Why not even the deaths of 39 migrants who suffocated in a lorry have stopped Vietnamese risking all to reach Britain: It's now the fastest-growing nationality on the small boats... and DAVID JONES visits community where nearly 1 in 10 has left for Europe

The young girl's grave is embossed with a haunting photograph that captures her innocent beauty. 

Her grief-wizened mother lights incense and places a chocolate cake on the headstone: leaving food to nourish the deceased is a Vietnamese custom.

Then, after whispering a prayer, Tran Tri Hien — whose Catholic faith is a legacy of French colonial rule — begins talking to her daughter, whose baptism name was Anna, as though she were still alive. 

'I like to let her know what's happening in the family and tell her the latest village gossip,' she explains wistfully, through my translator.

Watching this poignant scene in the weed-strewn cemetery in Do Thanh, a timeless village surrounded by paddy fields, 170 miles south of the capital Hanoi, one was reminded — if any reminder were needed — of the misery wreaked by illegal mass migration.

For in October 2019, Anna was among the 39 Vietnamese immigrants lured to Britain on the false promise of a better life, only to suffer a slow, agonising death as they were starved of oxygen in a refrigerated cross-Channel freight container.

At 19, Anna was one of the youngest victims. She had hoped to find lucrative work enabling her to pay off the £16,000 her father had borrowed to build their house — a debt that had fallen on her mother after he died prematurely of cancer, aged 52.

By grim irony, however, almost five years after the tragedy, Tran now owes twice that sum.

For even though Anna was killed by the traffickers, and Irish kingpin Ronan Hughes and his henchmen are now serving long jail terms, her mother is obliged to repay the fee they demanded for smuggling her from Zeebrugge in Belgium to Purfleet in Essex — another £16,000, which her daughter borrowed from Vietnamese relatives and friends.

For seven days a week, therefore, this tiny woman, who stands around 4ft 8in and looks older than her 57 years, takes on any odd job she can find, washing neighbours' clothes, cleaning for them, and gathering rice in autumn, then handing over the pittance she earns to the lenders.

Tran, whose two other daughters have moved away, does this for honour, knowing she can never hope to repay the £32,000 — 15 years' wages for the average worker in communist Vietnam.

It's a relentlessly hard and lonely existence, she admits without self-pity, adding: 'I wish those leaving for England could see that it's far more important to have your loved ones near you than to make money. They would be better off staying here with their families.'

Given the dangers these fortune-seekers face, and the sordid work they are too often forced into — selling sex, guarding underground cannabis farms where they seldom see daylight, skivvying as household slaves — they would indeed.

Yet a growing number of Vietnamese are either blind to the risks or prepared to take them. In Tran's little community alone, some 1,500 people — almost nine per cent of the population — have recently left for Europe, according to state- controlled media, and many are living secretly in Britain.

Similarly large exoduses are to be found in towns and villages throughout the province of Nghe An, and in neighbouring Ha Tinh, where career prospects are equally grim and wages pitifully low.

Given the numbers leaving, it may only be a matter of time before another shipment of Vietnamese migrants suffer the same fate as Anna, whose salutary story might be a parable dreamt up by proponents of the Government's Rwanda Bill if it wasn't horribly real.

The casual inhumanity of the Essex lorry traffickers sent shockwaves around the world. It was supposed to be a turning point in the war on illegal cross-Channel migration. 

But as I have seen first-hand while following these Vietnamese migrants on their surreptitious, nearly 7,000-mile journey to within sight of Dover's off-white cliffs, the only thing that has changed these past five years is the method of transportation.

As we have seen again this week, when an overloaded dinghy capsized, killing five people including a seven-year-old girl, these unseaworthy inflatables are no less dangerous than the lorries used before more stringent border checks made it difficult for migrants to be secreted in sealed compartments.

And though the 39 deaths were widely publicised in Vietnam, the deterrent effect was zero.

That much is clear from the latest official figures showing that the fastest-growing contingent crossing the Channel in small boats are nationals from this South-East Asian country, which has few historic ties to Britain, and whose people — though welcoming in my experience — generally have scant knowledge of our language or culture (beyond the Royal Family and Premier League football).

In 2022, 505 Vietnamese people made the perilous crossing, which can take eight hours or more, but last year the number more than doubled to 1,323, and that has almost been surpassed in the first four months of 2024. Between January 1 and April 21, a further 1,266 Vietnamese came by dinghy — one-fifth of the 6,265 total.

Expressing concern over this trend, a few days ago, Rishi Sunak said: 'Vietnamese migrants have increased tenfold. They account for almost all of the increase in small-boat numbers we have seen this year.'

Their compatriots now have a pitying name for these naively expectant economic migrants, one learns. It translates as 'straw people', a term intended to signify their elusiveness and the precariousness of their journeys.

It remains to be seen whether a joint British-Vietnamese governmental campaign to reverse the outflow, which last month featured an internet video warning would-be Channel-crossers not to risk being 'swallowed by the sea', will make an impact.

From the foolhardy determination I have encountered these past few days, though, I doubt it.

Despite this week's deaths, new Vietnamese encampments have already sprung up along the northern coast of France, their youthful occupants ready to transfer £1,600 and upwards into some faceless trafficker's bank account and dash for a waiting boat the moment they get the word.

An Iraqi in the camp told me the smuggling gang's overlord is a Kurd with such a fearsome reputation that nobody dares ask his name or whereabouts.

Flying from Hanoi to Paris on Tuesday, and driving north to the small town of Loon-Plage, near Dunkirk, I found scores of bedraggled adventurers billeted on scrubland bordering an industrial estate. Having departed a country where steamy spring heat touches 38C, they shivered in an unseasonably cold hailstorm.

