And if you have been following the news in recent years, i imagine that you, like me, have found it difficult to ignore the topic of refugees. This is an image of a refugees experience, fleeing communist vietnam in 1975. In many ways it reminds us of images that we might see on the news today. Its hard to ignore the human stories of families perishing at sea. Refugees are suffocating in meat trucks. Theyre crowding onto leaky boats. Theyre drowning. The bodies of those who are unable to cross to safety are washing up on mediterranean beaches. And refugees have been in the news for the past few years, particularly related to the crisis in syria, but refugees are being uprooted by conflict all around the world. So were not just talking about refugees coming from syria but from other wartorn regions. Especially in the past a couple of years, it has also been very difficult to ignore the public response to refugees. And Refugee Resettlement, like so many other topics today, has become a polarizing topic. On one hand, opposition to refugees has been fierce and even hostile. Politicians at the local, state, and federal level have linked refugees to terrorism and have pursued antirefugee policies in the name of National Security. The most famous of these measures is president Donald Trumps executive orders which ground the federal Refugee Program virtually to a halt in january 2017. His imposition of what is widely known as the refugee ban shortly after taking office initiated one of the sharpest legal and political debates of his presidency, and is part of a broader effort to limit the number of foreigners who are able to enter the United States. To be sure, politicians are not the only ones who have taken action on the issue of refugees. There have also been instances of vigilante antirefugee activism, some of it potentially violent and much of it centered on muslim refugees. In murfreesboro, tennessee, there were rallies led by white nationalists and neonazis. But its also hard to ignore the fact that there has been a tremendous amount of public support for refugees. The january 2017 executive orders prompted thousands of americans to protest and facilitate legal aid at airports across the country. Community groups organized rallies and Service Projects to raise awareness of the issue of refugees. People put signs declaring their support for refugees on their front lawns or above their church entryways or even on stickers on their laptop. Now, i am an historian. And my job is to remind you that we need to have some historical perspective. The truth is that in many ways we have been here before. Ive already pointed to this image of a boat. This is an image from 1975, but it could very well be an image of people fleeing by boat today. Weve seen these images before. Weve seen a vicious eruption of antirefugee sentiment before. Weve seen a generous prorefugee response before. Weve seen anxiety about religious and cultural difference before. Weve worried about refugees and National Security before. Now, i am frustrated a little bit by our contemporary conversation because so much of our contemporary conversation is not paying attention to our history, and lessons we can learn from the past. We especially dont hear a lot about asian refugees. We might hear a little bit more about jewish refugees, but not that much about asian refugees. Now ive made the case this entire semester that asianAmerican History is American History. And this is true for refugee history as well. So today, im going to talk about asian refugee migrations that took place four decades ago. And this refugee migration, i argue, changed the course of refugee history in the United States for the decades to come. Im going to talk about refugees known as ugandan asian refugees and Southeast Asian refugees. They arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, some of them as late as the beginning of the 21st century. This migration was a turning point in several different ways. Number one, in the 1970s, refugees were accepted for new reasons. For the first time, the United States wasnt just accepting refugees because they opposed communism. The United States was accepting refugees on the basis of emerging humanitarian commitments to human rights. Number two, during this period refugees were accepted and resettled in a new way. Were talking about a huge refugee migration here, over a million Southeast Asians refugees came to the United States in the last couple of decades of the 20th century. And that refugee migration and the amount of work that it took to coordinate relief and resettlement efforts, both overseas and domestically, made government officials realize they needed to have a more systematic and organized and permanent way to respond to refugee crises. So its in part because of Southeast Asian refugees in particular that we see the emergence of a push for new legislation which culminated in the 1980 refugee act. This act is still enforced today. Ill talk about the details of that act later. Number three, another reason why Southeast Asian refugee migrations and also ugandan asian refugee migrations matter, these asian refugees were at the beginning of a new wave of refugees, a new refugee population. They were the first group of nonwhite, noneuropean, nonchristian refugees to be resettled in the United States. There had been cuban refugees