Condition: New. Descriptive account of modern immigration to the United States and how it has mirrored trends in global migration. 34. Cambodians entered the United States as refugees after a group of Cambodian Communists named Khmer Rouge, led by the French-educated Pol Pot, won a civil war that had raged from March 1970 to April 1975 and proceeded to rule the country with extraordinary brutality. Carol Mortland and Judy Ledgerwood, “Secondary Migration among Southeast Asian Refugees in the United States.” Urban Anthropology 16 (1987), 291–326. When Prince Sihanouk broke off diplomatic relations with the United States, those programs ended. Cambodian refugees face starvation as Russian- and Chinese-backed regimes block humanitarian aid. There, they were put in refugee camps in which they endured poor conditions. The United States Congress passed the 1980 Refugee Act that adopted the United Nations’ definition of “refugee” as a person who is outside of his or her country and is unable or unwilling to return to it “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” That act also enabled Congress to become an equal partner with the president in formulating U.S. refugee policy and how it should be implemented.1 Before 1980, the executive branch of the U.S. government, under the “parole power” of the attorney general, had admitted groups of people as refugees that reflected two concerns: (1) the anti-Communist ideology that underlay U.S. foreign policy during the decades when the Cold War dominated international relations, and (2) U.S. immigration policy that became increasingly restrictive during the early decades of the 20th century and was not liberalized until the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. A second city in which Cambodian refugees congregated in large numbers was Lowell, an old textile-mill town in Massachusetts. Other people with professional skills decided not to go through the trouble of studying for and passing the licensing examinations required to practice various professions in the United States. This group was part of a second wave of Southeast Asian immigrants to come to the United States, the first of which had been the massive exodus from Vietnam in 1975. U.S. Congressional Research Service, as cited in Josephine Reynell, Political Pawns: Refugees in the Thai-Cambodian Border (Oxford: Refugee Studies Programme, 1989), 41. Depending on where they lived and what industries were located in those places, they have earned a living working in electronics assembly plants; in meat packing, chicken processing, and seafood processing facilities; in textile mills and garment sewing factories; in factories manufacturing plumbing and heating equipment, furniture, and machines; as carpenters in construction sites; as janitors in office buildings, maids in hotels, and kitchen help in restaurants; and as seasonal farm laborers. Cambodia’s neighbor to the east, Vietnam, laid claim to the Mekong Delta that Angkor had ruled by sending successive waves of Vietnamese to settle there. Husbands, for their part, may feel threatened by wives who may earn more than they do, and especially by those women who grow accustomed to behaving more assertively not only in the workplace but also within their homes.44. He sought and obtained the assistance of Mrs. Kitty Dukakis, the wife of then-governor Michael Dukakis. Given the imperative for finding “cheap” housing for them, most refugees ended up in inner city neighborhoods where gang warfare has been rampant. From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, European refugees from Communism included three kinds of persons: (1) “displaced persons,” some of whom were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, who refused to be repatriated to their countries of origin that were now under Soviet Communist domination, (2) Hungarians, and (3) Czechs. The rest of the population has relied on welfare and other forms of public assistance. A relatively large number have opened grocery stores. They used Buddhist temples to store their weapons and ammunition. By 1975, their strength had grown to 60,000 main-force troops and some 200,000 guerrillas. Thailand, which was never colonized, managed to remain independent by accommodating Japanese demands. An estimated 1.7 million people out of an estimated total population of 7.9 million died from executions, hunger, disease, injuries, coerced labor, and exposure to the elements. Between 1975 and 1994, a total of 157,518 Cambodians were admitted into the United States—148,665 as refugees, 6,335 as immigrants who had family members in the United States to sponsor them, and 2,518 as humanitarian and public interest parolees who did not qualify for refugee status but who were deemed deserving of admission nevertheless.28 Cambodians admitted into the United States after 1994 have come as immigrants and not as refugees, but the number per year has been small. More than 100,000 of them had come to the country during the 1980’s. Their rapid advance was made possible by several factors: (1) the mutually opportunistic alliance with Sihanouk whose recorded messages on cassette tapes distributed in rural areas urged peasants to join the Khmer Rouge to fight against the Lon Nol regime; (2) the Khmer Rouge’s appeal to the same peasants to help restore Sihanouk to