Most of the refugees came from the former South Vietnam. However, soon after the first wave between 1975-1978, North Vietnamese from seaside cities such as Haiphong started to escape and land in Hong Kong. Among them were genuine ethnically Chinese Vietnamese refugees who escaped from Vietnam and headed to China and the city of Hong Kong.

One forgotten group of Vietnamese boat people were those who escaped by land across the Cambodian and Thailand border. They did not travel by boat, but they ended up at the same camps just like those who braved the seas. The Orderly Departure Program from 1979 until 1994 was one such program that helped to resettle refugees in the United States. In this program, refugees were asked to go back to Vietnam and waited for assessment. If they were deemed to be eligible to be re-settled in the US according to the criteria the US government had established, they would be allowed to migrate to the USA. After ODP, there was another program called Humanitarian Operation. In this program, many former Southern Vietnamese who were involved in the former regime or working for the US would be allowed to migrate to the US provided that they had suffered harsh persecutions by the communist regime after 1975. Also the half-American children in Vietnam also allowed to migrate along with their mothers or foster parents. This also sparked a feverish wave of rich Vietnamese parents buying the right from the real mothers or foster parents. They paid money (in the black market) to transfer the half-American children into their custody, then applied for visa to migrate to the USA. Most of these half-American children were born of American soldiers and illiterate prostitutes. They were subject of discrimination, poverty, neglects and abuse. It was a big headache for the US to accept and deal with these children that the Vietnamese government were glad to be rid of. The United States and Vietnam signed an agreement on November 15, 2005, which allows those Vietnamese to immigrate who were not able to do so before the humanitarian operation program ended in 1994. Effectively this new agreement was the extension and also final chapter of the HO program.

Hong Kong adopted the "port of first asylum policy," and received over 100,000 of them in the city at its peak in the late 1980s. Many refugee camps were set up in its territories. Frequent violent clashes between the boat people and security forces caused public outcry and mounting concerns in the early 1990s since many camps are very close to high-density residential areas.

For Australia, there was a major policy shift by the Fraser government, which abolished the White Australia policy by letting over 100,000 Vietnamese refugees in such a quick pace. The countries that accepted most of these refugees were:

By late 1980s, Western Europe, the United States and Australia received fewer Vietnamese refugees [citation needed]. It became much harder to get visas to settle in these countries. The refugees faced prospects of staying years in the camps and ultimate repatriation back to Vietnam. They were branded, rightly or wrongly, as economic refugees. By the mid-1990s, the number of refugees fleeing from Vietnam had dwindled. Many refugee camps were closed. Most of the well educated or those with genuine refugee status had already been accepted by receiving countries[citation needed].

There were some unwritten rules in the mind of immigration officials from Western countries. They preferred to accept married couples, young families and girls over 18 years old, leaving single men and minors to languish at the camps for years. Among these unwanted, those who worked and studied hard and involved themselves in constructive refugee community activities were eventually accepted by the West by recommendations from UNHCR workers. Hong Kong was open about its willingness to take the remnants at its camp, but only some refugees took up the offer. Many refugees would have been accepted by Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, but hardly any wanted to settle in these countries.

The market reforms of Vietnam, the imminent return of Hong Kong to China by Britain and the financial incentives for voluntary returning to Vietnam caused many boat people to elect to return to Vietnam during the 1990s. Consequently, most remaining asylum seekers were voluntarily or forcibly repatriated to Vietnam, although a very small number (about 2,500) were granted residency by the Hong Kong Government in 2002, marking an end to the Vietnam boat people history. In 2005, the remaining refugees in the Philippines (around 200) were granted asylum in Canada and the United States.

A parody variation of the term, "yacht people" has been applied to affluent Chinese immigrating to Canada and the United States from Hong Kong and other locations.

Film

Journey from the Fall ([Vượt Sóng] Error: {{Lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help)) is an independent movie by writer/director/editor Ham Tran, about the Vietnamese refugee camp and boat people experience following the Fall of Saigon on April 30th, 1975.


Notes

  1. ^ a b c "Millions of lives changed forever with Saigon's fall". Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. 2001-04-29.

See also

External links

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