Letter from Phnom Penh

Thoughts from the front lines of US Immigration

The two young men sporting hip hop clothes and gang tattoos wander easily among the tourists.

There are so many people visiting the ancient temples of Angkor that no one in particular draws much attention. These two are Cambodian American, visiting the temples that represent the glory of the Khmer empire, icons which they have known all their lives only through the stories of their parents. The two kneel in front of a statue of Buddha, heads bowed in prayer. Boxer shorts sprout out of their sagging pants, and the tattoos running down their arms end in hands with palms pressed together, sticks of incense cradled in their fingers.

They are not tourists and this is not a vacation. They are “returnees,” deported from the United States where they have grown up, back to the country they fled as young children with their families. While there are currently 67 returnees in Cambodia, there are another 1,500 awaiting deportation in the U.S.

They have all been ordered deported, mostly on the basis of having been convicted of a crime. Changes to U.S. immigration law have largely eliminated defences to their “removal,” as deportation is now called, even though most of them have lived in the U.S. for 20 years or more and many, like these two young men, came as young children and have grown up as “Americans.”

Kimho Ma left Cambodia in 1979 as a sick baby tied to his mother’s chest with a scarf. They were among the tens of thousands of Cambodians fleeing the murderous Khmer Rouge. In the regime’s attempts to rid the Cambodian population of all traces of Western and intellectual thought, close to two million Cambodians—almost one-third of the country’s population—died between 1975 and 1979, victims of starvation, sickness, and arbitrary execution. When the Vietnamese army “liberated” the country in 1979, survivors flooded across the border into Thailand.

The Ma family travelled on foot to Thailand without food, with Kimho sick and lifeless, wrapped in a krama. His mother walked hand-in-hand with Kimho’s brother and sister, with his oldest brother in the lead taking the place of the father who stayed behind, too ill to make the trek. Throughout their difficult journey, skirting land mines and Khmer Rouge soldiers, his mother would periodically check to see if the baby was still moving, ready to leave him for dead by the side of the road. He managed to breathe just enough to convince them not to abandon him.

When they made it to the Thai border, his sister remembers, “We knew then he would live a long life because he was so strong to survive that trip.”

They spent five years in refugee camps on the Thai/Cambodian border, waiting for sponsorship to a third country and for international immigration policy and laws to embrace the waves of refugees from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. The Ma family came to the U.S. in 1985 when Kimho was seven, along with his mother’s sister’s family.

The family came as part of the large wave of Cambodian migration between 1975 and 1985, when some 127,000 Cambodian refugees arrived in the U.S. They were war refugees, without plans or suitcases, carrying only a few photographs taken in the refugee camps, the memories of the atrocities they had experienced, and a desire for freedom. Rural dwellers mostly, they had few skills and little education. The cities where they settled were not ready to take on whole populations of strange refugees without job or language skills. They were poor in a United States that would become increasingly hostile to the poor over the next 20 years.

The struggles they experienced in adapting to their new culture were exacerbated by psychological distress. Close to 50 percent of adult Cambodian refugees were ultimately diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a 1999 report by the office of the U.S. Surgeon General, while many more exhibited some of the symptoms. Most adults were unwilling to talk about their experiences under the Khmer Rouge, either with aid workers or with their young children, who had no memories of the atrocities. Children feeling isolated from their peers, both socially and at school, were reluctant to bring their troubles to their parents, who were struggling with the demons they carried from Cambodia, while trying to feed their families on low paying jobs.

English quickly became the language used by the younger generation to describe their experiences in an English speaking world. Children became the translators for their parents, interacting with social services, doctors, lawyers, and schools. Older sons took the place of fathers who had been lost to war or the Khmer Rouge. One refugee remembers answering a phone call from the police in the middle of the night, looking for the father of the family to come pick up his younger brother. “There is no father,” he told them. “I am the father. I will come get him.”

As family roles reversed, elders lost the respect of their children and the control they traditionally had in the family. Teens felt estranged from their Cambodian families because of their language and cultural differences and marginalized at school for the same reasons. Many found security with others in the same situation, groups that sometimes grew into street gangs. The breakdown in traditional family structures is considered by many to be a root cause for the growth of Asian gangs. A worker with the Khmer Community of Seattle-King County admitted, “Most kids join a gang because of the loss of power as a parent.”

Kimho Ma described the reasons he and his friends joined gangs. “Many of the Asian youths were looking for a place of acceptance. A lot was very young, some was in their early teens, and they had no understanding of their culture. Many came from poor living conditions and most were undereducated. Gangster life was a chance for them to build status in post- modern America.... I spoke some English but not good enough, so I would get teased at school. Most of us got mocked for being different, taunted for being poor, and battered for being foreign.... We saw the gang as a congregation for strength and unity...there was no more intimidation at school.”

