Migration in Vietnam: driven by the state or the market?

Are migration studies premised on a false ideological bias? Is the operation of a free market the engine of migration? What have we learned about the linkages between migration and development? How do individual and family livelihood strategies shape migration patterns?

A report from the University of East Anglia’s Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE) uses evidence from internal migration in Vietnam to argue that migration studies have been preoccupied with a categorisation of the phenomenon split into forced and planned versus free or unorganised. It argues the need to better appreciate the essential diversity and spatial and temporal dynamics of migration and its complex impact on livelihoods.

The paper traces the persistent efforts of the Vietnamese state to reshape the country’s population configuration and distribution. Literature on migration in Vietnam has until recently focused on ‘organised migration’, the evacuation of the urban population of northern Vietnam to avoid US bombardment, and the post-reunification resettlement programmes implemented to redress the perceived imbalance of population density between North and South and between the Red River and Mekong Deltas and the mountainous frontier areas.

Key findings note that:

• the declared demographic and economic justifications of the resettlement programmes were questionable
• the environmental arguments to justify the enforced inactivity of ethnic minorities and end their ‘destructive’ slash-and-burn agriculture, were particularly misplaced
• geopolitical considerations (the desire to populate strategic areas adjoining Laos, Cambodia and China with ethnic Vietnamese) and ideological mistrust of ‘parasitic’ southern urbanites who were moved to the countryside were the real motivating impulses behind resettlement
• while official statistics are misleading (and conceal the extent of return movements), it appears that the target of moving 10 million people by 2000 was only 15 to 25 per cent successful
• ethnic minorities were adept at developing strategies to get round sedentarisation schemes
• since 1986, decollectivisation, the emergence of non-state enterprises and changes in property and tenure laws have led to increased, spontaneous migration.

Individual and household socio-economic actors pursuing their own interests have recently managed to reshape power relations and gain greater bargaining power. While official constraints on mobility still exist, and security personnel have not stopped removals of rural migrants from urban areas, more and more people are able to ignore the official requirement to obtain permission from local authorities at origin and destination. Most are now eventually able to get their non-authorised residence legitimised.

The report argues the need for government policy to accommodate the new circumstances of greater population mobility. Policy and research implications arising from the study suggests the need in Vietnam, and in other developing and transitional countries with significant internal migration, for:

• shedding presumptions that migration has negative consequences for development
• a holistic approach to migration which integrates demographic realities into development programmes
• better social provision and environmental protection projects in both sending and receiving communities
• improved understanding of the livelihood diversification strategies of rural families, the socio-economic effects of remittances on sending areas and migration’s impact on access to resources, credit, information and social services
• more attention to issues of ethnicity and gender equity in migration studies.

Source(s):
‘Structure and implications of migration in a transitional economy: beyond the planned and spontaneous dichotomy in Vietnam’, CSERGE Working Paper, GEC 01-01, by Heather Xiaoquan Zhang, P. Mick Kelly and Catherine Locke, 2001 Full document.

Funded by: John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation

id21 Research Highlight: 10 October 2003

Further Information:
Mick Kelly
CSERGE
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1603 593738
Fax: +44 (0)1603 593739
Contact the contributor: m.kelly@uea.ac.uk

CSERGE, University of East Anglia, UK

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