By Amanda C. Demmer / Special To The Washington Post
After 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan, the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul has collapsed, and Americans are hastily evacuating the country. As the Taliban takes over the country for a second time, an incredibly urgent question resonates: What will be the fate of those aligned with the United States?
The history of the Vietnam War suggests that this question will endure long beyond the U.S. evacuation. About 130,000 South Vietnamese evacuated alongside U.S. personnel in April 1975, and 20 years later, more than 1 million had resettled in the United States, in addition to hundreds of thousands of Laotians and Cambodians. Estimates are that tens of thousands of Afghans supported the United States in the war in Afghanistan, and the United States has allocated some 26,500 Special Immigrant Visas for them. However, it is unclear how many people the United States ultimately would be willing to resettle. Refugee admissions stood at historic lows last year, and amid pervasive anti-refugee sentiment, the Biden administration only raised the cap to 62,500 for this fiscal year. Revisiting the history of Vietnam points to the possibility that Americans may find common cause in support of refugee resettlement, even in the wake of an unpopular war and during times of intense partisanship.
In early 1975, North Vietnam launched a decisive military offensive. Vast swaths of South Vietnamese territory fell in rapid succession: Phuc Long province in early March, Buon Ma Thuot on March 10; Hue on March 25. Four days later, communist troops captured Da Nang, a bustling port metropolis that was the second-largest city in South Vietnam. Da Nang’s fall forced U.S. policymakers to reckon with South Vietnam’s imminent collapse.
Officials in Washington, D.C., and Saigon frantically planned a belated evacuation. The extent and nature of the U.S. obligation to its Vietnamese allies was an immediate and consistent part of these conversations. Intense opposition to the admission of South Vietnamese emanated from many places. War fatigue, economic woes, racism and the tendency to see Vietnamese people as enemies rather than allies all added momentum to the impulse to simply evacuate the last Americans and attempt to wash the nation’s hands of the conflict.
Despite these obstacles, however, 130,000 Vietnamese evacuated alongside American personnel in April 1975. When explaining this decision, President Gerald Ford framed the United States’ ongoing commitments to the South Vietnamese as a “profound moral obligation,” one that endured despite the imminent collapse of the regime in Saigon. Although a victory for those who labored for a significant number of resettlement slots, the number paled in comparison to estimates of those who might be endangered after the American withdrawal, which on more than one occasion reached 1 million.
Yet, the evacuation did not abruptly sever the ties between the American and Vietnamese people. Nor did it completely end the war, which continued in violent and tragic ways for those still in Vietnam. The years following the installation of communist governments in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia saw one of the largest migrations of the 20th century.
In the four years between 1975 and 1979, over 700,000 individuals reached the shores of first asylum nations. This migration was the result of both forced-expulsion policies and the decision of hundreds of thousands of people to flee. By 1995, the total number of migrants stemming from the conflicts and their aftermaths exceeded 1.4 million.
Just over 63 percent of these migrants, or 822,977, ended up in the United States. In 1979 and again in 1989, the United States and over 60 other countries participated in international conferences aimed at addressing Southeast Asian migrants, with Washington accepting the largest number of refugees and pledging the most money to help support U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) programs in both instances.
In addition to the 130,000 who evacuated alongside the United States in 1975 and the more than 822,000 additional migrants, the United States also admitted another half-million individuals directly from Vietnam through a multilateral initiative known as the Orderly Departure Program (ODP).
Negotiated in 1979 under UNHCR auspices, the ODP provided a safe and legal means for Vietnamese to leave their country without the dangers associated with clandestine flight. The 500,000-plus people who migrated to the United States through this program had family and employment ties to the United States, including Amerasians (the children of Vietnamese women and American men), those interned in Hanoi’s reeducation camps and their “close family members.” Facilitating these migrations required negotiating bilateral agreements with Hanoi in the absence of formal diplomatic relations and, often, revising U.S. laws. Such agreements and/or codifications occurred in 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989 and 1996. The administrations of Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in other words, all supported resettling South Vietnamese refugees in the decades after 1975.
How do we explain this sustained, bipartisan support, which occurred even as the United States adopted far less generous policies toward migrants from other countries? The highly visible plight of people who fled by sea and revelations of genocide in Cambodia helped prompt action; especially because they occurred as Americans and those around the world confronted the brutal history of the Holocaust. In a speech that Vice President Walter Mondale gave at the 1979 U.N. Conference on Indochinese Refugees, he compared the unfolding events directly to the Holocaust and suggested that failure to respond in 1979 would be equal to the failure to act on the eve of World War II. Comparisons to the Holocaust and the surging human rights movement of the late 1970s helped create consensus in favor of providing people with safe haven.
Policymakers with starkly divergent views of the Vietnam War were able to find common cause in refugee resettlement. For those who opposed the war, assisting those paying the price for U.S. policy failures seemed an obvious choice and a moral necessity. For those who supported the war and remained committed to waging the Cold War, the fact that so many Vietnamese fled their homeland served as a substitute for military victory insofar as it seemed to validate the claim that the conflict had been a “noble cause” all along. Assisting South Vietnamese refugees, especially when framed as family reunification efforts, often transcended partisanship. Sens. Bob Dole (R-Kansas) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), for instance, co-sponsored resolutions that received unanimous support, a level of consensus usually unheard of for a topic related to the Vietnam War.
As time went on, the support of Vietnam War veterans in Congress like John McCain (R-Arizona) also added credibility and political clout to migration programs. Finally, the consistent, tireless work of nongovernmental actors and institutions helped keep questions that were invisible to large segments of the American public in front of U.S. officials. The successive waves of migration policies after 1975 were not automatic or preordained, they were the result of hard-fought, intentional lobbying and policymaking.
History never repeats itself exactly. Important differences in time, geography, context, culture and individual actors separate the Vietnam War from what we are witnessing unfolding in Afghanistan. And yet, the echoes of the past are impossible to ignore.
Like in 1975, the U.S. government has pledged to include allies in its evacuation plans. In mid-July, the Pentagon announced Operation Allies Refuge, a program intended to provide relocation flights for those approved under the Special Immigration Visa program. Those flights began on July 30, but the evacuation pace has not kept up with the alacrity of the Taliban’s advance.
As with the evacuation of Saigon, the military situation in Kabul deteriorated so quickly that belatedly made plans were poorly executed, and significant numbers who received promises of evacuation will be left behind. On Sunday, the New York Times put the number of such individuals at “tens of thousands.” As a stopgap measure, Kosovo and Albania have agreed to temporarily house Afghans seeking visas to enter the United States at Washington’s request, and Canada has pledged to accept 20,000 refugees for permanent resettlement.
Time will tell what other developments may arise as the situation on the ground rapidly changes. What is unmistakable is that U.S. officials and the American public are again facing the question: What obligations are owed to the people with whom the United States has been aligned for decades, and what, if anything, is the United States willing to do about it? The history of the Vietnam War shows that this query will resonate long after the evacuation of the last Americans from Kabul and that bipartisan support of refugee resettlement is possible.
Amanda C. Demmer is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech and author of “After Saigon’s Fall: Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975-2000.”
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