The impact of political conflict on transracial adoption: The case of Vietnamese children

Abstract

In the past decade, the adoption of foreign-born children, most of them Asian, by American families has rapidly increased. Several thousand foreign-born children are now being adopted by American parents every year (Adams & Kim, 1971; U.S. Department of Justice, 1976). Paradoxically, the rapid increase in the adoption of Asian children has taken place during a period of time in which American relations with Asia have grown more tense and problematic. Relationships between the United States and such traditionally friendly countries as India have become tense and sometimes openly hostile. Even countries with such close ties as Thailand and the Phillippines have begun to distance themselves from the United States. The past decade has also been a time of increasing hostility and conflict between white and nonwhite groups in the United States. The early optimism and fraternity of the civil rights movements has turned to the harsher and more nationalistic and racially exclusive forms of struggle of the late 1960s and 1970s. White resistance to nonwhite struggles for change has become nationwide and not simply regional. Birmingham's violence is replayed in Boston and Brooklyn. Nonwhite groups in the United States have seen a link between their struggles and the conflicts between the United States and the nations of the Third World. It is not unlikely that these domestic and international conflicts exercise an important impact on the lives of the families who have adopted and continue to adopt children transracially and transnationally. What happens to families whose members are