“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History (via quotespile)
At a recent naturalization ceremony in Dallas, former first lady Laura Bush rightly emphasized that Texas is “a land of immigrants.” Our state, she said, “is a place where people come, year after year, to build a better life.” It’s a state “that thrives due to the prosperity, ingenuity, transformation and generosity of immigrants. And we are a much richer state for all the cultures that have settled on our land.”
One of those cultures is that of the nearly quarter-million Vietnamese-Americans who call Texas home. That’s second only to California, where more than a half-million Vietnamese-Americans reside.
In 1979, as millions fled communism, war and famine in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, doubled the number of Southeast Asian refugees accepted by the U.S. from 7,000 to 14,000 a month. Carter said his administration was acting “with the compassion that has traditionally characterized the United States when confronted with such situations of human crisis.”
Between 1975 and 1997, under three Republican and two Democratic presidents, the U.S. took in more than 1.25 million Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and other Southeast Asian refugees.
But a recent decision by the Trump administration ignores this history and threatens to betray a solemn promise we made to the South Vietnamese people when we pulled out of Saigon — we acknowledge and respect your sacrifice and your service and will provide you and your families refuge.
Since 2017, the administration has adopted a “zero tolerance” policy and taken steps to deport nearly 9,000 Vietnamese refugees convicted of crimes in the U.S., including legal permanent residents who’ve lived here for more than 40 years.
Most of the immigrants’ run-ins with the law happened decades ago when they were young and adjusting to life in a new country. All have paid their debt to society, either through jail time, parole, community service or fines.
After pushback by the Asian-American community and Democratic lawmakers, the Trump administration appears to be backing away from its initial aggressive stance on deportation. That’s due in large part to Vietnam’s unwillingness to repatriate large numbers of refugees or amend the 2008 agreement.
But that doesn’t mean that those already detained by the Department of Homeland Security, or the approximately 1,500 Vietnamese-Americans in Texas that could be deported under a reinterpretation of the agreement, are home free.
