Indochina refugee crisis

The Indochina refugee crisis was the large outflow of people from the former French colonies of Indochina, comprising the countries of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, after communist governments were established in 1975. Over the next 25 years and out of a total Indochinese population in 1975 of 56 million, more than 3 million people would undertake the dangerous journey to become refugees in other countries of Southeast Asia or China. Hundreds of thousands may have died in their attempt to flee. More than 2.5 million Indochinese were resettled, mostly in North America, Australia and Europe. Five hundred thousand were repatriated, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

The Indochinese refugees consisted of a number of different peoples, including the Vietnamese boat people, the Sino-Vietnamese Hoa, Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge and hunger, ethnic Laotians, Iu Mien, Hmong and other highland peoples of Laos, and Montagnard, the highland peoples of Vietnam. They fled to nearby countries to seek temporary asylum and most requested permanent resettlement in third countries. The refugee outflow and humanitarian crisis was especially acute in 1979 and 1980.

Reverberations of the Indochina refugee crisis continued into the 21st century. The last of the boat people were repatriated from Malaysia in 2005 and Thailand deported 4,000 Hmong refugees in 2009.

In Spring 1975, the armies of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong advanced rapidly southward and by early April the defeat and occupation of South Vietnam by the north was nearly certain. During the Vietnam War, nearly one million Vietnamese had been employed by the U.S. government or were family members of former employees and were believed to be in danger of persecution or execution by the conquering North Vietnamese. Fearing that rumors of evacuation would cause panic in the South Vietnamese population, extensive planning began only on April 18, 1975 when U.S. President Gerald Ford created an inter-agency task force headed by Julia Taft to "coordinate...evacuation of U.S. citizens, Vietnamese citizens, and third-country nationals from Vietnam." By that time the military forces of North Vietnam were nearly in the outskirts of Saigon and the population of the city was swelled by hundreds of thousands of people displaced from areas already overrun by the communist armies.

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