http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12169557/site/newsweek/
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Joe Cochrane
Newsweek
Updated: 1:20 p.m. ET April 5, 2006
April 5, 2006 - On first glance, Aun looks like any other thirtysomething Cambodian man living in Phnom Penh. He wears button-down dress shirts, trousers and sandals, just like many young office workers and civil servants. Nonetheless, people on the streets sometimes do a double take when they see him—sensing there’s something different in the way he walks. Any American tourist who might come across Aun would have to be deaf not to understand the source of the confusion: fluent English with a Texas accent. “Just the way I present myself when I’m out, people are wondering if I’m from the States,” says the 37-year-old.

Aun, also known as Andy, is an American—or at least he thought he was until about four years ago. That’s when U.S. immigration authorities informed him he was being deported back to Cambodia under a 1996 law that requires mandatory deportations for permanent alien residents convicted of a felony. A refugee of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of the late 1970s, Aun didn’t have the easiest of childhoods after his family was plucked from a camp in Thailand and relocated to Dallas. He didn’t adjust particularly well, ran with the wrong crowd as a teenager, and eventually spent time in jail for robbery, his first offense.

The Cambodian government, under intense pressure from the Bush administration, agreed in March 2002 to begin accepting its former citizens back. Aun was one of the first six to return that same year; another 145 deportees have since followed and another 1,400 are eligible to be sent back after being convicted for crimes ranging from domestic disputes to more serious offenses such as manslaughter. After their prison sentences, at least some of these young men have grown up to become law-abiding members of society with families and jobs. “We did the crime and we did the time,” Aun says. “But this is like double punishment.”

It’s more like banishment. The vast majority of alien Cambodians who are subject to deportation have little to no recollection of their native country, having been evacuated to the United States when they were children. Many don’t even speak the Khmer language or have living relatives here, and some were born in Thai refugee camps and have never set foot on Cambodian soil. Instead of civil war and “The Killing Fields,” they grew up with MTV, McDonald’s and Ronald Reagan.

Now, the deportees are reliving the nightmare of emotional trauma and separated families. Their own children, born in the United States, are now American citizens who are seeing their mothers and fathers forced to leave the country—likely forever. Aging parents who escaped Pol Pot are now saying goodbye to adult children being sent back to the place they escaped over two decades ago. Cambodia isn’t the only country the United States has asked to take back its citizens following what seems to be a general stiffening of immigration policies, but given Cambodia’s violent recent history, the situation is particularly tragic. All the Cambodian aliens subject to deportation could have avoided it by becoming U.S. citizens through the normal naturalization process, but having been settled in America for decades, never bothered. “From a citizenship perspective, they may not have it,” says George T. Ellis, program manager of a deportee support program in Phnom Penh, who is also a licensed psychologist, “but mentally, they definitely are Americans.” Many of the deportees arrived in the States as babies or toddlers.

That reality makes the deportee’s re-integration—actually integration—into Cambodian society particularly troubling. In August 2002, NEWSWEEK interviewed two members of the first group a few days after they returned here, including Aun. More than three and a half years later, their fortunes vary widely. Ellis says 10 percent of the deportees came back with drug problems or mental illness, which have only been exacerbated by living in Cambodia. (Some deportees are living on the street or returned to crime and are now in Cambodian jails.) His program runs a “safe house” for disabled and mentally ill deportees, and temporary housing for functional ones where they can receive help in finding jobs, language lessons, cultural orientation and computer classes. “How do you deal with the trauma of being deported?” he asks rhetorically. “Then, given that these people think they’re Americans, how do you unmake a citizen?”

Aun, who didn’t want his last name published, is one of the so-called success stories. Since his return, he got married, works as a financial assistant for Ellis’s Returnee Integration Support Program, and takes night classes in accounting at a local college. Aun left Cambodia when he was 8 years old, so he was able to pick up his native tongue quickly and was already familiar with the customs—two keys to a successful reintegration that others don’t have. His relatives in the United States used connections in Cambodia to arrange Aun’s marriage to his wife, Sophorn, so he’d at least have some family in Cambodia.

Those following in Aun’s footsteps are finding it harder going. One of the reasons Aun married into a Cambodian family within months of landing here was due to the country’s social structure, in which family connections are crucial. The country still operates on something of a feudal patronage system where people are on the “string” of a richer or more connected relative or associate. Uneducated deportees without family here can’t hope for much more than working in a garment factory, or as a food or market vendor—and the Cambodian minimum wage is only $60 a month. “Even if you’re educated, you need a hookup,” Aun says.

Deportee advocates are holding out hope the U.S. government or Congress will rescind the deportation law and return discretion to judges on whether aliens who have served prison sentences should be allowed to stay, based on extenuating family circumstances or whether they’ve been rehabilitated and can still be productive Americans. “These people came as refugees,” Ellis says. “They didn’t have much social capital when they arrived and were brought up in [poorer U.S. towns and cities].” Aside from occasional media coverage, most Americans apparently are unaware that alien residents are being deported. A new documentary, “Sentenced Home,” making the rounds on the independent-film-festival circuit has also garnered critical acclaim this year. “The U.S. could have at least warned us about the law—you don’t know much as a refugee,” Aun says. “I’m hanging in there. Not fine, but alive.”