There was also antagonism among the many immigrant, refugee, and ethnic groups living together in housing projects and attending the same schools. Kimho explained, “...members of the early year join for the sole purpose for protection against out-side attack from different ethnic group. One of the biggest rivalries in the street of America is the Latino gangs and the Asian gangs. Many blame the problem on the ethnicity, but I see it as a poverty issue…. Here we were, young Khmer men living in the ghetto of America. So was it wrong for us to stand up for ourselves? Was it wrong for us to be free of harm?”

Kimho was 17-years-old when he was arrested for participating in a gang shooting in 1995. Throughout the 1990s, many minors who ran afoul of the criminal justice system were being charged as adults, bringing younger and younger lawbreakers into the adult system where they could be charged with more serious crimes and sentenced to longer sentences in adult prisons.

At the same time, many refugee adults didn’t or couldn’t apply to naturalize themselves and their minor children because of a lack of English skills, lack of low income legal assistance for refugees and immigrants, and a lack of understanding among social service providers of how important citizenship was for ensuring the stability of immigrant and refugee families. The psychological baggage that many refugees carried with them also created real fear of government officials. An incompetent immigration service made things difficult for those who did apply—stories abound of lost paperwork, wrong forms, incorrect information, and utter indifference on the part of the bureaucracy for the families whose lives were permanently affected by its inefficiency.

This left family members exposed to increasingly draconian immigration laws. But most refugee children who were growing up here assumed they were no different than U.S. citizens, or at least that their parents had taken care of whatever legal manipulations their immigration to the U.S. had required. Even if they did understand their immigration status and the severity of not naturalizing, as minors they were not able to apply for citizenship on their own. Along with many others, Kimho’s parents did not naturalize, nor did they understand the significance of the clothing and “colours” he wore, the music he listened to, or the places where he hung out with his friends—until he was arrested and charged with a gang-related murder.

Charged as adults, a jury found Kimho and three of his co-defendants guilty of manslaughter. After serving a 22-month sentence, he was released from state prison only to be incarcerated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). That was when he discovered he was not a U.S. citizen and faced extremely punitive immigration laws. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) required that anyone convicted of a dizzying array of felonies must be deported, and eliminated any discretion for immigration judges to grant waivers no matter how compelling the individual circumstances. For Kimho Ma, there was no defence to deportation.

Before he and his family understood what was happening, Kimho was ordered deported. He remained behind bars, in INS “detention,” but Cambodia had not accepted the repatriation of any of its citizens since the Vietnam War decades earlier and refused to accept him. With deportation pending, but not possible, the INS insisted on holding Kimho in detention, even if it was for life.

He found other Cambodians like himself in the various INS jails. There were Vietnamese and Laotian detainees in the same situation, since U.S. relations with all three countries were cut off after the wars in Southeast Asia. Nationally, there were estimated to be close to 5,000 Southeast Asians being held in INS limbo indefinitely, the “lifers” waiting to be deported.

The INS argued that these former criminals, who had all served their sentences, were a danger to society. The government also claimed that because they had been ordered deported, they had been stripped of their constitutional right to freedom. Kimho and the others fought back, filing handwritten petitions for writs of habeas corpus from their cells. These jailhouse litigants ultimately came to the attention of lawyers who would take on their cases and fight the detentions. Kimho’s case became the focus of appeals through the federal courts, finding their final victory in a 5 to 4 decision at the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2001 in the cases of Ashcroft v. Ma and Zadvydus v. Davis. The decision allowed the release of thousands of detainees, some of whom had been in INS detention for five years or more. Kimho Ma had spent two and one-half years in INS detention after completing his sentence in state prison.

But the win at the Supreme Court left the deportation orders of all of these people untouched. As anti-immigrant policies intensified in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, U.S. officials pressured the Cambodian government to sign an agreement in March 2002 that would allow Cambodian nationals in the U.S. with deportation orders to be sent back to the country they had fled decades earlier.

Kimho was among the first groups to be sent back. In early October 2002, his family gathered at the shabby gas station across the street from INS headquarters in Seattle where he was to turn himself in. As his mother watched the door to the immigration building swing shut behind him, she sank to the sidewalk, as if all of her spirit and strength had disappeared along with her son.

Kimho’s trip across the Pacific retraced the journey his family had taken 17 years earlier. Except this time he was in shackles and handcuffs, guarded by INS officers on a U.S. government jet.
Arriving in Phnom Penh for the first time in his life, Kimho Ma was struck by how beautiful the country was and how friendly the people. After an initial period of detention by Cambodian immigration, he now lives as a Cambodian in Phnom Penh. Along with the several dozen men who have been deported to Cambodia, so far, he has found himself in a country unlike anything he could have imagined from his parents stories.

Cambodia overflows with the unfortunate. Limbless land-mine victims fill the streets of Phnom Penh, swarming foreigners for handouts that will allow them to eat for another day. They share street corners with clusters of street kids, many abandoned by families too poor to care for them, sniffing glue to cut the constant hunger and heat. HIV positive babies, acid attack victims missing parts of their faces, 12-year-old prostitutes, orchestras of amputee musicians, all vie for the limited services offered by privately funded non-governmental organizations. Raw sewage flows into the Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers and power lines routinely collapse in the winds and rains of the annual monsoons, falling into flood waters in the streets below and electrocuting anyone wading through at the time.

