When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983: A Comparative History of European and Israeli Responses to the South-East Asian Refugee Crisis 9783030642235, 9783030642242

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MIGRATION HISTORY

When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983 A Comparative History of European and Israeli Responses to the South-East Asian Refugee Crisis Edited by Becky Taylor · Karen Akoka · Marcel Berlinghoff · Shira Havkin

Palgrave Studies in Migration History

Series Editors Philippe Rygiel Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon Saint-Germain-du-Puy, France Per-Olof Grönberg Luleå University of Technology Luleå, Sweden David Feldman Birkbeck College—University of London London, UK Marlou Schrover Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands

This series explores the history of migration, from antiquity to the present day and across a wide geographical scope. Taking a broad definition of migration, the editors welcome books that consider all forms of mobility, including cross-border mobility, internal migration and forced migration. These books investigate the causes and consequences of migration, whether for economic, religious, humanitarian or political reasons, and the policies and organizations that facilitate or challenge mobility. Considering responses to migration, the series looks to migrants’ experiences, the communities left behind and the societies in which they settled. The editors welcome proposals for monographs, edited collections and Palgrave Pivots. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15185

Becky Taylor  •  Karen Akoka Marcel Berlinghoff  •  Shira Havkin Editors

When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983 A Comparative History of European and Israeli Responses to the South-East Asian Refugee Crisis

Editors Becky Taylor School of History University of East Anglia Norwich, UK Marcel Berlinghoff Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) Osnabrück University Osnabrück, Germany

Karen Akoka Institute for Political Social Sciences (ISP) Paris Nanterre University Paris, France Shira Havkin CERI/Sciences-Po Paris, France

Palgrave Studies in Migration History ISBN 978-3-030-64223-5    ISBN 978-3-030-64224-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64224-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Chapter 4 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Bettina Strenske/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The original idea for this book came out of an international colloquium ‘L’étiquetage comme réfugié: Approches comparées des pratiques institutionnelles’ held in March 2017 at Université Paris-Nanterre. In particular we would like to thank Philippe Rygiel for encouraging us to turn our productive discussions and ideas into a more concrete form. The original research for Becky Taylor’s chapter on the UK was funded by a Wellcome Trust fellowship (grant ref: 097727/Z/11/Z). We would like to thank Cathie Carmichael and Alice Kess for their help with some of the German translations. This book was conceived and written in the spirit of intellectual collaboration and collegiality from which we have all benefited. However, Karen Akoka, Marcel Berlinghoff and Shira Havkin would additionally like to thank Becky Taylor for her determined coordination, careful editing and friendly support, in particular in wrestling their chapters into proper English

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Becky Taylor, Karen Akoka, Marcel Berlinghoff, and Shira Havkin 2 France: Boat People Brought by Plane 47 Karen Akoka 3 Germany: ‘Refugie-surprise’: The Unlikely Reception of Indochinese Boat People in Germany 79 Marcel Berlinghoff 4 ‘Our Most Foreign Refugees’: Refugees from Vietnam in Britain109 Becky Taylor 5 The Netherlands: ‘Boat People’ as Changemakers in the Dutch Refugee System145 Julia Kleinschmidt

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6 Israel: Asylum Without Refugee Status: Israel’s Reception of Vietnamese Exiles177 Shira Havkin Bibliography213 Index227

Notes on Contributors

Karen  Akoka  is an associate professor in Political Science at Paris Nanterre University, a researcher at the Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique (ISP) and a fellow of the Institut Convergences Migrations. She studies asylum and immigration policies in different national contexts with a focus on comparative approaches over time and space. She has published several articles and books, including Asylum and exile: a history of the refugee/migrant distinction (Paris, La Découverte, 2020). Marcel Berlinghoff  is a historian with a focus on migration history and refugee and forced migration studies. He is Senior Researcher and Member of the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at Osnabrück University. He has published on European migration history including Das Ende der “Gastarbeit”: Europäische Anwerbestopps 1970–1974 (SHM 27) (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2013), and is co-editor of Z’Flucht, German Journal of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies. Shira Havkin  is an affiliated researcher at CERI/Sciences-Po, Paris, and a fellow of the Institut Convergences Migrations. Her work examines contemporary transformations of border, migration and asylum policies. She has published about the history of the Israeli asylum system and the privatisation of the checkpoints in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She is currently working on asylum for sexual minorities in France.

