Indochinese Refugees Research Articles

Trauma Narratives: Collective Memories as Literature by Indochinese Refugees in the United States

Indochinese refugees in the United States are part of Asian Americans, whose narratives portray their life in their home countries, journeys to the new world and life in the United States, their new world. This study investigates three primary texts by American authors of Indochinese descent, including Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, Sichan Siv’s Golden Bones and Sucheng Chan’s Hmong Means Free. These three texts are highly historicised, portraying traumatic experiences of Indochinese refugees who suffer from war and communist persecution in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, respectively. These texts are considered trauma narratives serving as collective memories of those people, which help them to remember their pasts and constitute their group identity. The narratives in the three primary texts also explain how Indochinese subjects come to be Asian Americans and reveal that in fact the United States is considered an important cause of their diaspora and trauma. The authors of those narratives are unable to eradicate the traumatic memories from their psyche, so they yearn for voices to vent out those memories as a form of healing. Their trauma narratives have become part of American culture which is partially constituted by trauma suffered by different groups of people in this country.

Rethinking ‘regional processing’ in Europe: lessons from the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) for indochinese refugees

ABSTRACT Since the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015–2016, debate has persisted over the creation of more accessible legal pathways for asylum seekers to reach Europe, particularly during large-scale and protracted refugee situations. This has included the possibility of the European Union processing the protection claims of asylum seekers in transit countries or regions of origin before they reach Europe. Assuming that such arrangements are made without prejudice to the right to claim territorial asylum in Europe or elsewhere, in theory, regional processing could help reduce the risks associated with the onward movement of asylum seekers and migrants and facilitate more predictable movements of people during large-scale refugee situations. But what could or should a ‘regional processing’ framework entail for it to be compatible with international human rights law principles? This paper considers this question by drawing practical insights from the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees, which was the first international attempt to introduce region-wide processing during the Indochinese refugee crisis in the 1970s–1980s. Through an evaluation of the Plan, this paper explores how ‘regional processing’ might be re-conceptualised to expand protection pathways to Europe and inform a protection-orientated approach to international cooperation on asylum and migration.

Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work

Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work

Rethinking “Regional Processing”: Could the Lessons Learned from the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees (CPA) Offer a Roadmap for International Cooperation in Response to ‘Regional’ Refugee Situations?

Rethinking “Regional Processing”: Could the Lessons Learned from the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees (CPA) Offer a Roadmap for International Cooperation in Response to ‘Regional’ Refugee Situations?

Does refugee inflow affect urban crime? Evidence from the U.S. Indochinese refugee resettlement

AbstractWe study the city‐level crime effects of immigration using a large migratory episode in U.S. cities: the resettlement of postwar Indochinese refugees in the 1970s–1980s. We examine the impact of these migratory inflows, where the destination of refugees was largely exogeneously determined, on the incidence of various types of crime by aggregating county‐level crime data. Results from a difference‐in‐differences analysis imply that the cities receiving the heaviest inflows of refugees did not experience differential trends in property crime or violent crime rates following this period; while there is an upward impact on murder rates, pre‐trends do not match for this variable, and further analysis via the synthetic control method show that any upward impact is driven primarily by a temporary (5 years at most) surge in three metropolitan statistical areas. Our results suggest that consistent with prior literature, even a large refugee inflow may not by itself generate persistent crime increases.

Community Sponsorship in Europe: Taking Stock, Policy Transfer and What the Future Might Hold

This article explores the recent emergence of community sponsorship of refugees in Europe, an approach which shares responsibility between civil society and the state for the admission and/or integration of refugees. Originally a Canadian model developed to support the resettlement of Indochinese refugees, the model has gained momentum in Europe, with a number of states piloting or establishing community sponsorship schemes. This proliferation, while generally seen as positive for international protection of refugees, has led to conceptual confusion and a significant range of approaches under the “umbrella” concept of community sponsorship. As a result, community sponsorship today may be understood both as a form of resettlement and a complementary pathway to protection. While interest and momentum around community sponsorship is high, little work currently exists mapping and analysing how jurisdictions adopt the community sponsorship model. With reference to existing work on policy transfer, this contribution takes stock of community sponsorship models in Europe; analyses how community sponsorship may become a viable policy option in European states as a form of transnational policy transfer; and sets out a number of challenges for the future development of community sponsorship in Europe.

