ESCAPING GENOCIDE AND REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT

Beginning in the 1970's, there was a mass influx of Southeast Asians from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam to the United States due to genocide and political upheavals in the region following instability created by the Vietnam War. A total of 1,146,650 Southeast Asians were resettled in America between 1975-2002, and the 2002 Census estimated the community s population to be around 2 million nationwide.

Most Southeast Asian refugees were resettled in impoverished and tumultuous neighborhoods with no infrastructure in place to ensure proper integration, and minimal preparation for the existing community. This made living conditions ripe for poverty, crime, violence and discrimination. A 2004 survey revealed that 70% of Southeast Asian refugees exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because nearly all had suffered the loss of family members, experienced harsh labor camps and torture, and many fathers were former soldiers. There was no behavioral health support to help work through these problems.

Due to the harshness of our environment, the trauma experienced by our parents, and little support structure for youth, some turned to involvement in gangs and criminal activity, and landed themselves in the legal system. Convictions that some received as young people, even after time has been served, now make them susceptible to deportation under the 1996 immigration laws.

"The Cambodians are manifestly the greatest failure of the refugee program in this country...Mistake No. 1 was that we didn't treat the Cambodians as different. The scope and breadth and depth of what they endured -- the only thing you can compare it to, was the Jewish Holocaust. What they went through is not something you bounce back from without a lot of tailored and targeted and expensive help...The fact that we failed in resettling them is a microcosm of the way the world failed in turning a blind eye to the atrocities in the first place."

Lavinia Limon, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants

"In a Homeland Far From Home" by Deborah Sontag NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE