If only all citzenship restrictions seemed as cruel and arbitrary as these 'internal' regulations must seem to us...there is a recent book (i believe) by Dorothy Solinger on such internal migration in China today.
Vietnam Doesn't Welcome Migrants to Its Cities
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Leaders Risk Strife
By Pressuring Poor
To Return to Farms
By Samantha Marshall
02/15/2000
The Wall Street Journal
Page A23
(Copyright (c) 2000, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- Waves of rural migrants are flowing into Vietnam's cities in pursuit of jobs that dried up here after economic crisis struck Asia three years ago. The migration represents one of the biggest problems facing Vietnam's Communist leadership: How to allow the betterment of the peasants it purports to champion, while maintaining social stability.
The government's strategy, so far, amounts to consigning the migrants to a bureaucratic twilight zone in the hopes they will simply go back home. Consider Truong Van Hung, a pork-noodle vendor in the slums of Ho Chi Minh City. He came here from a village in central Vietnam to give his children a better education, but his migrant status bars them from state schools. Since he can't scrape together their $20-a-term private-school fees, he has fallen into debt to loan sharks. "It would make my life so much easier if only the government would let me register" to be a legal city resident, he says.
The government regards Mr. Hung and the hundreds of thousands of migrants like him to be a threat to social stability. Illegal migrants make up almost 20% of Ho Chi Minh City's five million population, according to conservative state estimates; the government decries the slums built by the migrants as nests of vice. So the migrants are denied access to education, health-care, loans and unemployment insurance because they can't register. Not all these services are legally linked to residence permits, but registered city dwellers have priority in already overcrowded hospitals and schools. <'A Heavy Burden' "I feel sorry for these people," says Vo Thi Bach Tuyet, director of the Department of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs in Ho Chi Minh City. "But it's a heavy burden for the government to cope with."
Vietnam faces many burdens. Economic growth is at a near standstill; foreign investment for 1999 is less than a third of 1997 levels. Corruption is rampant, with more than 1,000 arrests at all but the uppermost levels of government during an anticorruption campaign last year. Incidents of drug use and other social ills have almost tripled over the past decade, according to government statistics.
As one of the poorest and most politically isolated countries in Asia, with a per capita income of about $300, this hard-line Communist country is particularly sensitive to hints of unrest; two years ago violent peasant protests against official graft closed down the northern province of Thai Binh. Disgruntled farmers from other regions still sit in protest outside the homes of Vietnam's leaders.
The migrant problem could be an important contributor to grass-roots discontent, some political analysts warn. Unless Vietnam reforms its economy further, its strategy toward migrants may tend to push more people like Mr. Hung to the margins of society, opening the door to unrest.
Among Vietnam's disenfranchised "there is the potential for a minor incident to grow quickly into a combustible mass," says Carlyle Thayer, a professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
Migration wasn't considered a problem until relatively recently. A decade ago, traveling workers were shunted into regions that needed labor to tend crops or build roads. Migrants lacking registration papers were sent to re-education camps. Then, when Vietnam began to open its economy to foreign investment in the early 1990s, factories and construction sites gobbled up the subsequent flood of peasants, so the government turned a blind eye to illegal internal migration.
As foreign investors fled during the past few years, however, those jobs became scarce. But the migration continued. A recent United Nations Development Program report estimates 70,000 to 100,000 migrants flow into Ho Chi Minh City each year, on top of the million or so that the government says already live there, although not all of them necessarily stay.
The irony is that, in many ways, the migrants are model citizens. They tend to be young and ambitious. They save what they can and remit extra income back to their home villages, helping in their small way to alleviate rural poverty.
Consider Mr. Hung, whose proudest possessions hang on the walls of his tiny one-room house -- his son Phu My's school honors certificates. He brought his family to this sprawling slum on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City three years ago because he didn't want his children to miss out on the schooling he longed for when he was younger. He had wanted to become a schoolteacher, but poverty drove him out of the classroom and into the rice fields when he was 12.
The Hungs left Quang Phu, their village on the Perfume River, in 1996, after a bad harvest left them without enough rice for the winter. Now Mr. Hung would like to become a motorcycle-taxi driver for the extra income it would bring, but he can't afford the bike. Instead, he and his wife, Le Thi Anh, work 11 hours a day to earn $4 apiece pushing food carts through Ho Chi Minh City traffic. What isn't spent on food and rent goes on school tuition, books, papers and pens for their son and two daughters. "Everything for the children's education," he says.
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Skipping School
School attendance among children in Ho Chi Minh City
Age Migrant Non-migrant
6-9 87% 100%
15-19 33% 66%
The United Nations Development Program notes the numbers are rough
estimates.
Source: UNDP