Still, one of the first impressions Kimho had of Cambodia was that, for the first time in memory, he was in a place where everyone looked like him. The racism that dogged him in the United States was gone. Many of the returnees experienced the same sense of familiarity, along with relief at being free of the U.S. immigration system.

But they also find that they stand out. While most of them speak Khmer, their accents give them away as non-native. Some try to dress like locals so they won’t look different, but many of their mannerisms—the way they walk, the way they look at someone while conversing—all give them away as “foreign.” They are often asked where they come from, and are usually requested to pay the more expensive foreigner rate for public services and activities. “To start off we already look different, then we all speak in English and just act different,” writes Kimho. “My Cambodian is still questioned by a lot of locals.... It’s a trip how so many people think [I] am not Khmer. But, then again maybe that’s a good thing. Almost everybody I meet thinks [I] am a tourist. If they only knew.”

Kimho writes frequently of the confusion of not knowing in which world he belongs. “All I know is [I] am here and that it’s for a while.... When you wake up and you hop on a motodup [motorcycle taxi] and you see the struggle of the country again. Only then you realize that this is a part of my world now. It ain’t Bush, Backstreet Boy, or MTV no more. Now it’s the CPP [the ruling Cambodian People’s Party] or the Sam Rainsy Party, the dusty road, and the traffic of Cambodia.”

Talking to his mom, he says “Hearing her voice really make me homesick. It’s funny how I also say home sick. Shit. This is home.”

How does someone who’s spent a short lifetime building a bridge from Cambodian to U.S. culture, turn around and recross the bridge? The term acculturation describes the process of adapting from one’s old culture to the new. But what about “reverse acculturation,” where someone must relearn—or learn for the first time—their old culture and shed the adopted one? While supporters of the INS policies argue that Kimho and the others never were U.S. citizens, so never earned the rights of citizens, they are clearly U.S. citizens by their upbringing, their way of looking at the world, their sense of themselves. Kimho understands this: “...my mind is caught up in two different worlds and it’s hard to forget where you use to come from. I mean it’s hard to erase 20 years of living.

“I had been thinking a lot about life and what is going on in my life. It rain yesterday and I like it a lot. I was just sitting in front of the house and listening to the rain fall. And it got me thinking how much I miss the Seattle rain. It been so hot over here it was nice having a break from the heat. I mean I can remember when I was a kid running the street with my friend and how we use to get caught up in the rain. We would be walking and all of a sudden the rain would come down and hard. Then we would find a little shelter and just hide until the rain went away. But, what cool is that while we were waiting for the rain to go away we would talk about everything.

And that what I remember most. I remember how innocent we were under the rain and here we are now, most of my friends are lock up or dead and some on their way back to Cambodia.”

Most of the returnees are leaving family behind in the United States. Many, like Kimho, have elderly parents who they are expected to be able to care for. Many also leave behind U.S. citizen children. One returnee leaves 6-year-old twins; another has a 3- year-old daughter. One has two young girls and was working and taking care of his family as his wife finished her MBA when INS wrenched him from his home.

The cost to U.S. society of breaking up these families is significant. The loss of the breadwinner from families living in borderline poverty will push many more people onto public assistance. Mental health issues also appear to be rising among family members affected by deportation, with depression and stress contributing to an increasing level of dysfunction. The U.S. legal system promised freedom and justice to these families, but now many Cambodians feel betrayed by the U.S. and its laws that destroy rather than protect.

Members of the Cambodian American community are fighting back. Looking for recognition that refugees are different than economic immigrants, they are hoping to convince Congress that refugees deserve a waiver to harsh immigration laws. The history of Cambodian refugees—their survival and flight from the Khmer Rouge and their struggle in the United States—argues for some form of particularized relief from the present, cruel U.S. immigration policies.

But the impact of these deportations on this single community illuminates more universal truths: that deportation destroys families and is a punishment of grossly unjust proportions. Even if deportation may be warranted in a handful of cases, more often than not it is a policy that creates more problems than it solves. At a time when government policies increasingly restrict who is considered “American”—and who, as a consequence, falls within or without the protections of our celebrated democratic institutions—the U.S. also needs to acknowledge that healthy families and communities are essential for our own security and enact policies that preserve rather than destroy our communities. Then maybe the people who are being sent to Cambodia can come home to their families.

Waiting for visitors to arrive in Phnom Penh, Kimho writes, “I wonder when I be on that flight heading back to America. I guess it’s just a dream...but, then again dreams do come true.”

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Jay Stansell is an attorney who argued the case of Kimho Ma, a subject of this article, at the U.S. Supreme Court. Dori Cahn is an adult educator working with immigrants and refugees. The article is based on a chapter in a collection entitled Race, Culture, Psychology and Law (forthcoming from Sage).