User:NoahCB99/sandbox

United States
Vietnamese immigrants have grown into one of the world's largest immigrant groups in the United States. Their numbers reach as high as 1.3 million in 2012, up from 231,000 in 1980. It was mainly from rural areas that these people relocated to the United States as refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War. They arrived in three distinct waves, stretching from the 1960s to the 1990s. The first was mainly military and urban citizens who were targets of communist forces because of their associations with the South Vietnam government and the United States. In the 1970s, the second wave arrived and it brought rural Vietnamese to the United States in what became known as the "boat people crisis". These people did not have the education and wealth of the former wave and were also majority Chinese, and fled the persecution of the Vietnamese government. The final wave came in the 1980s and into the 1990s and included thousands of Vietnamese Americans and few actual refugees. These were the children of Vietnamese mothers and United States soldiers and increased the population of Vietnamese in America exponentially. By 2012, they amounted to 31 percent of the 4 million foreign-born population from South East Asia, 11 percent of the 11.9 million foreign-born from Asia, and 3 percent of the 40.8 million overall foreign-born population.

Mass Vietnamese immigration began because of the deterioration of the Vietnam government during the 1970s. After the exit of the United States, the South Vietnam government was completely overwhelmed by the North Vietnam Army (NVA) as a result of the North Vietnamese military offensive of mid-march 1975. South Vietnamese citizens were pushed farther and farther south into Saigon as the offensive continued. On April 30, 1975, Saigon came under control of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, and thus, many Vietnamese became refugees and immigrated to the United States.

By 1979, the United Nations recognized that the Vietnamese refugee crisis was a "world problem", which resulted in the First Geneva Conference on Indochinese Refugees in July 1979. The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Canada each agreed to be countries of resettlement for these refugees, and this caused Vietnamese refugee immigration to the U.S. to peak from 1979-1982. The same year, president Jimmy Carter doubled the number of Southeast Asian refugees accepted into the United States from 7,000 to 14,000; this was much to the dismay of American citizens, 62% of which disapproved of the measure.

The South Vietnamese did not immigrate to the U.S. willingly in this "second wave" as they were forced out of their homes by the NVA and sought refuge in the United States. Many of these people saw the U.S.'s handling of the situation in Vietnam as betrayal and many felt conflicted about making the journey there. In this instance, they would be denoted, not as immigrants, but as refugees because of the forced manner in which they made their exile to the United States. Nearly all of the Vietnamese who migrated to the United States during this time were refugees as 99% of those who received a green card in 1982 were such. The total amount of Vietnamese driven out of their country as a result of diaspora amounted in total to 2 million according to the U.S. Census Bureau's data from 2008-2012.