Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Return migration is a popular topic to be researched in many countries. It is not always a ‘natural’ process, a matter of simply going home, but an indispensability of migration process. In Vietnam, however, return migration has not been much researched, especially not research on internal remigration of the poor voluntary migrant workers who migrated from rural areas to the urban areas or the cities. The study was carried out in O Lam village, Tri Ton district, An Giang province. This study was conducted to answer three questions as well as to clarify three issues: 1) the reason why Khmer migrant workers return to their home village; 2) the social and economic impacts for the returnees and their families; and 3) the adaptation of both Khmer migrants and villagers to the return of the migrants in the home village. To achieve these objectives, a mixed methodology - ethnological approach combined with PRA tools, secondary data, and literature - was applied in this research. The findings of this study showed that all processes of the migration up to remigration of the Khmer people in this village were generalized. The findings also showed that Khmer return migrants returned home with many various reasons. However, two core ones were due to the fact that most of the Khmer short term returnees could not adapt to the living and working conditions in the destinations, and the seasonal returnees mostly returned to the home village because of rice crop season in the countryside. Besides that, the returnees also re-migrate to the countryside due to health problem, and other reasons. The study also explored that the remigration of both groups of returnees had significant effects on themselves and their families in terms of economic, social, and cultural aspects. Another point was presented that the different groups of return migration had different strategies in order to re-adapt in their home village. Moreover, it was reported the Khmer return migrant workers has not accessed to the support policy for both the migrants and the return migrants because their spontaneous migration.