Deported... Returned...

September 13, 2009
By Stéphane Janin
http://khmerabroad.blogspot.com

There are currently 212 returnees who have been deported since 2002, as they have encountered the American justice system in a time where they lacked the American citizenship. If a few of them have succeeded getting good jobs, most returnees don’t have the chance to be in a great positive mood. Some face real physical or health concerns, sometimes crippled by malnutrition, others face psychological issues or depression, some can end up in the streets, weak, vulnerable and often the victim of violent crime. Intolerable situation certainly, but the cause mostly lack financial support. The Returnee Integration Support Center (RISC) in Phnom Penh has seen his funding really diminished these last years (USAID withdrew support for the project) and can only do its best with a diminishing staff to provide a place for these Returnees and help them with housing, health, education and most of all finding a job. From Massachussets, an American organization – “Deported Diaspora”, http://www.deporteddiaspora.org/ – tries to support deported people and advocate on that problem.

In the 1980s, the American government has welcomed some 145 000 Cambodians, most of them from the different refugees camps of the Thai border. For some of the children of these Cambodian refugees, America has sometimes played unwanted tricks, taking advantage some twenty years later of their lacking the American citizenship: in March 2002, the United States signed a deportation agreement with Cambodia.

Since then deportation back to Cambodia has become the fate of more than 200 Cambodian Americans (212 to this day) who had encountered the American justice system. Many of the deported are people who left Cambodia as babies or young children or who were born in the Thai refugee camps, having never touched Cambodian soil in their entire lives. They’re from California, Massachussets, Minnesota, Texas, Florida and other places in the US where Cambodians have gathered. And they will never be allowed to go back to America, even for a short family visit!

Unlike the integration of others Asian nationalities, the integration of Cambodians to the American life has not always been easy. Many surveys in the last decade show that Cambodians usually have some of the worst rates in terms of poverty living, access to American citizenship, access to college studies, use of the English language…

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