Phong, 27, is an undocumented Vietnamese migrant working eleven hours a day, six days a week at a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris for €1,550 a month. He lives a minimal existence. Every penny Phong can spare goes to repaying the €15,000 debt he incurred while travelling from Nghe An in central Vietnam to France. The smuggler had charged him €4,000 up front, which was enough to get him to Moscow on a tourist visa. The trip to Poland cost a further €6,000: €2,000 for the arrangements to leave and €4,000 for arriving safely. A final €5,000 was due once he arrived in France.
Phong, of course, did not have this sort of cash sitting around. He borrowed it and now he has to pay it back. This is why he spends nearly all his waking moments working at a restaurant for less than €6 an hour.
Even though Phong was not among the dead, his story can help us think about the recent tragedy in Essex, where the bodies of 39 Vietnamese migrants were found in the back of a refrigerated container lorry. Are smugglers simply travel service providers? Or are they traffickers luring migrants into debt to later enslave them? In the days following the discovery in Essex the media was full of claims of trafficking. But portraying such events as clear-cut cases of trafficking and modern slavery is neither necessarily accurate nor practically helpful.