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Julia Kleinschmidt  is project coordinator and editor at the Aktionsbündnis Brandenburg against Far Right Extremism, Violence and Racism. Her focus is remembrance politics of the Stolpersteine-project and right-wing terrorism of the National Socialist Underground (NSU). She writes on refugee and violence history, and is co-editor of WerkstattGeschichte. She is completing her PhD at the University of Göttingen, on the history of ‘the vulnerable refugee’ in West Germany and the Netherlands. Becky Taylor  is based at the School of History at the University of East Anglia, UK, where she works on minority and marginal groups and their relationship with the state and wider society. She has written widely on refugees, including Refugees in Twentieth-Century Britain: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), and on Europe’s Roma, Gypsy and Traveller populations.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Becky Taylor, Karen Akoka, Marcel Berlinghoff, and Shira Havkin

Over late 1978 and into 1979 saw television screens across Europe being filled, night after night, with images of small boats, overloaded with terrified and exhausted people desperate to escape Vietnam’s new Socialist Republic. The international community’s response to their plight was to produce, within months, the UNHCR’s largest ever resettlement initiative to date. It also spawned the Orderly Departure Programme, which aimed at stopping the exodus of thousands of Vietnamese at source. The drama B. Taylor (*) School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] K. Akoka Institute for Political Social Sciences (ISP), Paris Nanterre University, Paris, France M. Berlinghoff Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. Havkin CERI/Sciences-Po, Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Taylor et al. (eds.), When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983, Palgrave Studies in Migration History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64224-2_1

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of the sea rescues, the visibility of a crisis unfolding half a world away and the scale of events created a sense of urgency and often suggested that the crisis was unprecedented. But, while this was the first time that the UNHCR had worked on such a large scale in south-east Asia, relief and resettlement operations supporting populations labelled as refugees had by the 1970s, particularly in Europe, a much longer history. Although ‘refugees’—here meaning both people seeking refuge, and the acknowledgement of refugees in international law—had become a fact of life over the twentieth century, their place in public consciousness remained rather more ambiguous. They might have been present in every major European state every year from after the First World War to the end of the century, but it often took sudden, very visible and sizeable numbers of arrivals to provoke interest and sympathy from the public, media and politicians alike. With the exception of certain cohorts of Cold War arrivals, after 1945 western Europe remained largely insulated from the mass presence of refugees.1 This was to change in 2015, a year which saw nearly a million people crossing the Mediterranean by boat and walking across the Balkans in an attempt to reach the European Union from war-torn Syria and across an increasingly unstable Middle East. At the time the ‘European refugee crisis’, as it rapidly became termed, was both constructed as a new challenge requiring an unprecedented coordinated international response and elicited comparisons with earlier refugee movements.2 And here we find the case of south-east Asian ‘boat people’ and their widely acclaimed ‘generous reception’ in the early 1980s repurposed. Across Europe it was used in media and public debate to offer a counter-­ example to the more restrictive and suspicious national and European

1  Most notably, Hungarians in 1956, Czechoslovaks in 1968 and Poles in 1980. The main cohort of refugees to enter western Europe were those fleeing former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. 2  See, for example, Jessica Reinisch, ‘History Matters … but Which One? Every Refugee Crisis has a Context’, History and Policy, September 29, 2015, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/history-matters-but-which-one-every-refugee-crisis-has-acontext, accessed July 8, 2019; Becky Taylor, ‘Refugees, Ghost Ships and Thatcher’, History Workshop Online, January 26, 2015, http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/ghostships/, accessed July 8, 2019; Annette Schuhmann and Christoph Plath (eds), ‘Europa an der Grenze. Zeithistorische Anmerkungen zur „Flüchtlingskrise’, Zeitgeschichte-online, January 2017, https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/themen/europa-der-grenze, accessed July 20, 2019; Christie Miedema, Vrede of vrijheid? Dilemma’s, dialoog en misverstanden tussen Nederlandse en West-Duitse linkse organisaties en de Poolse oppositie in de jaren tachtig (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015).

