A Long Way from Vietnam

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BBC journalist Nga Pham investigates people-smuggling from her country into the UK.

Nga Pham asks why irregular Vietnamese migration is the second highest into the UK - and rising annually. Why hasn’t the Essex lorry disaster, with 39 deaths, put others off?

BBC journalist Nga Pham asks why irregular Vietnamese migration is the second highest into the UK (Albanian nationals are the first), and why the numbers are rising every year.  

Even the tragedy of the Essex lorry disaster in 2019, when 39 Vietnamese people were suffocated in a container lorry as they came over the Channel, is not enough to put them off.  Coming from some of the most economically deprived provinces in Vietnam, these families pay from $30-45,000 to people smugglers to send hundreds of their children out each year in the hope of a better future. 

The land route out through China, Russia, Europe can take months if not years, often involving coercion, trafficking and sexual exploitation along the way.  Then Calais and the final peril of crossing by boat or lorry awaits them, before trying to find a job and make a life here.

Nga talks to people in Vietnam about their desperation to leave and why the 39 deaths have not deterred them, and to those who have returned, sending back their earnings to clear family debts, build houses, and buy motorbikes for their relations.  She also talks to those who were caught up in trafficking networks, discovered by the police and deported back to Vietnam with nothing to show for their years of slave labour.  

In the UK, Nga meets people who have arrived by container just like the Essex 39 - people who are now working in nail bars, cannabis farms and restaurants, hiding in plain sight.   She talks to modern slavery lawyers, anti-trafficking police units across the country, and the National Crime Agency which has an officer permanently based in Hanoi.  Nga asks the Minister for Immigration what the UK government strategy is for ending this misery of debt bondage and cheap labour.   


Presented by Nga Pham
Produced by Anna Horsbrugh-Porter
A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 4

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