Vietnamese refugees at Camp Pendelton, California (May 8, 1975) | Elisa Leonelli / The Claremont Colleges Digital Library / CCO
This year commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, a protracted conflict that led to the deaths of approximately 60,000 American soldiers and as many as two million Vietnamese civilians. But the end of the war led to the start of another, equally consequential chapter in American history: Republican President Gerald Ford’s signing of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act, which would begin the resettlement in the United States over several decades of approximately two million Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and ethnically Chinese individuals who had been displaced as a result of both the Vietnam War and President Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia.
The legislation was important both as recognition by the United States of its responsibilities to the individuals who had assisted in the country’s engagement in Southeast Asia and because it laid the groundwork for what would become a larger and more durable refugee policy in the US in the years that followed—an era being abruptly brought to a close by President Donald J. Trump and his decision to refuse asylum to Afghan refugees who had helped US forces in our war in Afghanistan. President Jimmy Carter would build on this initial piece of Republican supported legislation to pass the Refugee Act of 1980, expanding refugee resettlement beyond those from Southeast Asia.
The first group of 130,000 Vietnamese refugees to arrive under this program, in 1975, largely consisted of highly educated Vietnamese who had worked closely with the Americans. Hundreds of thousands more would arrive throughout the late 1970s, with much less education and skill.
At first, native-born Americans were highly skeptical of this refugee initiative, with only 36 percent supporting President Ford’s initiative. Yet over time, successive new arrivals of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia would become woven into the fabric of American society, civically, economically, and socially, despite first generation migrants having very low levels of formal education, literacy, and English-language skills.
The success of an immigration or refugee resettlement can never be fully evaluated in the first decades, nor even in the first generation. Relatively few first-generation Vietnamese Americans held college degrees. Many held jobs in agriculture, fishing, and the personal care industry, most notably nail salons.
Their children, however, have become lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, and writers. Today, Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees have among the highest rate of citizenship acquisition among all immigrant groups at 75 percent and 78 percent respectively. Vietnamese also have among the highest rates of homeownership, at 65 percent. Households headed by a Cambodian immigrant have a median income of $81,000. Second generation Vietnamese Americans show the highest levels of educational mobility vis-à-vis other immigrant groups, with 62 percent attaining college degrees versus 26 percent of their parents’ generation, an astounding increase. This rate also exceeds that of native-born Americans.
Measuring immigrant and refugee success through indicators such as citizenship acquisition, educational attainment, homeownership, and income, while important, tell only part of the story, however. These refugees and their children are now part of the fabric of our communities. They have not only been folded into the mainstream but have reshaped what the mainstream is understood to be.
The nail industry, dominated by Vietnamese Americans, is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Chinese food abounds throughout the country and can be found in virtually every corner of the United States. A 2020 California election for state assembly saw a competition between Democrat Deidre Nguyen and Republican Janet Nguyen. The two women, no relation to each other, were both born in Vietnam in the mid-1970s, only a year apart, and arrived as young refugees. The Nguyen versus Nguyen election speaks to this ethnic group’s political coming of age.
Fifty years after President Ford signed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act, President Trump, fanning the fears of native-born Americans, has moved to shut our borders to refugees seeking asylum, even when they are people who are seeking refuge precisely because they chose our armed forces in foreign conflicts.
Surely America can do better—as the experience of our Indochina migrants suggests.
