Secondary Migration, Resettlement, and Community Building

Author: Phúc Duy Như Tố
Grades: 11-12

Suggested Amount of Time: 50-60 minutes
Area of Study: Vietnamese Resettlement and Community Building

Compelling Question

• What is Vietnamese America?

Lesson Questions

• How did Vietnamese refugees build a sense of home in the United States?
• In what dimensions has the Vietnam War ended and continued to impact and shape Vietnamese American communities in the US? 
• How did displacement shift gender relations within Vietnamese refugee families and communities?
• What were the resettlement patterns of Vietnamese refugees post-1980?
• What are the various ways in which Vietnamese immigrants and refugees reclaim and build community amidst violent displacement and discrimination? 

Lesson Objective

Students will synthesize resettlement patterns of Vietnamese refugees from 1980–1990 by analyzing reports and completing a written reflection and participating in a peer discussion.

Lesson Background

Concepts that students should know prior to this class:

• History of the Vietnam War from Vietnamese refugees’ perspectives
• Militarized refuge(es) 
• Different Immigration Waves of Vietnamese Refugees

The 130,000 (mostly Vietnamese) refugees who arrived in the United States during 1975 were sent initially to four government reception centers—at Camp Pendleton, California; Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania; Fort Chaffee, Arkansas; and Eglin Air Force Base, Florida—where they were interviewed by voluntary agencies and matched with sponsors throughout the country, including individuals, church groups and other organizations. US refugee placement policy aimed to disperse the refugee population to all 50 states in order to minimize any negative impacts on receiving communities, and indeed the 1975 Vietnamese refugees were more significantly dispersed than other immigrant or refugee populations. The refugees were initially placed in 813 separate zip code areas in every state, including Alaska, with about two-thirds settling in zip code areas that had fewer than 500 refugees and only 8.5 percent settling in places with more than 3,000 refugees. Less than half were sent to the state of their choice. Despite this general pattern of dispersal—shaped by government policy, the availability of sponsorships, and the relative absence of family ties and previously established ethnic communities in the US—areas of Indochinese concentration nonetheless began to emerge, particularly in California, and to grow rapidly as a result of secondary migration from other states. By 1980, 45 percent of the 1975 arrivals lived in a state other than the one where they had been originally sent; and the refugee population living in California had doubled from about 20 percent to 40 percent, where they were concentrated in contiguous Southern California metropolitan areas and, to the north, in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose.

As the much larger waves of refugees began to arrive after 1979 and as their social networks were becoming increasingly consolidated over time, government policies and programs continued to seek the dispersal of refugees without family away from high-impact areas, while most others were reunited with family members already residing in areas of high concentration. By the early 1980s, about a third of arriving refugees already had close relatives in the US who could serve as sponsors, and another third had more distant relatives, leaving only the remaining third without kinship ties subject to the dispersal policy. In addition, different localities of concentration emerged for the different ethnic groups. By 1990 the largest Vietnamese enclave in the US had formed in Orange County, with its hub in the communities of Santa Ana and Westminster (Little Saigon). By 2000, a fourth of all Vietnamese Americans were concentrated in the metropolitan corridor from Los Angeles to San Diego, and another sixth in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Image Citation: Archives, O. C. (n.d.-b). Asian Garden Mall, 9200 Bolsa Ave., Westminster. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ocarchives/41078164582