US hauls in more than 100 Cambodians set to be deported

[geovalin]

Daphne Chen

 

More than 100 Cambodian permanent residents have been detained by American immigration officials in a spate of round-ups over the past two weeks, even as Cambodia and the United States continue negotiations over the Kingdom’s reluctance to accept deported Cambodians who have been convicted of crimes.

 

Katrina Dizon Mariategue, an immigration policy manager at the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center in Washington, DC, said the organisation is tracking more than 100 Cambodians who have been arrested and sent to a detention centre in California in “one of the bigger round-ups” the group has seen.

 

“Many families are understandably distraught,” Mariategue said in an email. “Many have kids, are in fear of losing their homes, some have expressed thoughts of suicide.”

 

read more http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/us-hauls-more-100-cambodians-set-be-deported

 

 

-- © Copyright Phenom Pen Post 17/10

[Deserted]

I noted some time back that in the Khmer community in Long Beach CA was a hotbed of crime. I wondered then how they were getting away with it and that was over 20 years ago.

[DrPhibes]

6 hours ago, Deserted said:

I noted some time back that in the Khmer community in Long Beach CA was a hotbed of crime. I wondered then how they were getting away with it and that was over 20 years ago.

Yup, lived near Redondo and Anaheim LB in the mid to late 80's.  Liv'n cheap as a new Douglas Aircraft engineer.  The more west you went on Anaheim, the dicier it got in the Cambodian section.  But, damn!  their young ladies would do you if you just took them out for a McD's happy meal!  Ah those were the days...

[Deserted]

Yes. I was on the PCH just of Redondo. There were some there too but it was mostly LongBeach and boy did they dislike Thais.

[Sheryl]

One of the problems is that the adults settle in areas where rents are cheap with no thought to the implications for their kids in terms of quality of school, presence of gangs etc.

 

Native-born Americans, if they have kids, when choosing a place to live give enormous importance to the school and are well aware that these vary greatly from place to  place - and not only as a result of the general socioec of the area, there are places where rents aren't sky high but the schools are OK (both in terms of educational quality  and absence of gangs etc) , but one needs to do to know which they are and do due diligence. The Cambodians tend to just assume that wherever they live, there will be a school and it will be good enough. Then their kids end up in terrible, gang-infested schools with such poor quality of education they might as well not attend, and the predictable occurs.

 

I have a number of Cambodian friends settled in the US - good people, educated people  - whose kids have gone bad for precisely these reasons.

 

My Cambodian nephew and his wife won the visa lottery and just went over there a few months back. Their 2 kids -- my "grandkids", whose education I support - are still in Phnom Penh  (in a good private school)  and believe me there is no way I will let the parents bring them over to the US until I have personally visited where they live and the schools and ascertained they are of acceptable quality...and also, until the youngest is old enough not to need constant adult supervision, because another dynamic at work here is that once in the US and faced with the economic realities there (quite different than they had expected!) both parents and any other able bodied adults work fulltime, not much time to keep an eye on what the kids are up to.

 

Of course the deportation aspect isn't just because the kids got convicted or a crime, it is because the family did not bother to get citizenship. If they had, the kids would still go to jail, but deportation would not be on the cards.