power; (3) the heavy bombing carried out by U.S. planes that devastated the countryside in eastern Cambodia and alienated the rural population; (4) the military and political aid from North Vietnam during the first two years of the civil war; and (5) the Khmer Rouge’s own increasingly effective military prowess.6 Half a million people died during the civil war and at least three million were displaced out of a total population of less than eight million. These structures with no walls were erected overnight in a rice paddy with poor drainage. U.S. Committee for Refugees, Something Like Home Again: The Repatriation of Cambodian Refugees (Washington, D.C.: American Council for Nationalities Service, U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1994). The Thai government also worried that if Cambodia were to be emptied of its population, the Vietnamese army occupying Cambodia could more easily amass along the Cambodian-Thai border to threaten Thailand’s internal security. The Khmer Rouge had planted land mines along both the Cambodian-Thai and the Cambodian-Vietnamese borders, so a significant portion of these would-be refuge-seekers was blown to pieces before they found refuge. Yale University established the Documentation Center in 1995 supported by grants from the U.S. State Department and the Netherlands government. A significant portion of this last group is composed of households headed by women whose fathers, husbands, or sons the Khmer Rouge had killed. But it was difficult to determine exactly who among the residents of Khao I Dang qualified as bona fide refugees because the only persons who might suffer persecution if they were sent back to a Cambodia ruled by the Vietnamese-supported government were the Khmer Rouge.26 No resettlement countries wanted to admit any Khmer Rouge soldiers or cadres. In comparison, academic book-length studies of the post-arrival lives of Cambodian refugees, immigrants, and U.S.-born Americans of Cambodian ancestry are sparse. A much larger number, made up of those who came after 1979, became the working poor. Others have joined gangs. Dennis McNamara, “The Origins and Effects of ‘Humane Deterrence’ Policies in Southeast Asia,” in Refugees and International Relations, ed. (An unknown number died along the way, shot by Khmer Rouge soldiers who caught them or dying from sickness, injuries, or hunger.) Although elected officials argued that it was necessary to act in order to put the United States in line with international standards for the treatment of refugees, the numerical cap suggested it had more to do with opposition to immigration primarily linked to the economic problems confronting the United States. Only in the 1990s was an annual quota established to limit the number of Cubans who could be admitted. Instead, they became owners and managers of small businesses, such as restaurants, donut shops, grocery stores, and jewelry stores. The first major influx of Cambodian immigrants who began arriving in the United States during the late 1970’s was part of a large group of refugees from Southeast Asia fleeing political instability in their homelands. American-born children and youth of Cambodian ancestry are the fastest growing segment of the ethnic Cambodian population in the United States today. Then, the eligibility period was reduced to eighteen months, later to eight months, and finally to three months. Unfortunately, other headline-grabbing events around the world and in the United States seem to have relegated research on Cambodian Americans to the back burner in both academic and public consciousness. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. ORR thought it would be easier to persuade such truncated families to move away from localities already full of Cambodians. While Thailand allowed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to build refugee camps on Thai soil to house the refuge-seekers and to feed them, Thai authorities administered the camps themselves. Stephen Golub, “Looking for Phantoms: Flaws in the Khmer Rouge Screening Process” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1986). The Khmer are the major ethnic group in Cambodia; the language they speak is also called Khmer and it belongs to the Mon-Khmer family of languages. When added to the half million who had died during the civil war, the carnage included more than a quarter of the country’s total population. The latter two groups had revolted against the Soviet Union that had turned their countries into political “satellites” after the end of the Second World War and that used military force to put down the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the one in Czechoslovakia, known as the “Prague Spring,” in 1968. The earliest arrivals were classified as “displaced persons,” interviewed by representatives from international organizations, processed as refugees, and resettled in Western countries. Prior to this wave of southeastern immigration, very few people with Cambodian heritage lived in the United States. Some former Khmer Rouge personnel, who had escaped to Vietnam because they opposed Pol Pot’s extremist ideology and savage practices, returned in late December 1978, accompanied by 120,000 Vietnamese troops, to topple the government of their former comrades. 