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refugee, asylum and migration regimes which had been constructed over previous decades.3 Despite such claims, and in contrast to the recent swelling of refugee history scholarship, particularly of the ‘forty year crisis’, little attention has in fact been given to the history of refugees from the 1950s to the 1980s, including the reception of the ‘boat people’ in Europe.4 Work dealing with these years generally offer vast histories of the great displacement of refugees;5 the development of the UNHCR and its struggle for autonomy;6 the deployment of refugee studies; and analyses of state asylum policies viewed ‘from above’, which are generally anchored in international relations.7 Our intention here is to do something rather different. Through 3  Julia Kleinschmidt, ‘Streit um das ‘kleine Asyl’. De-Facto-Flüchtlinge als gesellschaftspolitische Herausforderung für Bund und Länder während der 1980er Jahre’, in Jaeger et al, eds., Den Protest regieren. Staatliches Handeln, neue soziale Bewegungen und linke Organisationen in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren (Essen, 2018), 231–258; Leo Lucassen and Jan Lucassen, ‘The Strange Death of Dutch Tolerance: The Timing and Nature of the Pessimist Turn in the Dutch Migration Debate’, Journal of Modern History 87, no. 1 (2015): 72–101; https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/affaires-sensibles/affaires-sensibles-24septembre-2015. 4  Among many others Claudia Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch, eds., Refugees in Europe, 1919–59. A Forty Year Crisis? (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Dzovinar Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire. Les acteurs européens et la scène proche-orientale pendant l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004); Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Catherine Gousseff, L’Exil russe. La fabrique du réfugié apatride, 1920–1939 (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 2008); Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, L’Exil des républicains espagnols en France. De la guerre civile à la mort de Franco (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999). 5  Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 6  Gil Loescher, UNHCR and the World Politics: A Perilous Path (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); ‘Documented Reflection on the UN Refugee Agency’s Activities in the Bipolar Context,’ Working Paper, ‘The UNHCR and the Global Cold War, 1971–1984’, Joint UNHCR/GIIS/GSP project, 2007. 7  B.S. Chimni, ‘The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies: A View from the South’, Journal of Refugee Studies 11, no. 4 (1998): 11–29; Richard Black, ‘Fifty Years of Refugee Studies: From Theory to Policy’, International Migration Review 35, no. 1 (2001); Charles B. Keely, ‘The International Refugee Regime(s): The End of the Cold War Matters,’ International Migration Review 35, no. 1 (2001): 303–314; Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). See the critique of this work in Benjamin Thomas White, ‘Refuge and History—A Critical Reading of a Polemic’, Migration and Society 2, no. 1 (2019).

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constructing fine-grained accounts of individual reception and resettlement programmes across five countries, we aim to develop a comparative history of the reception and resettlement of people from south-east Asia. Across the introduction and the substantive chapters of this book we seek to join up the international-scale preoccupations and decision-making which worked to produce the UNHCR’s international resettlement programme with individual countries’ efforts to translate participation into their own national contexts. In the process we demonstrate that although certain themes, such as the Cold War, were live issues across all our case study countries, they were always refracted through very specific national lenses. In teasing out both the background to, and execution of, each country’s reception of the ‘boat people’, we are able to unpick unproblematic constructions of ‘generosity’ as well as draw out comparisons, and the often stark differences, between the different countries’ responses This is important. The search for historical analogies for contemporary events is a dangerous pastime when we ignore historical specificities and shoe-horn present-day preoccupations into past events. Indeed, in significant ways the arrival of large numbers of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians in Europe between 1979 and 1983 was distinct from either the mass movements of people within Europe in the four decades after 1918, or the arrivals of 2015, not least in the fact that the process of selection took place well beyond Europe’s shores.8 For it was the neighbouring states of Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Thailand which were to act as immediate hosts to those leaving Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in their hundreds of thousands. And, if we are to count Europe’s contribution to resettlement efforts against those of other non-neighbouring countries, for all the public congratulation which surrounded Europe’s reception of ‘boat people’, numerically it was not significant. Of the some 1.3 million individuals resettled under the UNHCR’s programme, over half—822,977—went to the United States, with both Australia and Canada taking a further 137,000 each.9 It was from within this remaining  Frank and Reinisch, Refugees in Europe.  UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees, 2000. Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action (UNHCR: Geneva, 2000) Fig.  4.4, 99. For accounts of wider international resettlement efforts see Vaughan Robinson, ed., The International Refugee Crisis: British and Canadian Responses (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993); Yêên Lêê Espiritu, ‘Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1–2 (2006): 410–433; David Haines, ed., Refugees as Immigrants: Cambodians, 8 9

