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”.
The smuggler is your uncle, your cousin, and the person who has the contacts to continue the journey
Hoang Van Tiep, an 18-year-old cousin of Pham, died in the container with her. He had begun his journey two years earlier, reaching France via Russia.
He likely chose this route because of enduring ties between Vietnam and the former communist bloc despite the fall of Soviet Union. “Many Vietnamese wishing to travel to Europe stop off in Russia on a simple tourist visa”, said Mimi Vu, an independent expert on human trafficking in Vietnam. And, to this day, many central and eastern European countries run seasonal employment programmes with southeast Asian countries.
“Central and Eastern Europe has a serious shortage of workers in the industrial, construction and agricultural sectors”, said Vu, pointing out that “two victims of the fatal crossing in October 2019 had arrived in Europe on temporary work visas.”
A final journey
Migrants wishing to go further, like Hoang, then often use smugglers to cross Europe from east to west.
“Describing these networks as organised, with a leader at the top of the pyramid and a tribe of migrants at the bottom, waiting to be shipped, is a mistake”, said Tan. “The smuggler is your uncle, your cousin, and above all the person who has the contacts to continue the journey. At the end of the day, it's a bit of a scramble.”
Vu said it resembles a “vast logistics sector,” with many players contributing to moving goods around. “The shipping container you want to send from Vietnam to Europe passes from one company to another, without them all knowing each other, and without you knowing them all,” she said. “Here it's the same, but with human beings.”
Some migrants tried to break through the wall with an iron bar but were unable to do so
After reaching France, Hoang worked for a while as a dishwasher in a restaurant. He told his family he wanted to go to England in September 2019, and on 21 October he wrote to his parents asking for £11,000 to fund the journey. This was his last message to loved ones back home.
The next morning, he was joined by his cousin Pham and other migrants in the middle of an industrial zone in Bierne, a town a few kilometres south of Dunkirk. A lorry pulled up next to the group, they climbed into the trailer, and then it carried on to the Belgian port of Zeebrugge.
At the trial later on, the driver, Eamonn Harrison, a 22-year-old Irishman, said he was watching Netflix with the curtains closed when the migrants entered.
Harrison uncoupled the trailer at the port shortly before 2pm. An hour later it was loaded onto a ferry bound for Purfleet, England – an eight-hour crossing. At the bottom of the ferry, in the hermetically sealed trailer, the temperature reached 38 degrees. Oxygen was running out, and the passengers were panicking.
Some migrants tried to break through the wall with an iron bar but were unable to do so. At 7.37pm, another of the victims, Nguyen Tho Tuan, wrote to his loved ones: “ I cannot take care of you. I am sorry. I am sorry. I cannot breathe.”
The ferry reached the English coast shortly after midnight, and police discovered the bodies early in the morning.
Mourning and anger
“The next day, we decided to hold a vigil outside the Home Office in London. There was a lot of anger and sadness, particularly in the east and southeast Asian diasporas,” said Kay Stephens, a member of the Remember & Resist collective that was formed in the wake of this tragedy.
Other commemorations took place across the UK, from Belfast to Glasgow. “The media and the authorities were quick to point the finger of blame at the smugglers,” Stephens said. But “to see the home secretary, Priti Patel, say on Twitter that she is ‘shocked and saddened’ is to forget that these deaths are above all the consequence of the hostile environment policies deployed by the British authorities.”
The more risks smugglers take, the higher the cost of passage
During the vigil in front of the Home Office, “a Chinese community activist, Jabez Lam, took the floor and recalled that, 20 years earlier, 58 Chinese migrants had died in similar circumstances,” Stephens said.
Customs officers at the port of Dover discovered the bodies Lam was referring to on 18 June 2000. Like the 39 migrants from Vietnam, these were also in a trailer loaded onto a ferry at Zeebrugge.
“The same policies continue to be pursued, so there's obviously a strong resonance between these two events,” Stephens said.
The 39 deaths resonate with future tragedies as well. later. In December 2001, 13 people left Zeebrugge hidden in a container bound, they thought, for Dover. Four days later the container was opened in Waterford, in the south of Ireland. Eight were dead, and the rest were perilously close to it.
Trials, but no change
The collective death of 39 Vietnamese migrants in October 2019 triggered police investigations in several countries.
In the UK, this investigation led to the conviction of 11 people, including the truck driver, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for manslaughter. Eighteen people were punished in Belgium, including cab drivers and the owners of homes through which victims had passed. In Vietnam, four convictions for human trafficking were handed down. Most recently, in November 2023, 18 people were given jail sentences of up to 10 years in France, including several cab drivers.
But, seen from Vietnam, “the death of these 39 exiles didn’t change anything,” Vu said. “The main consequence has been an increase in the cost of the journey.“ Before October 2019 the price to reach Western Europe ranged between £13,000 and £27,000 she said, but now it can reach £43,000.
“The more risks smugglers take, the higher the cost of passage,“ Vu said.
She added that higher prices are further supported by the lesson many prospective migrants have drawn from the tragedy.
“Many Vietnamese wishing to leave the country believe these migrants died because they didn’t pay enough,” she said, “and so arrival in the United Kingdom was not guaranteed.“
And while those 39 people did make it to UK soil, those planning to travel after them can only hope to make it alive.
Explore the rest of the series
- INTRODUCTION | 391 deaths in 25 years at the UK border
MEMORIAL | Our cemetery of 391 migrant deaths - PORT | Dying by the ferries in Calais
- TUNNEL | Drivers said Eurotunnel ‘a picture of war’
- HOMICIDE | Punitive killings in Calais overlooked
- POLICE | Police violence ‘rarely punished’ at the border
- LORRIES | 20 years of dying in lorries but still ‘no change’
- BOATS | The path to the ‘small boats’ crisis
- SUICIDE | A border designed to create despair
- REMEMBRANCE | 25 years of victims: ‘Your borders, our dead’
- EXPLAINER | Channel border violence from a UK perspective
BEHIND THIS SERIES
The author, Maël Galisson, has painstakingly collected and cross-checked the data underlying this series and the Calais Memorial since 2015. His sources include death certificates, press articles, reports from NGOs and activists, and testimonies from migrants and volunteers.
The original version of this series was published in French by Les Jours in summer 2023. It was updated and re-edited after it was translated into English for publication on openDemocracy.