and jewish refugees, ill talk about that later, but this was the first huge group of nonwhite, noneuropean, nonchristian refugees. And these refugees were so different that it was a source of great anxiety for americans. In truth, these refugees ended up being the forerunner for refugee populations who would arrive in the United States in subsequent decades. So these refugees in many ways set the groundwork for how the United States would resettle refugees, but also were a harbinger for what would come. And some asian refugees, ugandan refugees and Southeast Asian refugees in the future, profoundly changed the u. S. And its approach to refugees in the decades to come. If any of you like literature, youll know that we have been talking about asian refugees, in fact the history of vietnamese refugees has received a lot of attention in the past couple of years because of this book, the sympathizer which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. You are reading an excerpt from this novel this week and well discuss it next week. The author himself was a refugee. And hes reflected a lot about what it means to be a refugee and a writer and to tell his story. In an essay he published in the New York Times he observed the following. Many people have characterized my novel the sympathizer as an immigrant story and me as an immigrant. No. My novel is a war story. And i am not an immigrant. I am a refugee who, like many others, has never ceased being a refugee in some corners of my mind. He continues, immigrants are more reassuring than refugees because there is an endpoint to their story. However they arrive, whether they are documented or not, their desires for a new life can be absorbed into the American Dream or into the european narrative of civilization. By contrast, refugees are zombies of the world, the undead who rise from dying states to march or switch for our borders in endless waves. So lets stop and think about this line for a little bit. What do you think he means by saying immigrants are different from refugees . Theres a choice that immigrants take to build their own, like, new future, whereas with the refugee crises we see now, theres often a push that forces them to leave their own countries and migrate somewhere else just because of, like, a failure of government or reasons that they dont have control over themselves. Absolutely. So there is a forced migration that characterizes refugee migrations rather than immigrants who, as you point out, have more of a choice. With refugees there is somewhat of a an immigrant who came to this country by their own choice to build a new life, the refugee, the reason we would welcome them in is because were housing them until they go back, but with an immigrant that connotation isnt there. So the ability to return to your home country. Weve talked about how a lot of immigrants migrate to the United States or elsewhere and return home. Refugees dont have that option, thats a really important point. Because they have been forced out due to war, persecution, Natural Disaster, any number of reasons that make their life in their previous country impossible. They would not survive. So i think youre exactly right, refugee migrations is characterized by a need for survival. What do you think he means when he says that refugees are zombies of the world . I thought that was evocative, zombies of the world, the undead who arise from dying states. In a way, they are the only vessels of culture left of these dying states, and its really hard to get someone to, you know, completely forfeit their culture because it is part of their identity. So as long as they live, the culture lives. Yes, okay. So i think this is really powerful. They are often vessels of their culture. Theyre leaving desperate situations where they would have otherwise died, physically and perhaps also their community would have died, their culture would have died. And so this idea of people leaving dying states in circumstances of profound dislocation and trauma is really powerful. I think that language of zombies is really powerful because it reminds us of the desperation, the violence, the fear that people leave that pushes people to migrate. And i think that its important for us to remember that this violence, that this suffering, that this persecution, that this upheaval that forced them to migrate doesnt just end there, but continues to shape their lives in years to come. So the author calls attention to, i think, the two most important aspects of refugees and what distinguishes them from immigrants. Number one, they are involuntary migrants, as you pointed out already, forcibly removed from their homes due to political conflict, Natural Disaster or other extraordinary circumstances. And theyre often very traumatized people, zombies as he would say. The interesting thing about refugees is they are powerful in our mythology of american exceptionalist immigration history. Think about the poem thats on the statue of liberty, the new colossus by emma lazarus, who describes the statue of liberty as the mother of exiles, who says, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless tempesttossed to me, i lift my lamp beside the golden door. How many of you have heard those lines before . So famous. And the fact that those lines are on the statue of liberty, which is a symbol of immigration in the United