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213,000 people that Europe and the rest of the world’s contribution to the resettlement programme came. Yet, despite both the pitfalls of making direct historical comparisons and Europe’s relatively modest contribution to the UNHCR initiative, this historical moment still bears attention. Focusing our attention on an earlier international refugee ‘crisis’ reminds us that the challenges associated with receiving and resettling vulnerable strangers have been faced before, and that different states offered up different solutions to enable refugees to build a life in their new country. At a time when Europe’s refugee and asylum policies appears in ruins, looking back at a time when more than two hundred thousand people from south-east Asia were actively relocated to Europe stands as evidence that political will, state resources and public generosity might be successfully mobilised in the cause of international burden-sharing and humanitarian action. Revisiting the arrival of the ‘boat people’ to Europe also enables us to think historically about the deployment of welfare support and voluntary action as well as state attitudes in the management of mass population movements. Over four decades after their arrival, we might now enjoy sufficient perspective to distinguish between short-term difficulties and longer-term trends shaping their resettlement. If it is useful to look across time, it is equally valuable to look across place. Drawing on five case study countries—France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Israel—this book generates a comparative account of responses to the ‘boat people’ crisis of 1979. Doing so has enabled us to move beyond country-specific preoccupations and analyses which focus disproportionately on the perceived characteristics of this refugee cohort to explain their experiences of reception and resettlement. As we see in the British and German experiences, narratives of the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of refugees in their new national context were all too often essentialised and blind to the structural factors shaping the terms of their resettlement. Taking a comparative approach has allowed us instead to move the horizon, to reveal both the importance of wider international and geopolitical imperatives in mediating responses to the situation and the specificity of national contexts in forming their respective reception and resettlement programmes. The ‘Europe’ we look at is carefully qualified: the Cold War Laotians, and Vietnamese in America (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1989); Nancy Viviani, The Long Journey: Vietnamese Migration and Settlement in Australia (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1984).

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ensured that it was only Western European nations that engaged in the UNHCR resettlement programme. And Israel, although geographically located on the eastern Mediterranean, through the personal and historic ties of many of its population, and in its geo-political ambitions, sustained close connection to Europe and sought to align itself with the West. The arrival of refugees from south-east Asia to Europe was a significant cornerstone of a global Western response to the geo-political turmoil of the region, a response largely but not exclusively co-ordinated by the UNHCR following a conference held in July 1979 in Geneva. But for the Conference agreements to move beyond warm words and promises, international-­level commitment needed to be translated into vernacular political contexts and action. And for us, as collaborators and authors, working from our separate national contexts, this was what drove our interest in developing a comparative approach. The Geneva conference-­ derived mandate may have seen the creation of a single global refugee programme, but it was one fundamentally driven by national concerns and histories. Looking between our different countries, we began to see just how profoundly their separate responses were shaped by their own histories, not simply via (post)colonial connections with the region, but also histories and memories of war, displacement and refuge as well as their own established institutions and forms of governance. And so, what we started to understand was how quickly the apparently global category of ‘refugee’ underpinning the UNHCR’s programme became translated into and enshrined and entangled within individual national histories. We increasingly realised just how slippery were the categories, laws and texts governing the selection, entry and treatment of people from south-east Asia. In fact, as we discuss below, we hesitated sometimes to even be certain of using the label ‘refugee’ without careful qualification. The joining up of the international and the national scales pushed us to move one step further and locate individual experiences as part of a chain running from global to local sites of action.10 The processes by which someone moved from a coastal village in northern Vietnam to a council flat in Hackney in East London or to a non-state relief service hostel in Norden-Norddeich on the German coast, or found themselves living in Tel Aviv, Paris or Rotterdam, was both a story of human agency—the 10  For an explicit discussion of this approach for the British context more generally see Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide (London: Routledge, 1999).

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choice to escape on a boat or overland, the decision to put oneself forward for selection for a particular country—and larger geo-political forces working in tandem with national and local government policies, the actions of refugee agencies and of course, of contingency. For those rescued at sea in particular, the national affiliation of the vessel picking them up—which in turn determined the country in which they were resettled—was a matter of pure chance. Tracing the threads joining these different scales, and setting different national decisions alongside each other, allowed us to move away from the normalisation of in-nation political choices to reveal just how often those choices were mediated by highly specific national histories, pressures and preoccupations. Taken together, exploring these questions across different countries does not only enable us to construct an account of the UNHCR’s largest resettlement programme within Europe in the late twentieth century. Just as importantly, it offers the means to integrate our understanding of refugees within broader trends and experiences of European history during a crucial period of political and social change.

