Abstract As the United States evacuated Vietnam in 1975, the Gerald R. Ford administration sought to determine where Vietnamese refugees who had evacuated in advance of the communist takeover could be processed for resettlement. Using federal and territorial government and US military documents from the United States and Guam, this article examines how the federal government and US military considered places within the US empire, including military bases in the Philippines, Guam, an unincorporated territory, and the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, as places in which to construct the US refugee migration apparatus. I argue that the federal government had to understand how concerns about sovereignty did or did not necessitate “territorial diplomacy”—extensions of financial aid or reckoning with political constraints territorial policy makers posed—to secure the use of these places as refugee processing sites. Once evacuated from Vietnam, refugees themselves contended with how their presence in a non-sovereign place shaped their ability to resettle or repatriate. The history of Vietnamese refugee policy between 1975 and 1977 thus reveals how the indelible intermeshing of US empire and refugee migration determines federal decision-making, the legal futures of US territories, and the lives of individual refugees.
Sarah R. Meiners (Thu,) studied this question.