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UK border: 20 years of dying in lorries but still ‘no change’ [1]

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Date: 2024-02 

On the night of 22 October 2019, Pham Thi Tra My, a 26-year-old Vietnamese woman, sent her last text to her mother. “I'm dying, I can't breathe,” she told her. “I am really, really sorry, mum and dad, my trip to a foreign land has failed.” And then she wrote no more.

Pham had left Vietnam a few weeks earlier, hoping to reach England. She was found lifeless in the back of a lorry on an industrial estate in Grays, 20 kilometres east of London, the morning after she sent that last message.

Thirty-eight of her compatriots, 31 men and seven women, were found asphyxiated with her. They are among the 391 migrants who died on the border between the UK, France and Belgium between 1 January 1999 and 1 January 2024, and whose lives and deaths are recounted in this series.

So much hope

Pham was born in Nghen, a town in central Vietnam. She took the bus in early October 2019 for Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, then travelled by land to China. She stayed for ten days before flying to Paris on a tourist visa provided by a smuggler.

“The majority of the 39 victims of this deadly crossing come from regions that are not only the least developed in the country, but also the most vulnerable to climate change,” said Danielle Tan, an independent researcher who has studied Vietnamese migrants stranded on the French-British border.

That said, “it is not the poorest inhabitants of these regions who decide to leave,” she said. “This journey requires considerable resources, not least financial.”

Pham paid at least £17,000 to reach the United Kingdom. “Most of the time, it's relatives who contribute to financing a young family member's trip,” Tan explained. That creates “a debt that will then have to be repaid”.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/uk-border-crossings-20-years-of-dying-in-lorries-but-still-no-change/

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