13. In the 1950s, thousands of Chinese were admitted after a Communist government came to power in mainland China in 1949. At first, there was no immediate exodus because people’s first priority was to travel all over the country in search of family members from whom they had been separated but who might still be alive. After the Vietnamese troops were finally withdrawn, the Phnom Penh government changed the name of the country to State of Cambodia. The Boat People and Achievement in America: A Study of Family Life, HardWork, and Cultural Values. After a few months, however, the outflow of refuge-seekers resumed and rapidly increased in volume. In most instances resettlement officials and social workers enrolled them in refugee assistance programs almost immediately upon their arrival because that was the most expeditious way to have the newcomers taken care of. A second wave of refuge-seekers was made up of people who had successfully escaped overland to Thailand during the Khmer Rouge regime. William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 330. U.S. officials allocated 130,000 slots for potential refugees, of which 125,000 were reserved for South Vietnamese and 5,000 for Cambodians. Some mid-level Khmer Rouge military commanders and political cadres who opposed Pol Pot’s extreme policies and savage practices escaped to Vietnam in 1977 and 1978. The United States provided the Lon Nol government with $1.18 billion in military aid and $503 million in civilian aid during the five years he ruled the country.5 Even though Sihanouk had persecuted the Communists while he was in power, he now joined forces with the Khmer Rouge to fight against the Lon Nol regime. With its troops bogged down in Vietnam, France in 1953 granted independence to both Cambodia and Laos—two colonies it had always considered to be less important than Vietnam. Scott, Joanna C. Indochina’s Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. They wanted to create a “pure” peasant society cleansed of all Western and modern “contamination” so that Democratic Kampuchea could become the “most advanced” society in the world overnight. Cambodia has a deplorable human rights record and is infamous for using refugees as bargaining chips in bids for foreign aid. Historically there had been no immigration from Cambodia into the United States, so there were no existing Cambodian ethnic communities when the first wave of refugees arrived. to a variety of human technologies that conspire . Refuge-seekers from other countries, including people from Iraq and Afghanistan where the United States has fought long wars, have also entered but in very small numbers compared to the (combined) millions of Cubans, Soviet Jews, and Indochinese (the last group includes Vietnamese, Sino-Vietnamese, Cambodians, lowland Lao, Hmong, Iu Mien, Tai Dam, and Cham)—all of them refugees from Communism. On the one hand, refugees were seen as people who “voted with their feet” as they escaped from countries ruled by oppressive Communist regimes; hence, such “freedom fighters” should be welcomed into the United States. Repatriation Thai officials considered their presence to be a security threat and an unacceptable drain on the country’s resources. Because almost every Cambodian family had lost members during the “killing fields” years under the Khmer Rouge, most who arrived in the U.S. had few kinsmen who might have already settled into communities with a large number of their co-ethnics. What made this possible was the pressure exerted on Congress and President Jimmy Carter and then President Ronald Reagan by the U.S. ambassador to Thailand and some of the embassy staff in Bangkok, as well as by various humanitarian organizations that advocated strongly on behalf of the Cambodians.24 What also helped was that several congressmen championed efforts to admit Cambodian refugees into the United States.25 These Khao I Dang residents comprised the third and largest wave of Cambodian refuge-seekers. Besides Cambodians, refuge-seekers from Laos and Vietnam also found their way to the Thai-Cambodian border. No one anticipated that Sihanouk would become a skillful politician who not only successfully juggled domestic factions vying for power but also played the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China against one another during the Cold War. In their new home, they have been simply the latest group to experience a long history of troubled race and ethnic relations in the United States, in which non-white peoples and immigrants from countries other than those in western Europe have been the targets of prejudice, bigotry, racism, institutionalized inequality in the labor market, social injustice, and political disenfranchisement.36 Yes, it is true that many American individuals and organizations with humanitarian impulses have tried to help them, both before and after they arrived in the United States, but those acts of kindness do not fully compensate for the negative receptions they have faced since they landed in the United States. Despite myriad difficulties, Cambodians in the United States are determined to resuscitate their social institutions and culture that the Khmer Rouge had tried to destroy during their reign of terror. Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, American History.
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