ລາວໂຮມລາວ ເພື່ອປະຊາທິປະໄຕ

The rapid influx of Chinese, including illegal traders and laborers, into Laos is a common topic of conversation for me and my friends back home.

Can Lao people cope with the competition? Can the country handle so many illegal migrants? Is there another way of accepting foreign investment without taking in so many foreigners?

Laos, where the government last year reported gross domestic product of $7.4 billion, has seen investment from China soar to $2.6 billion in 2010. Our northern neighbor is now the second biggest foreign investor, after Vietnam.

Chinese money has funded projects ranging from hydropower power to rubber tree plantations. Along with the cash have come traders and laborers.

Their arrival has worried people in Laos, where the Chinese are famed for their skills negotiating and trading. How can we compete? Shouldn’t be preserve jobs for local people?

With a population of 6 million, Laos has around 200,000 immigrants working illegally, mostly from China and Vietnam.

“How will we cope with their children?” one of my colleagues from Vientiane asked me in an email, describing how one of the capital’s biggest shopping centers, Sanjiang, is fast becoming chinatown.

People in Laos should understand economic migration – thousands of them moved to Thailand illegally to seek employment.

Basic businesses like street vendors, food outlets and small-scale farming ought to be carried out by local people, but are instead run by foreign migrants. Nowadays, the Chinese sell their low-cost products, even in Laos’s rural mountainous communities.

In villages like my birthplace, twenty minutes’ drive from Vientiane, Chinese have taken over businesses from local people, who are selling Chinese-made spare parts, toys and hardware. Businesses that had been facing bankruptcy under Lao ownership are now profitable.

“Chinese can grab anything from the Lao people, even food from their mouths,” reads one much commented posting on the country’s social network, Laolink, decsribing the migrants agressive approach to business.

However, there are two sides to this argument.

The cheap winter coats and blankets from Chinese vendors keep our people warm, especially the poor who in mountain communities where other Lao people refuse to do go selling. Chinese-made motorbikes enable poor children to ride to distant schools.

Instead of angst, we need to learn how to adapt and live with the global economic economy.

The Lao government has welcomed foreign investment and the associated migration, and no one disputes that Lao people have experienced an improvement in living conditions.

No country can guarantee the wellbeing of its people without opening up to foreign trade and migrants. 

Laos, one of Asia’s poorest nations, needs the world second largest economy to help us escape poverty.