Hidden by knotted thickets of sea-buckthorn and creeping willow, they subsist in makeshift tents lashed together from tree branches and plastic sheets.

One of their number, Quang, was celebrating his 20th birthday and as I arrived they were staging a banquet for him, with an upturned shopping trolley used as a barbecue to grill pork steaks.

They had stumped up for cans of Heineken which they laid out on a blue tarpaulin in the shape of a heart. Before attacking the food, they sang a rousing chorus of 'Happy Birthday' but could summon few other words of English.

A 27-year-old migrant named Ut had come from the same district as Anna. Speaking to my fixer in Hanoi via WhatsApp, he told me of his astonishing journey here. 

It had taken two years, he claimed. Abandoning his £126-a-month job on a building site and leaving his three-year-old daughter with his mother, he had first secured a visa to work legally in Russia — obtainable online.

This is a route followed by many Vietnamese migrants whose true destination is Britain. 

Others go via European countries with easy access, such as Serbia, Romania and, more recently, Hungary, which needs workers for its burgeoning construction, food processing and agriculture industries, and has just signed a deal with Vietnam's politburo enabling its citizens to fill vacancies.

From Moscow, Ut said, he had walked steadily westwards, never knowing which country he was in. For five months he laboured on a farm in a remote forest, but the owner hadn't paid him.

But when — not if — he made it to England, he would earn £2,000 a month, so he had heard, making his titanic struggle worthwhile.

He wouldn't be paying traffickers, he told me, for he was among a group of Vietnamese who planned to buy their own dinghy, then pilot it across the world's business shipping lane.

Others have drowned in precisely this way, I warned him. 'After what I've been through, nothing frightens me,' came the reply. 'I know I could die for any reason, at any time.'

Huddled around a standpipe provided for the hundreds of multinational migrants encamped at Loon-Plage, I later watched four waiflike Vietnamese females larking around, as if they were on a camping holiday, as they washed clothes, bowls and chopsticks. Had they read a recent article in The Times they might not have been laughing.

Revealing that most new Vietnamese arrivals were now women (which sets them apart from other nationalities), a Border Force source said they had been found to carry 'a significant amount' of contraception, suggesting they intended to work in the sex industry.

I wanted to know whether this concerned the women, but they refused to engage with me.

So why had these young men and women left Vietnam? And why do they risk life and limb to reach Britain when they might less hazardously find work in other European countries, as well as Asian countries with booming economies and open-door labour policies, such as China, Japan and South Korea?

The answers became obvious back in Nghe An. Though this province of 3.5 million people in North-Central Vietnam is rich in resources and impressive new office blocks are sprouting in Vinh, its main city, the average wage is less than £2,000 a year.

Moreover, the government, for all its socialist pretensions, relies heavily on the 'remittance' money sent home by its migrant workforce. It now brings in some £8 billion a year, so legal migration is actively encouraged.

Driving through Nghe An, one sees many impressive private houses built with migrant earnings, legal or otherwise. The roads are lined with boards advertising foreign job opportunities.

Duong Ngoc Bay, whose agency charges £1,600 to place people in these posts and arrange the paperwork, admits his service isn't an option for everyone.

Many can't learn the language of their destination countries or acquire the skills for the jobs on offer. Others are deemed unsuitable for visas, perhaps because they have a criminal record.

Still more are not prepared to wait for several months until arrangements have been put in place. So they pay many times Duong's fee — up to £20,000 is not uncommon — to be trafficked.

As for why they all too often gravitate to the shores of Kent, that became clear when, over supper, a shady though engaging character in his 50s regaled me with his eye-opening story.

Though he confided to my fixer that he once trafficked people into Britain, in my presence he would only admit to being secreted to Dover in the back of a lorry carrying sunflower seeds.

When the lorry stopped at a motorway services, he says, he leapt out and was promptly arrested. 

However, after two weeks in a detention centre he was amazed to be freed — with no constraints — so he made his way to Camberwell, South London, where he had friends, and soon opened a nail bar.

He operated this money-spinning business for eight years, working seven days a week and living in the basement, yet no one ever questioned his presence.

Astonishingly, he was even left to continue manicuring when, after two years, he grew tired of looking over his shoulder and revealed his presence to the UK Border Agency. 

When he surrendered himself, they sent him on his way with an identity card — which he showed me — stipulating that he must not work but allowing him to use the NHS.

A further six years passed before he decided to come home in 2017. Having deposited £1,600 every month into his Vietnamese bank account, by then he must have saved at least £150,000 — and considerably more if he was secretly running a trafficking racket as well.

He now owns car and property dealerships in Vinh and drove me to his favourite restaurant in a top-of-the-range Honda CR-V. No wonder he loves London — except, that is, for one thing.

'There are too many foreign people living there,' he said without irony.

Although personally I don't agree with sending migrants to Rwanda, after following the Vietnamese migrants along their road to perdition I have never felt more strongly that we need to stop this insanity. Not least to save those naive enough to believe Britain is some Shangri-La from themselves.

Visiting another sorrowing family who live just a few streets away from Anna's mother in Do Thanh, I was met with another sobering photograph: that of Nguyen Dinh Tu, 26, proudly attired in his national service uniform.

He, too, clawed vainly at the sealed door of that Essex-bound container, leaving his widow struggling to raise two children.

Yet Nguyen's father, a 74-year-old war veteran, told me he knew many locals who believe their only future lies in Britain.

'They know how my son died but think it's worth taking a risk to be successful,' he said, shaking his head. 'I wish our two governments could get together and do something to stop them trying to escape in this miserable way.'

Amen to that. Only the vile traffickers who sow seeds of hope in the straw people, then cast them to the four winds, could possibly see things differently.