Historical Context and Events What prompted hundreds of thousands of people over 1978 and 1979 to leave their homes in Vietnam, risking robbery, rape or death to escape? Under European colonial rule Vietnam had existed as French Indo-China, but France’s imperial interests in this period extended right across the region to encompass Laos and Cambodia.11 Vietnam’s independence struggle and the subsequent civil war in which the USA fatally decided to intervene, meant that both the French and Americans were heavily implicated in the refugee exodus after the fall of Saigon in 1975 to North Vietnamese troops. While this event and the resulting establishment of a socialist republic that same year was to produce an initial exodus from Vietnam, mainly of people who had been closely aligned to the regime in

11  Vietnam was colonised by France in stages over the mid-nineteenth century, and its three main territories were formally merged into the union of French Indochina in 1887. Cambodia was a French protectorate from 1863, and Laos from 1893. During and after the Second World War, Japanese occupation and France’s postwar weakness saw nationalist movements gaining hold across the region. Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu leading to the Geneva Accords of 1954 and the creation of the kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia and an independent Vietnam.

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the South and the American war effort, they were soon to be followed by thousands more. Policies rapidly implemented by the new Vietnamese government entailed a profound restructuring of life across the country, including the creation of a one-party state and an extensive relocation programme, which aimed to move urban residents and peasants to ‘New Economic Zones’. Together the policies were intended to increase national food production in the country’s most war-damaged and remote regions, but their lack of infrastructure combined with forcible relocations and punitive taxes imposed on entrepreneurs instead produced severe social disruption and mass hunger. These initiatives operated hand-in-hand with the creation of ‘re-education’ camps which incarcerated around a million people accused of undermining the socialist state. At the same time the government implemented a targeted policy of discrimination against the country’s ethnic Chinese population, many of whom formed part of the commercial elite and who now found their businesses expropriated and their civil rights attacked. Already by 1977, about 15,000 Vietnamese had sought asylum in neighbouring south-east Asian countries, and the hardening of the Vietnamese government’s policies only served to ensure that these numbers kept rising across 1977 and into 1978. The invasion of North Vietnam by China in early 1979 served to escalate matters quickly, increasing instability and anti-ethnic Chinese feeling within Vietnam, so that the numbers fleeing—either overland to neighbouring countries, or in overcrowded boats across the South China Sea to Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Philippines, or to Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand— rose to over two million people. Things were no more stable in the rest of the region. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in late 1976, Thailand’s support of Cambodian resistance forces and US support of the Khmer Rouge saw Cold War politics overlapping with national and local preoccupations in a toxic combination producing mass extermination within the country and hundreds of thousands of refugees attempting to reach safety in Thailand. At the same time Laos’ communist government’s persecution of the Hmong, who had become identified with the CIA-sponsored ‘secret army’, caused escalating human rights abuses and economic hardships and led to the eventual flight of approximately three hundred thousand people into Thailand.12

 Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics, 203.

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In no small part it was the visibility of the sea-based escapes across the South China Sea, and crucially the rescue of boats in distress by vessels registered to Western countries, which helped to push the Vietnamese refugee crisis to international prominence. From early on in socialist Vietnam’s history, those fleeing had used their own fishing boats and small craft, or had commissioned fisher people and others to enable them to escape. As a major shipping route, given the number of boats leaving Vietnam by late 1978 and their often overloaded and unseaworthy state, it was almost inevitable that merchant vessels would come across craft in need of rescue as they crossed the South China Sea. International maritime conventions made it the duty of any captain of a boat in a seaworthy state to rescue those in distress at sea. Even so, despite having set off distress flares and often very visibly being in trouble, passengers reported often being ignored by passing ships. From those who made landfall or who were picked up by other boats, reports filtered out to the West of attacks by pirates, robbery, rape and death for those who resisted or who were too frail to survive prolonged exposure at sea. BBC researcher John-­ Paul Davidson spent two years in south-east Asia documenting the experiences of the Vietnamese. One of his reports, filed from Pulau Bidong, a previously uninhabited Malaysian island which had become home to 14,000 refugees, gave a sense of the conditions faced by those leaving by boat: They were 20 days at sea, for what is normally a three or four day voyage. They had encountered pirates many times, and on the eighth day, two large Thai fishing boats had approached them. They stopped, fearing that they would be rammed, and allowed the pirates to board as they had done before. The pirates searched the boat and passengers, taking everything that had not already been stolen, including the spare engine, tools and petrol. They then chose the youngest and prettiest of the girls and ordered them at gunpoint on to their boat … When these refugees arrived on the beach in Kelantan … they had been without food and water for three days. Twenty-seven had died of exposure, including the infants who had lost their mothers.13 13  John-Paul Davidson, ‘Vietnam on Sea’, Guardian [UK], June 30, 1979, 9. Such attacks continued well into the 1980s. In November 1983, UNHCR’s Director of the Division of International Protection, Michel Moussalli, described ‘scenes that surpass normal imagination … Eighteen persons leave in a small craft and in crossing the Gulf of Thailand are attacked by pirates, one girl who resists being raped is killed and another young girl of 15 is abducted. The remaining 16 persons who are of no use to the pirates have their boat rammed repeatedly and all perish at sea’. See UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees, 86.

