2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(1) custody or permission from their fathers to take them abroad, and without possession of their legal documentation. Because of the timeline of migration trends, the children that resulted from marriage migration to Taiwan are the oldest, followed by those from Korea and then China. Currently, most of these children remain in primary school, meaning the full scope of their legal problems may have yet to reveal themselves. We believe this issue will continue to develop and increase in severity as the children involved mature. B Data Collection and Findings The research presented in this paper was conducted by a team of researchers in and around Can Tho over a two-year period. 64 Through in-depth fieldwork in two districts in the Can Tho region, our project was able to not only substantiate our hypothesis that some of the children involved in these cases (especially groups 2, 3 and 4) face difficulties in accessing social rights within the Vietnamese legal and administrative system, but also that they all potentially face future challenges in asserting economic and political rights. Our research was carried out over three stages from 2015–18 and included data collection with provincial and district level officials, academic and non-governmental stakeholders and families of returned children (rather than their mothers). Interviews conducted with non-migrant stakeholders consisted of semistructured interviews intended to help gauge the extent of the problem, for which no formal statistics currently exist. The existing statistics rely on migrant’s selfidentification with the Ministry of Justice and are thought to capture only a limited number of women who have returned from marriage migration. The numbers recorded by government officials are only collected from families who report difficulties or apply for registration for themselves and/or the children. Because there is no streamlined approach to data collection on this issue at either the national or local level, each department within each province has different statistics, meaning within any given district there are a variety of different numbers to represent the same group of people. Because of this inconsistency in statistical accuracy, it is impossible to know the total number of women who have returned to the Delta with ‘bi-racial’ children as a result of marriage migration. 65 Although several of our research subjects suggested that there could be ‘hundreds of thousands’ of bi-racial children currently living permanently in southern Vietnam, our research indicates that this number would be closer to somewhere in the thousands. Our survey captured information regarding the lived realities and legal status of 45 families with bi-racial children within two districts. 66 These families supported 206 bi-racial children living permanently in these districts. Based on our scoping research, we estimate that this number reflects a significant fraction of the total cases within these two districts; yet there are 126 districts in total within the five provinces of the Mekong Delta region alone. 64 65 66 ibid. Primary data was collected and translated by Tran Thi Phung Ha: Ha (n 59). We use the term ‘bi-racial’ here to refer to children born of a Vietnamese mother and either Taiwanese, Korean or Chinese father. In the vast majority of cases, interviews were conducted with grandparents of the children in question. Migrant mothers often leave their children with grandparents in order to re-migrate either internally in Vietnam or abroad. 80