Community Sponsorship in Europe: Taking Stock, Policy Transfer and What the Future Might Hold

This article explores the recent emergence of community sponsorship of refugees in Europe, an approach which shares responsibility between civil society and the state for the admission and/or integration of refugees. Originally a Canadian model developed to support the resettlement of Indochinese refugees, the model has gained momentum in Europe, with a number of states piloting or establishing community sponsorship schemes. This proliferation, while generally seen as positive for international protection of refugees, has led to conceptual confusion and a significant range of approaches under the ‘umbrella’ concept of community sponsorship. As a result, community sponsorship today may be understood both as a form of resettlement and a complementary pathway to protection. While interest and momentum around community sponsorship is high, little work currently exists mapping and analysing how jurisdictions adopt community sponsorship model. With reference to existing work on policy transfer, this contribution takes stock of community sponsorship models in Europe; analyses how community sponsorship may become a viable policy option in European states as a form of transnational policy transfer; and sets out a number of challenges for the future development of community sponsorship in Europe.

Newspaper Discourses on the Acceptance of Refugees in Japan from the 1970s to the 1980s

ABSTRACT Japan has been criticised internationally for its reluctance to accept refugees. In the late 1970s, however, the Japanese government decided to implement special measures to accept refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Between 1978 and 2005, 11,319 Indo-Chinese refugees were resettled in Japan. In this article, I analyse newspaper discourses on the acceptance of Indo-Chinese refugees and the subsequent arrivals of Chinese asylum seekers in Japan. While opening Japan’s borders and accepting Indo-Chinese refugees was perceived favourably as a process Japan should experience from the 1970s to the late 1980s, asylum seekers arriving by sea in Japan were perceived as a threat in 1989, when many Chinese were found to be included among them. I explore these changing newspaper discourses with reference to the concepts of national identity, kokusaika and governmental belonging. Any discussion of the acceptance of others into a nation becomes inextricably bound up with the notion of national identity. In the case of Japan in the 1970 and 1980s, the concept of kokusaika (internationalisation) was pertinent because it intersected with such discussions. A theoretical perspective is offered by Ghassan Hage’s notion of ‘governmental belonging’, whereby those in a dominant position claim the power to position others in the nation.

Data visualization of texts in the transitions of framing Indochinese refugees by Japanese television documentaries

In contrast to the previous studies that have conducted visual analyses of refugee documentaries, the aim of this study is to provide new insight into how the refugee crisis in Indochina has been portrayed in the Japanese media through documentaries by text mining narratives of the television program scripts. Out of the total of all 35 television documentaries that have been broadcasted by NHK in the past, this study sampled ten television documentaries, the oldest going back to the 1970s. In order to historically view how the portrayal of Indochinese refugees have changed over the years and how this might affect how Japanese perceive refugees, the following were sampled for this paper: one from 1977, four from the 1980s, two from the 1990s, two from the 2000s and one from 2014. The narration scripts of these documentary programs were re-created by hand into data, onsite at the NHK Archives in Tokyo. The data analysis was done through text mining by R. From the text-mining analysis and data visualization by weighted tag clouds and co-occurrence network maps of all ten documentaries, certain characteristics of the dominant refugee media agenda of each decade were clearly observed. One noteworthy finding is the general trend of how initially, refugees were seen as an alien collective, and gradually over the decades, the media made as transition of showing them more as individuals, families and finally as a part of the Japanese community.

The Global Compact on Refugees: A Historic Achievement

The Global Compact on Refugees: A Historic Achievement

Regional deterrence and ‘non-genuine’ refugees: The punitive legacy of the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action

The outsourcing of refugee protection obligations is reshaping state relations in the Asia Pacific and Southeast Asian region and has underscored a progressively punitive approach to ‘irregular’ refugee movement. Such a shift can be partially but importantly traced to the deterrent foundations of Australia's dual-track processing system, introduced as an outcome of the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action on Indochinese Refugees (CPA). Although the CPA was a multilateral attempt to improve access to refugee protection through a coordinated regional response, in many respects it undermined the potential for refugee protection. By examining the history and motivations of regional responses, we can trace their impact as an exercise in either affirming or disavowing regional responsibility for refugee protection, while enabling some states to retain and even increase their capacity for control in the region. Given the call by the Global Compact on Refugees for coordinated regionally responsive approaches based on humanitarian principles, the crafting of regional and global plans, their motives and their governing logic, require ongoing and careful attention to ascertain the forms of responsibility or irresponsibility for refugee protection which they might sustain over time.

