50 Years After Vietnam, Thousands Flee Another Lost American War

The United States admitted more than 300,000 Southeast Asians after the Vietnam War. Analysts say there is little chance the country will repeat the extensive refugee resettlement effort.

It was the end of a decades-long American military engagement overseas, and thousands of U.S. allies were clamoring to board the last planes leaving for, they hoped, eventual resettlement in the United States. Their capital had fallen. Deadly reprisals for those who stayed behind were almost certain. It was 1975, the tumultuous backdrop was Southeast Asia, and Washington largely opened America’s doors, letting in some 300,000 refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia over the next four years. Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a young senator from Delaware, co-sponsored landmark legislation that won unanimous passage in the Senate and was signed into law in 1980, divorcing refugee admissions from U.S. foreign policy and generally expanding the number allowed into the country each year. Now, as similar scenes of chaos and desperation unfold in Kabul with the conclusion of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, most analysts say there is little chance the country will repeat the extensive refugee resettlement effort that accompanied the end of the war in Vietnam.