Abstract
The aim of this study is to investigate the policies of first-asylum countries, the immediate destinations of refugees who had escaped Indochinese countries, with looking into the nature of these policies and the way they were constructed. Specifically, this study will focus on three aspects of refugee policies of five ASEAN countries. The first aspect is the impacts of the Cold War context on refugee policies. Although ASEAN countries shared a pro-West and anti-Communist position, their refugee policies were significantly different from policies of the anti-Communist United States. The United States wanted to put Indochinese refugees in the framework of ‘hospitality-based-on-hostility’ - which means better treatment for escapees from Communist states; the ASEAN countries disagreed. The second aspect is the argument on the agency of refugees put forward by ASEAN governments to justify their policies. During the boat people crisis of the 1970s, ASEAN governments used to deny the agency of refugees, labeling them ‘the population intentionally flown out by the Vietnamese government’, or call them ‘illegal immigrants’, regardless of their motivations of migration. These labels were used to highlight that the boat people were different from genuine refugees who deserved asylum. ASEAN’s focus on the mode of migration, rather than the backgrounds to migration, still frames the responses to refugee flows in the region. The third aspect is that the ASEAN governments drove international agreements on Indochinese refugees, which shows that ASEAN is capable of taking a leading role in finding solutions to regional refugee crises.
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