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Although definitive figures do not exist, one source estimated that ten per cent of boat escapees died in the attempt, either drowned or lost at sea, falling victim to pirate attacks, or from dehydration.14 As we shall see across the chapters of this book, it was the high-profile sea rescues which elicited the most reaction in the West, as this was the means by which most European countries found themselves being drawn into the crisis. But although the press often focussed on European merchant vessels picking up people in distress at sea, it was Vietnam’s neighbours which were faced with hosting the vast majority of the exodus. By 1978 the scale of the departures and the size of the boats had grown dramatically: instead of small wooden fishing craft, steel-hulled freighters run by regional smuggling syndicates and carrying over two thousand passengers were regularly arriving on the shores of Malaysia and other countries bordering the South China Sea. Such movements were not possible without the complicity of the Vietnamese regime. Indeed Hanoi had moved towards a deliberate policy of ridding itself of ethnic Chinese and other disaffected elements and exacting payment in the process. In exchange for their life savings, which often needed to be converted into gold bars, people were given places on outgoing vessels. This had the twin benefits for the Vietnamese government of removing dissidents and earning foreign currency exchange at a time when its economy was close to collapse. But although there was often a very fine line between those who were ‘encouraged’ or virtually forced to leave, and those who risked non-authorised escape in small boats, attitudes in surrounding countries hardened considerably with the use of large freighters.15 By 1979 Malaysia had seen 124,103 arrivals by boat, Hong Kong nearly 80,000, and Thailand just over 25,000. But this latter figure belied the scale of the situation: at the same time Thailand was faced with mass arrivals on its land borders, with some 15,000 Vietnamese refugees dwarfed by 171,000 Cambodians and over 21,000 Laotians seeking safety from their own regimes.16 As the situation intensified over the first half of 1979, receiving nations started to take matters into their own hands. Facing over 54,000 arrivals in June alone, Singapore refused to allow anyone ashore without an accompanying guarantee of resettlement within ninety days; 14  Barry Wain, The Refused: The Agony of the Indochinese Refugees (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 83. 15  Ibid. 16  UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees, 98.

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Thailand began to resort to physically repelling boats from their coastlines; while Malaysia announced would put out to sea the 70,000 refugees already on its soil and shoot on sight any boat people entering its waters.17 Jointly the five members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations released a statement that they had ‘reached the limit of their endurance and [had] decided that they would not accept any new arrivals’.18 The scale of the exodus, media coverage in the West highlighting the plight of the ‘boat people’, the increasingly intransigent reactions to the refugees from surrounding nations and the wider Cold War context caused matters to come to a head in the summer of 1979. Although, as we see in Chap. 4, the new British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, sought to claim the credit, it was this broader confluence of events which drove the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees, Poul Hartling, to call a conference to seek a resolution to the crisis. Held in Geneva in July 1979, the conference aimed to end the mass departures from Vietnam, improve conditions and rights for those who had sought refuge in neighbouring nations and develop a coordinated international resettlement strategy to reduce the pressure on south-east Asian nations.19 To a notable extent the conference was successful in its aims. In return for Vietnam’s agreement to impose a moratorium on illegal departures, and therefore address the problem at source, the UNHCR declared all those arriving in first countries of asylum as refugees prima facie. In essence, this allowed it to move away from the model implied by the 1951 Refugee Convention, in which an individual’s own experiences, or their ‘well-founded fear of persecution’, defined claims for refugeehood. Instead, the simple fact of arrival in a first country of asylum was taken as evidence enough of refugee status. In turn, the states in the region which had borne the brunt of arrivals accepted that the refugees’ right to asylum should be respected, so ending the boat push-backs and some of the worst treatment in the camps. This was part of what became known informally as ‘an open shore for an open door’ policy, in which international pledges to resettle Vietnamese refugees were substantially increased in return for countries of first asylum accepting the refugees onto their shores, 17  The National Archives, Kew, UK (hereafter TNA): PREM19/129, telegram, June 14, 1979; UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees, 83. 18  These nations were Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. 19  Already in December 1978 a consultative meeting on Indochinese Refugees was called by UNHCR to Geneva, see W. Courtland Robinson, Terms of Refuge. The Indochinese Exodus and the International Response (London: Zed Books, 2000), 32.

