Discourses on Southeast Asian refugees in the United States commonly depict resettlement as deliverance from the perils of war, persecution, and displacement. However, a closer look at the realities of resettlement reveals systemic poverty, criminalization, and racialized violence for many Southeast Asian refugees and second generation youth. Through a historical lens, this thesis poses questions about the confluence of policing, imperial warfare, and Southeast Asian resettlement into the U.S. in the post-Vietnam War era. In light of a contemporary Southeast Asian criminal deportation crisis, I excavate entangled histories of racial violence on both imperial and domestic fronts–arguing that Southeast Asian resettlement onto American soil is an extension of imperial warfare rather than purported "refuge" from it. In unsettling the discourses and realities of resettlement, this essay contributes to the field of critical refugee studies by connecting contemporary issues of mass incarceration and criminal deportation to histories of racialized policing, border regimes, and American imperialism that fundamentally produced precarious conditions for Southeast Asian refugee subjectivities.
Kacey Nguyen (Mon,) studied this question.