Migrant workers have built the nations of East Asia for generations, even centuries. Some migrants moved overseas voluntarily to seek better opportunities while some were moved involuntarily, being trafficked or enslaved or captured in war. Throughout mainland Southeast Asia, the low population density meant that the desire to capture more labour was a leading motivation for the endemic warfare that has characterized the region. Entire villages of people, especially those villages which had some special technology or craft ability, would be fought over, captured and moved to a new location far from their homes. This helps explain the diverse ethnicity of the region even today.
The age of European colonization provided a new stimulus for migration. Following the principle of divide and conquer, the controllers of the British Empire set ethnic group against ethnic group – in just the same way that the Mongols brought the Muslim Hui people to Yunnan to form the bureaucratic elite there and, at the same time, the cause of years of warfare and revolt. So, in the British empire, Indians were brought in to help rule Burma, to the dismay of the Burmese, as well as to form the police and security forces in Hong Kong and Singapore. Those migrants knew they only had power as long as the British maintained their position there and that was the basis of their loyalty and position.
Other migrants moved for economic reasons. Chinese workers were brought in large numbers to British Malaya and southern Siam (now Thailand) to work the tin mines and the newly planted rubber plantations. Conditions varied and some workers were able to establish thriving businesses of their own. Others were condemned to harsh and unsafe conditions as little more than slaves. This appears to have been the fate of many of the Vietnamese who were imported to work in the French-controlled rubber plantations in Cambodia. Legal systems in different colonies varied and this had an impact on the type of treatment received by migrant workers, although in some cases that relied almost completely on the compassion and sense of equality of the individual colon or colonist.
Migrant workers who wished to remain in their new homes had the choice of either marrying local women and integrating into society or else importing women from their homeland once they felt they were able to support a family. Societies were organized to help in the movement of money and people back and forth between the overseas home and the original land. These became the source of the Triads, in some cases, which are associated with organized crime, extortion and smuggling. However, they were at first simply community-based organizations.