States, is really powerful, it really centers the United States or the idea of the United States as being a welcoming haven for people who are exiles. Unfortunately the history of the United States tells a somewhat different, more complicated story. The truth is we havent always had a humanitarian impulse to welcome refugees. Usually weve only done so when its in our humanitarian National Interest. Usually weve been more inclined to actually reject refugees than to accept them. And to borrow the words of historian eric tang, often refugees who have been accepted for resettlement here are not only resettled but are also deeply unsettled by the experience of forced migration and resettlement in the United States. To give you an overview of what ill talk about today, ill give you a little bit of background about american Refugee Resettlement policy after the second war. And then im going to use that background to set up why the 1970s were such an important period of change. Thats when a small group of ugandan refugees arrived in the United States and they were followed by an even larger group of refugees, Southeast Asian refugees who are alternatively described as indochinese refugees, these included refugees from vietnam, laos, and cambodia. Ill talk about the crisis that developed overseas, but ill focus mostly on developments that took place here in the United States, how the general public viewed Southeast Asian refugees, how Southeast Asian refugees were admitted and resettled, and how Southeast Asian refugees themselves tell stories about their experience. Ill tease out why the history of Southeast AsianRefugee Resettlement matters. And ill conclude with some discussion about how Southeast Asianamericans today are drawing on their refugee history to intervene in contemporary Public Policy debates. Any questions so far . So lets begin with some background about Refugee Resettlement in the United States during the 20th century. During the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, the most refugees came from europe with the exception of cuban refugees. Most were white and either jewish or christian. And during this period, right after the second world war, and during the cold war, commitment to opposing communism really shaped how the United States determined which refugees to accept. During and after world war ii, the United States changed its immigration policies to accept people displaced by war. These refugees were known as displaced persons and they benefitted from the landmark legislation of the time, which was the 1948 displaced persons act. That act actually expired, and in 1953 it was replaced by the Refugee Relief act which helped other european refugees including italians, greeks, and dutch refugees. In 1956, we see cold war developments in europe also shape a new refugee population and give rise to new groups of people seeking refuge, in particular the hungarian revolution occurred and Freedom Fighters, as they were popularly known, were welcome to the United States. They were accepted under what is called parole power which allowed the United States to accept refugees and circumvent its own immigration laws which at this time, if you recall, were pretty restrictive. Throughout much of the cold war, the executive branch used a loophole in immigration law, the parole power, to admit refugees when it deemed that it was in the National Interest to do so. Most of those refugees admitted were fleeing left wing or communist regimes. Finally, in 1959, cuban exiles began to arrive. The first to arrive were bautista sympathizers who feared reprisal from the castro government. For the first time the United States was the country of first refuge, meaning refugees didnt go to another country and apply for resettlement in the United States, they went straight to the United States, especially to places like miami. The policy for cuban refugees at this time was such that these refugees would be given asylum as part of a bigger anticastro, anticommunist policy. A number of requirements were imposed on these early refugee populations, and these requirements illustrated how the United States pursued its own cold war selfinterest. First, as ive already mentioned, the u. S. Offered a special welcome for people fleeing communism. Second, preference was given for refugees who were professionals or highly educated or skilled. This was in keeping with other immigration laws of the period. Alternately, while welcoming displaced people has been seen as a humanitarian act, these humanitarian efforts were often centered on the needs of the United States, the helper. These images feature refugees who arrived in the United States during this period. The photo on the left features displaced persons who are registering at ft. Ontario emergency Refugee Center which housed a thousand people displaced by world war ii. And the photo on the right is the cover of Time Magazine, 1957, featuring their chosen person of the year in 1956. The person of the year in 1956 was the hungarian freedom fighter. So lets think about this. What do you think this image on the right tells us about how americans viewed hungarian Freedom Fighters during this time . Think about what it means for Time Magazine to choose hungarian Freedom Fighters as their person of the year and to present them in this way. What does this magazine cover tell us abo