Summary
The year 1948 saw the first international agreement on asylum status with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations. Three years later, a United Nations convention was held specifically to address the status of refugees. However, it took several decades for U.S. policy to catch up to these international standards.
In 1945, the Displaced Persons Act allowed refugees from Europe to enter the United States. This was followed by the authorization of 200,000 immigrant visas for refugees from communist counties in 1953. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was the first American legislation to consider refugees as a new immigration category. It also finally brought an end to the policy of Chinese Exclusion. Following the end of the Vietnam War, the 1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Act allowed approximately 130,000 refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam to enter the U.S. Up to this point in time, there was an international standard for allowing refugees, but U.S. policy continued to remain piecemeal and only permit refugees from specific geographic locations or political systems.
The large numbers of refugees from Southeast Asia caused new controversy over the qualities that make someone worthy of being American and assimilable to American culture. Southeast Asian migrants were largely considered to be unassimilable. Like other migrant groups, many Vietnamese moved to communities with other Vietnamese people, causing increased anti-Vietnamese sentiments in some places. For example, many Vietnamese people took up shrimping in Texas, leading to reactionary anti-Vietnamese sentiment in the industry. In 1981, members of the Ku Klux Klan began boat parades, where they displayed weapons and hung effigies of Vietnamese fishermen. The klansmen also created a paramilitary group called the Texas Emergency Reserve. In response, the Vietnamese Fishermen’s Association filed a successful class action lawsuit against the Klan. The fishermen’s association justified their case with the 13th and 14th amendments, common law torts on assault and personal property, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and a Texas law prohibiting the establishment of private armies.
Asian Americans had long been barred from entering the United States and prevented from naturalizing as U.S. citizens. American refugee policy focused only on particular geographic regions and political systems until 1980. With the sudden jump in migrants from Asia following the end of the Vietnam war, new anti-Asian sentiments thrived in places with large refugee populations. Nevertheless, these new Asian migrants were able to use the legal system to demand equal protection.
Suggested Reading
Lee, Robert G. Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas. Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Ong, Aihwa. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. University of California Press, 2003.
Vietnamese in the Diaspora Digital Archive
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