"Thuyền nhân" hồi hương (April 30, 2008)

VIETNAM

The return of the boat people

Apr 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Former refugees bring back skills and money

THEY cast themselves on the seas in leaky boats in their hundreds of thousands, so desperate to escape penury and oppression that they would risk being drowned, murdered or shot. There was a time when the word “Vietnamese” was almost invariably followed by “boat people”. They began arriving soon after the fall of Saigon in 1975. By 1994 liberalisation in Vietnam was lifting the economy, the flood of refugees had become a trickle and the UN had found a way to resettle or repatriate them.

RAPHOIn unhappier days

Millions of others left Vietnam by less risky means during and after the country's independence wars of the mid-20th century. But in recent years many of the estimated 2.7m Viet kieu (overseas Vietnamese) have begun trickling back, encouraged by the government. The initiative to welcome them back comes from the very top. In January Nong Duc Manh, the general secretary of the Communist Party, said Vietnam's recent economic achievements were partly due to the efforts of “patriotic” returned exiles.

Among them is Philip Owings, who fled on a boat when he was eight, ending up in a refugee camp separated from his family. He was adopted by Americans and grew up on the West Coast but is now back as assistant manager at one of Hanoi's top hotels. Mr Owings first returned seven years ago as an exchange student and admits it was a culture shock. Now, with a promising career, he has married a Vietnamese and feels settled. Locals still charge him “foreigners' prices” when they hear his accent, but he says it is not hard to be accepted by his compatriots.

David Thai, a coffee-shop entrepreneur (see article), was born in Saigon to a family that had fled the north after the war to expel the French, left on a boat in 1975 and ended, via the Philippines and Vanuatu, in America. He describes growing up aspiring to be American but later longing to seek out his Vietnamese identity. Returning as a student, like Mr Owings, he was met with polite curiosity, not the hostility he had feared.

Tracy Le, a Vietnamese-Australian from Melbourne with an accent straight out of “Neighbours”, visited the country her parents left in the 1970s for a holiday, but accepted a job at Indochina Capital, a Ho Chi Minh City firm that is channelling foreign investors' cash into Vietnamese businesses. She reckons she is typical of younger exiles: planning only a brief visit, they end up staying. But most of them see no need to tear up their foreign passports yet. The government plans to offer them dual citizenship.

Vietnam does not have a super-rich diaspora like China's. Last year the Vietnamese government recorded business investment by Viet kieu of only $89m, though they are probably spending much more on personal consumption, from cars to property. A much more important contribution are the remittances—officially $5.5 billion last year, but probably more—that Vietnamese emigrants send home to their families.

The large number of well-educated professionals returning from the rich world are just what Vietnam needs to relieve its shortage of higher-level skills. Ms Le's boss at Indochina Capital, Tung Kim Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American, reckons there is a bigger wave to come as older exiles return to spend their final years back in their homeland. They will not need jobs, but will bring their pension money with them and build retirement homes in the suburbs.

Might the waves of returning exiles who have got used to living in democracies also help transform Vietnam's politics? So far most of them are keeping their heads down. One says that although they are officially welcomed, he is sure that they are closely watched by the authorities to see if they belong to exiled pro-democracy groups (some of which are indeed sending in Viet kieu). Yet in the longer term they are bound to become a force for political liberalisation.