Running on Empty: Canada and the Indochinese Refugees, 1975–1980

Running on Empty: Canada and the Indochinese Refugees, 1975–1980

Running on Empty: Canada and the Indochinese Refugees

" Running on Empty: Canada and the Indochinese Refugees ." Canadian Historical Review, 99(4), pp. 674–675

아세안 국가의 인도차이나 난민 정책에 대한 연구(1975-1996)

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.

Running on Empty: Canada and the Indochinese Refugees, 1975–1980, by Michael J. Molloy, Peter Duschinsky, Kurt F. Jensen, and Robert Shalka

Running on Empty: Canada and the Indochinese Refugees, 1975–1980, by Michael J. Molloy, Peter Duschinsky, Kurt F. Jensen, and Robert Shalka. An article from journal Refuge (Intersectional Feminist Interventions in the "Refugee Crisis"), on Érudit.

Forced Migrants, Media, and Securitization: Making Sense of the Changing Representations of Transit Asylum Seekers in Indonesian Print Media

This paper aims to explain how and why the representations of transit forced migrants in Indonesian major print media were vastly different within two time spans: (1) during the arrivals of the Indochinese refugees in 1975-1996 and (2) in the period of the new generations of refugees from Middle Eastern and South Asian countries in 1997-2013. Employing media content analysis of 216 news articles from three major print media in Indonesia, this study found out that the Indochinese refugees were portrayed with positive labels and thus, mainly discussed in connection with the non-security theme. In contrast, the new generations of forced migrants were portrayed with negative labels such as ‘illegal immigrants’ and were framed as security threats. Grounded within Securitization Theory, this paper thus argues that the changing representations were caused by the securitizing move made by specialized agencies in Indonesia.

Blending, Bargaining, and Burden-Sharing: Canada’s Resettlement Programs

In this piece, we offer a comment on the most recent addition to the Canadian resettlement scheme, the Blended Visa Office-Referred (BVOR) program. The BVOR program was introduced in 2013 as a modified version of private sponsorship and middle ground between sponsorship and government-assisted resettlement. While the program was met with criticism and skepticism that the government was off-loading more resettlement responsibility to private sponsors, the Syrian crisis significantly impacted and changed the Canadian resettlement landscape. This comment outlines the program and surveys the benefits and concerns with such a model. BVOR is examined in relation to both private and government resettlement, in the current moment of Syrian resettlement, and in comparison to the historical use of private sponsorship for Indochinese refugees. Through an examination of the challenges BVOR is intended to address and the division of public and private responsibility, the comment serves to assess the direction of Canada’s future resettlement.

The Good Governor

Review of: The Good Governor: Robert Ray and the Indochinese Refugees of Iowa, by Matthew R. Walsh.

The Indochinese Refugee Movement: An Exploratory Case Study of the Windsor Experience

Following the fall of Saigon in 1975, thousands fled Indochina in small boats to attain political asylum in neighbouring countries. Canada played a leading role in the resettlement of thousands of Indochinese refugees, and a significant part of this national effort was led by the city of Windsor, Ontario. This article examines Windsor’s local efforts to sponsor and integrate Indochinese refugees into Canadian society. In late 1977, Windsor Mayor Bert Weeks established an ad hoc committee on Indochinese refugees. Together with volunteers from local faith communities and non-governmental organizations, the city created a vast resettlement network and assumed the sponsorship of several families, well before the wave of refugees arrived in 1979. As an exploratory work, this article provides evidence of Windsor’s pivotal role in shaping the Canadian response to the Indochinese refugee crisis and may challenge the national narrative that large Canadian cities led refugee resettlement efforts. This study is timely, as important lessons can be drawn from the Windsor experience.

School Success and FailureChanges Seen in Children of Chinese Descent in Paris学校适应与不适应：巴黎华裔子女的变化

This research examines the difficulties faced by children of recent migrants from mainland China to France in Paris schools, and explains the underlying factors. It is based on fieldwork in Paris schools from 2005 to 2013. Other long-established Chinese communities in France consist mainly of Indo-Chinese refugees of Chinese descent. Their children were born in France and have adjusted to French schools; in contrast, some children of new Chinese immigrants (mainly from Wenzhou) do not attend school regularly and often drop out. My findings show that formation of the folk theory of success that values school education — which explains school success among Indo-Chinese refugee children — is hampered by institutional constraints resulting from parents’ status as illegal immigrants, and unstable parent-child relationships due to the family’s immigration arrangements. This paper reveals the limitations of conventional explanations for Chinese immigrants’ school success and failure based on cultural values.