WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

MARRIAGE MIGRATION BETWEEN VIETNAM AND TAIWAN…
Statistics on the marriage of Vietnamese women to Taiwanese
men, at the Vietnam end of the process, are maintained by the Taipei
Economic and Cultural Offices (TECO) in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh
City. Unfortunately data are only currently available from the latter
although it is true that the bulk of women involved are recruited from
the southern part of the country and the numbers registering at the
Hanoi office are likely to be small. Between 1995 and September 2002,
there were 58,279 such visas issued from the TECO in Ho Chi Minh
City (Do et al., 2003, 38) and in May 2004 officers reported that the
running total was in the vicinity of 70,000. 6 In addition, it is believed
there are about 5,000 visas issued at the Hanoi TECO (Do et al., 2003,
38). The bulk of all these visas have been issued in the last five years
with the numbers reaching a peak of 12,417 in 2001.
As is true of most migration in Asia, the marriage migrants are
drawn from particular communities. The brides are not recruited from
all areas around Vietnam but are overwhelmingly from rural areas in
the Mekong Delta region, which has some of the poorest communities
in Vietnam (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Province of origin of Vietnamese marriage migrants to Taiwan,
1994-2002 (number of women)
Laos
NUMBER OF WOMEN
250
100
50
10
Source: Based on data in Do et al., 2002.
Cambodia
China
Gulf of Tonkin
South
China
Sea
6 Unpublished data from Ho Chi Minh City TECO, May 2004.
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