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confident now that arriving refugees would only remain within their borders temporarily. For its part, the UNHCR stepped up its involvement in the existing camps, and worked with both the Philippines and Indonesia to establish regional processing centres to facilitate resettlement.20 Underpinning both the political drive of the conference and the financial resources it was able to attract—over US$160 million of new pledges— was the USA, which saw solving the region’s refugee crisis as part of its wider Cold War strategy. It also saw, in the crisis, the potential to build a positive legacy from the disasters of the Vietnam war: giving near-­ unconditional refuge to the ‘victims of Communism’ enabled it to draw a clear distinction between the progressive West and oppressive totalitarian states. In the years following the conference, 623,800 refugees from Vietnam were resettled under the UNHCR’s programme, with over 450,000 of these resettled in the eighteen months following the conference. While the majority (458,000) went to the USA, Canada and Australia, around 160,000 were taken to Europe, primarily France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, but also Norway. Independently of the UNHCR programme, by the mid-1980s, the French government had also brought 130,000 Cambodian, Laotians and Vietnamese to France as part of its own national resettlement programme. And on top of these numbers, non-governmental rescue and resettlement initiatives such as Bateau pour le Vietnam or Cap Anamur brought another twelve thousand people to Europe. At the other end of the scale Israel, separate from the UNHCR programme and, as we shall see in Chap. 6, keen to be seen by the international community as both Western and European, instigated its own reception programme for three hundred Vietnamese. The early 1980s saw the pace of resettlement outstripping new arrivals, in part because third countries maintained their pledges to accept refugees, but also owing to the success of the Orderly Departure Programme (ODP). This was the other side to the Vietnamese government’s crack-­ down on unauthorised departures, as it allowed those with compelling humanitarian reasons and those with relatives resettled as part of the UNHCR’s programme to join them in their country of final destination. By 1984, those leaving under the ODP exceeded the number of clandestine departures by boat, a situation which superficially suggested that the policy was working. But the scheme’s success raised a bigger question: if  UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees, 84.

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people leaving under the ODP had neither experienced individual persecution in Vietnam nor had survived the trauma of sea escape, in what sense were they refugees and deserving of UNHCR and international attention? Refugees, Boat people, Expellees, Returnees or Migrants? The unease felt by the UNHCR in the final years of the ODP, when it acknowledged that many of those who benefited from the programme could no longer be classified as refugees according to international criteria, highlights the importance of paying attention to the language used to describe those coming from south-east Asia to third countries for settlement.21 As we have seen, even at the height of the exodus from Vietnam in 1978–79 there were ethnic Chinese Vietnamese who had not directly experienced persecution as defined by the 1951 Refugee Convention, but rather had been heavily persuaded by the Vietnamese government to leave the country in return for a cash payment.22 And yet, the images played out on European television screens of overloaded boats of desperate people— people who had often faced storms, pirates, rape, as well as thirst, hunger and dangerous conditions in order to escape an oppressive communist regime—dovetailed precisely with popular understandings of refugeehood. The tension between official definitions of refugeehood and individual decisions to flee and seek refuge is as old as the construction of the international refugee regime. This had emerged alongside national efforts to introduce passports, visas and border controls, a process which had begun in the nineteenth century but which had swelled and gathered pace after the First World War.23 Before then, while people fled war, famine, disaster and persecution, their paths had rarely been barred by bureaucratic means. Most European countries had progressively extended control over their borders during the nineteenth century, but it was during and after the First World War that the scale of movements into exile—across the European continent and beyond—multiplied. For this reason historians have seen the twentieth century as the ‘century of refugees’, a time which  Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics, 208.  Hong Kiu Yuen, ‘Proxy Humanitarianism: Hong Kong’s Vietnamese Refugee Crisis, 1975–79’, unpublished MPhil dissertation, University of Hong Kong, 2014. 23  John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Mark Salter, Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Boulder: Lynn Rienner, 2003). 21 22

