Vietnamese refugees

Submitted by Jeff (United States), Jul 18, 2022 at 22:40

Good question, Anon, and good observations.

I can only speak from the viewpoint and experience of just one person, but I don't recall any hostility toward Vietnamese refugees in the USA. I'm not claiming there couldn't have been any acts of hostility or unkindness, but any events like that must have been very isolated. I'm sure I would remember a nationwide pattern of hostility.

Having known and worked with Vietnamese refugees and their children for decades, I haven't heard a single negative story about how they were treated upon their arrival or subsequently, living in the USA. Quite the opposite in fact.

All the same for refugees from the "iron curtain" countries of eastern Europe in the 1970's and 80's. Looking back, refugees I knew from Hungary and Poland, aside from being thrilled to be here, never complained about the vetting process they went through to determine if they were in fact refugees. To them, that process did not indicate any kind of phobia, hatred or intolerance. Our eastern European refugees seemed to easily understand that we had to check out people arriving from an empire that had threatened to bury us and had 20,000 nukes pointed at us. They probably would have thought we were nuts if we didn't put them through some kind of vetting process.

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