The deported man is not Khmerican, but American

Op-Ed by Kouprey
3rd August, 2011

Re: Cambodians get deported, Mexicans are allowed to stay: Completely unfair!

Historically speaking, the United States had carved up much of its present land mass out of the former territories of Mexico. This had been achieved under America's self-belief in 'Manifest Destiny'. Thus, in most Mexicans' eyes, the US is the embodiment of an Evil Empire in much the same vein as Vietnam has been in the eyes of most Khmer people for the last 3 hundred years or so.

In crossing the border into the US either legally or illegally, the Mexicans probably adjudge themselves to have played their parts in reclaiming, to some measure, something of their ancestral homeland!

This situation can not be likened to the unhappy circumstances experienced by Khmer people today since Vietnam's Evil Empire is still expanding at Cambodia's expense and the influx of Vietnamese settlers into Cambodia -temporarily halted in the 1970s - has resumed its normal momentum and course since Vietnamese troops entered the country in 1979. Worse still, even the indigenous Khmer people of the Mekong Delta have been driven off their ancestral lands and rice farms and into Cambodia, swelling the ranks of their near destitute and dispossessed cousins across the country.

One cannot condone someone for the crimes they had committed in their past. However, the use or exercise of logic or rationality, when not tempered with due liberality or humanity, could result in people being driven over the cliff and into the abyss of despair and tragedy, taking along with them wholly innocent lives like those of this young 'American' family.

To refer to this family as 'Khmerican' is a misnomer in a practical sense given that the expected deportee had left his native country since he was probably still in his nappies. 'Race' or 'ethnicity' is a fluid social concept or construction; it largely depicts what the subjects - humans - experience with body and soul as they interact and navigate the world around them which, in this specific instance, can be anything but sub-tropical Cambodia.

Korea is for the Koreans, Japan is for the Japanese, and should Americans be found breaking the law in either of those countries they would be duly punished for their offense or be repatriated to the US. But in this case, are the deportees really Cambodians in the sense just described? How does this case differ morally from the 20 Uighurs Cambodia had had to send back to China; an incident which invited much media moralising and disapproval from the American government even though Cambodia would have been hard pressed to do anything better given China's leverage and influence over her national affairs?