‘CO2’ trips of Vietnamese people to England

`CO2` refers to the stuffy, airless journeys in containers or trucks.

Migrants often have to wait for months in immigration camps in northern France, before sneaking into trucks.

Going `CO2 packing` also means having to wrap yourself in a thermal blanket or endure hours in a refrigerated container carrying goods to avoid being detected by the authorities.

But what the `human barrels` had to endure on that horrifying container was not the last leg of their migration journey to England.

British police took a container truck carrying 39 bodies discovered in Essex County away from the scene on October 23.

It is estimated that Vietnamese people pay human traffickers to get to Europe at a price ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 USD.

The Brexit process, which means leaving the European Union (EU), has reduced Britain’s labor source from Eastern Europe.

Most of the `bosses` take Vietnamese people to France and the Netherlands and then transfer them to Kurdish and Albanian gangs, and recently Irish or Northern Irish people to do the rest.

Many Vietnamese migrants come from Nghe An and Ha Tinh, two poor provinces in central Vietnam.

But when they arrived in the UK, they were completely `disillusioned`, living in a precarious situation, unable to seek help in the strict immigration system.

`I always advise them to stay in their homeland,` Father Simon Nguyen Duc Thang at a Catholic church in east London, where many parishioners are migrants, said this week.

Of the estimated 20,000 – 35,000 Vietnamese people living undocumented in the UK, not all of them have experienced horrors.

`My research shows that not all migrants are exploited and trafficked,` said Tamsin Barber, a lecturer at Oxford Brookers University.

The number of Vietnamese migrants trafficked to the UK is also constantly increasing, with last year being 5 times higher than in 2012.

On the journey from China to Russia and Western Europe, one of the most terrifying passages Vietnamese immigrants have to go through is walking through the forests of Belarus to the Polish border.

In a 2017 survey conducted by France on Vietnamese immigrants, a young man named Anh, 24 years old, said he and five other men, under the guidance of a human trafficker, were arrested many times.

Many smugglers arrange for victims to go to check-in counters at the airport about 10 minutes before the plane closes.

Trips to England can take months, but they can also take years.

It is common for Vietnamese people to have their journey to the UK interrupted, because they are detained or run out of money.

Vietnamese people working in a nail salon in Tottenham, London in 2017. Photo: New York Times.

Traffickers often lie or withhold location information from migrants, in order to completely control them.

If victims do not listen to traffickers, the consequences can be dire.

In cases that reach the UK, they are often `disillusioned`, according to lawyer Sulaiha Ali.

And in nail salons, many Vietnamese people can be controlled by their owners in every aspect of their lives, although research shows that some are accepted by the owners to be `godparents`, cook or provide accommodation.

Father Simon, who left Vietnam for England in 1984, said he recently received calls from families in Vietnam, asking for information, asking if their children could be victims in the 39-person case.

`Fathers, mothers, called me in tears,` Simon said.

`It’s okay to have nothing, but that’s in the case of being arrested or in prison. That means being alive. But now, they’ve lost everything. Lost hope, lost life. Nothing,` said the priest.

Mai Lam (According to NYTimes)