View article

The end of the Cold war has marked a radical change in the history of international migration processes (Castles, 2000). After several decades of controlled and limited international mobility, citizens of the former or reformed communist States began to have new opportunities to cross borders for tourism, visits, temporary or permanent migration for work and other socioeconomic needs. At the same time, the opening of borders of these nation-states has led to important in-flows of nationals from other countries. The increase in internal and international migrations within and between China and Vietnam are part of this important migration transition. Changing migration patterns in these two reformed economies (from planned to market) are generally linked to the far-reaching economic changes of the past two decades, accompanied by necessary ‘more’open-border policies that facilitate the circulation of goods, capital, and people (Dang and Le, 2001; Dang, 2003).

While in the 1970s and 1980s, the vast majority of Asian migrant workers migrated to the rich-oil countries of the Middle-East, this trend now has changed in favour of intra-Asia migration (IOM, 2005). Citizens of many developing countries of Asia now consider migration, for the most part temporary work migration, in the realm of possibilities to better their lives (Hugo, 2004). Most male migrants work in manufacturing and fisheries, and most female migrants labour as nannies, domestic workers or in the entertainment and sex industry (Piper, 2004). Due to the disengagement of governments of sending countries in the recruitment and training process of workers, a private and semiprivate …