~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

[Year 1997]
[Year 1998]
[Year 1999]
[Year 2000]
[Year 2001]

Rural migrants give new faces to Vietnam cities

HANOI - Tran Tien Dat dreamed the dream of the countryside. It was about all the wonders the city must hold: the excitement, the brightly lighted streets and, most important, a steady job. He could not shake these thoughts and knew that one day, despite his parents' objections, he would flee the rice paddies.

Last year, he left rural Phu Tho province in northern Vietnam and, as have so many young men, sought work here in the capital. His dream has taken him to a small factory on the banks of the Red River, just beyond the Long Bien Bridge, which U.S. bombers attacked repeatedly during the Vietnam War. Now he stands shinbone-deep in mud, covered with soot, sweating over the bricks of cooking coal he helps produce.

"I came to Hanoi to establish myself, although life is not as exciting as I hoped," says Dat, a 21-year-old high school graduate who lives and eats with seven others in the grimy factory. He works seven days a week, sunup to sundown, and earns about $2 a day, a princely sum compared with his income in the countryside, where "there simply is no work between crops." Dat's journey from farm to factory is one taken by tens of thousands of young Vietnamese every year, resulting in the most significant internal demographic change in this country of 77 million people since the war ended in 1975. Though Vietnamese society retains deep roots to family and village, a government survey indicates that half the 2.5 million people in the greater Hanoi area were born elsewhere and that one in four did not live in the capital a decade ago.

About 5,000 rural migrants--most young, single and unskilled--move here each month, the Labor Ministry reports. In metropolitan Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, which is attracting about 10,000 migrants a month, the population has swollen to 5 million and is projected to reach 12 million in 2020. The tide of new residents has strained social and housing services, created environmental problems and clogged streets, where 2 million bicycles, 1.5 million motorbikes and 58,000 cars compete for an open lane.

Though Still Low, Crime Is on the Rise Crime, though insignificant compared with U.S. urban areas, is increasing in the major cities. Rivers and lakes are becoming fouled with refuse and human waste. Air pollution is increasing. Those problems, the government says, are all related to migration. Shantytowns have sprung up on the outskirts of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, populated by transplants who cannot afford housing in the city centers. Along Hanoi's Giang Ho Street, groups of former farmers idle away the hours chatting and playing cards, hoping for a day's work as casual laborers. "There is no job I won't do," says Hoang Pham, 28. His daily expenses for living quarters and food amount to 35 cents.

Authorities have responded to the migration by making repeated attempts to enforce regulations that still require Vietnamese to obtain permission before taking up a new residency. But the cash-strapped Communist government, which is uncomfortable when it sees its control of the population lessened, has found itself without effective tools to limit the flow of people. It is estimated that one of every five people in Ho Chi Minh City is an "illegal" resident.

In fact, a U.N. report on Vietnam's rural exodus concludes: "Migration is a rational act." The movement is a search for economic opportunity and security stimulated by government policies adopted in 1986, under which Vietnam took the first steps toward a free-market economy, which led to growing prosperity and foreign investment. Most of the investment and the opportunities it creates are concentrated in or near the major cities. Despite the strains that migration creates in a population that is 78% rural and the most dense in Southeast Asia after those of Singapore and the Philippines, there are some positive economic aspects, says Nicholas Rosellini of the U.N. Development Program.

"It increases the labor force," says Rosellini, the program's deputy representative here, "and it can increase rural opportunity because most of the workers tend to send their income back to the families in the rural provinces." As a result, economists say, the disparity between rich and poor provinces is reduced. The migration from country to city is hardly unique to Vietnam. A similar movement fueled Europe's Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. Southeast Asia's economic boom of the 1980s and '90s pushed the populations of metropolitan Manila; Bangkok, Thailand; and Jakarta, Indonesia, upward to about 10 million each. All three cities are still trying to cope with the resultant stress on social and medical services, public transportation, housing, law enforcement and the environment. Nor is migration new to Vietnam. When the country was partitioned into north and south in 1954, about 1 million northerners, many of them Roman Catholics, crossed the Ben Hai River into South Vietnam. The exodus from the Communist north to the capitalist south was encouraged--some say engineered--by the CIA.

During the war, millions of Vietnamese fled from northern cities into the countryside to escape the U.S. bombing campaign, and millions more fled into southern cities to seek protection from ground fighting in rural areas. Thousands Fled After the Fall of Saigon Then there was the flight of hundreds of thousands to Western countries after North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon in April 1975, and the involuntary resettlement between 1976 and 1990 of 3.7 million Vietnamese into the government's "economic zones" in the Central Highlands and in the Mekong Delta in the south. The zones, which collectivized farming, proved a disaster, led to near famine and forced the government to reevaluate its policies and move toward a free-market economy.

It is said in Vietnam that if your face is to the earth and your back to the sun, your work is hard. At the factory on the Red River, work is indeed hard. Barefoot young men with rolled-up pants mold mud and coal together to make the bricks that millions of Hanoians use as cooking fuel. Each cylindrical piece sells for about 3 cents and burns for two hours. "This is only a temporary job because it has no future," says Nguyen Van Bang, 30, who has been in Hanoi for a year and is studying English at night. "But I hope it will lead me to a better job, and even though this work is dirty and low-paid, my life is still better in Hanoi than it was in the country."

By David Lamb - Los Angeles Time - February 17, 2000.