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saw millions of people on the move, but who often could find nowhere which was willing to grant them entry or leave to remain.24 And so, as Hannah Arendt was to observe, the plight of refugees and stateless people was not an aberration but rather the structural effect of the modern national order, where citizenship—the condition of belonging to a state— became also the condition for having rights.25 It was also the result of the progressive establishment and institutionalisation of an international legal and administrative asylum apparatus. Thus the tendency of governments to pick and choose between those seeking refuge within their borders was neither an anomaly nor simply a phenomenon of the early twenty-first century, but was rather embedded in the emergence of the modern international order.26 Although the roots of the modern asylum regime can be traced back to the end of the First World War and the institutions established by League of Nations, its manifest failings in relation to Jews and dissidents fleeing Nazi persecution signalled its ultimate weakness.27 Thus although the League generated two Conventions on refugees—in 1933 and 1938—it was the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention, and the UNHCR as its organisational body, which is largely considered as the legal foundation of the contemporary refugee regime. The Convention formally enshrined for the first time in international law a definition of refugees, one which shifted away from the collective approach used by the League, and towards an individualised conception of refugeehood which centered on the concept of persecution. Its terms were initially explicitly restricted, both temporally and spatially, to those affected by events occurring before 1951 within Europe alone. But its global extension in 1967 and removal of the date limit ensured the Refugee Convention was to become the UNHCR’s 24  Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee; Klaus Bade, Migration in European History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); Stephen Castles and Mark J.  Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Gérard Noiriel, La tyrannie du national: le droit d’asile en Europe, 1793–1993 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991). 25  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Press, 1951); on the citizen/ alien dialectic see also Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Seyla Benhabib, ‘Citizens, Residents, and Aliens in a Changing World: Political Membership in the Global Era’, Social Research 66, no. 3 (1999): 709–744. 26  Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, [1943] in Altogether Elsewhere. Writers on Exile, (ed.) Marc Robinson (London, 1994), 110–119. 27  Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe.

1 INTRODUCTION 

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key tool for managing refugees under its care and pressuring signatory states to engage in its resettlement programmes.28 It was this post-­1967-­ extended mandate which enabled the UNHCR to lead the south-east Asian resettlement programme that marked the international community’s response to the crisis in the region after 1979. In its original form the Convention aimed to draw a line under the failing of prior instruments in guaranteeing international protection to refugees and reorganise war-torn Europe with its sixty million displaced persons. Despite seeming to be designed to settle the fall-out from past events, in fact it was to become a weapon in the unfolding geo-political landscape of the post-war decades. While apparently humanitarian in scope, it was not politically neutral, but was powerfully embedded in the Cold War: its signatories were not only signalling their distance from the discredited inter-war years, but also their active reception of people fleeing the new European communist states. To welcome refugees in the Cold War era was thus to be seen as to stand firm against communism. This did not end when the Convention was extended in 1967. Rather, it allowed refugee resettlement to become a tool of the global Cold War. As we discuss below, and throughout the book, understanding that the Convention was a document which might be operationalised or ignored for geo-­ political ends, is useful. It allows a way into moving beyond simplistic humanitarian claims which have often underpinned representations of the UNHCR’s Vietnamese resettlement programme, to think through both why the international community acted so swiftly when faced with the crisis in south-east Asia, and how and why its signatories chose to interpret and implement the definitions and responsibilities it set out in strikingly different ways. And so, across the chapters in this book we chart the different routes by which our case study countries became involved in the UNHCR’s resettlement programme. From Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to use an international conference to sidestep its responsibilities towards people rescued by British merchant vessels, to the Netherlands’ use of the programme to signal itself as a humanitarian nation, we see how ‘the 28  For a discussion of the 1967 Protocol and how it amended the 1951 Convention see Guy Goodwin-Gill, ‘Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees’, United Nations (2008), http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/prsr/prsr.html, accessed June 26, 2020. The key exception to this remained Palestinian refugees displaced between June 1, 1946 and May 15, 1948, who were, and still are, under the administration of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA).

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refugee’ could be used in pursuit of multiple, and often competing, political ends. Examining how ‘the refugee’ became operationalised at the international scale offers one step towards unpicking normative assumptions over the universality and stability of it, and associated terms. Another way is via thinking through how it works at the national level. For those seeking asylum, labels often hide as much as they reveal. At the same time those same labels can be revealing of the histories and preoccupations of the countries and the people bestowing those labels. What did the different labels and terms used across our five countries say about the nations receiving people from south-east Asia, and popular perceptions of those people? Right across Europe ‘Vietnamese boat people’ was the most popular descriptor of these new arrivals. This label stemmed, of course, from the way in which the European public had most often had their situation brought to their attention, via reports and dramatic footage of boat rescues and of small craft capsizing in reach of Malaysia’s shores. This, and a normally vague understanding that their plight was something to do with the communist’s victory in the Vietnam war firmly located Europe’s new arrivals in the minds of the majority of the population as ‘Vietnamese boat people’. Britain’s labelling of its newcomers, variously as ‘Vietnamese refugees’ or ‘Vietnamese boat people’ closely followed both general popular understanding and the UNHCR’s deployment of the category of prima facie refugee. The simple fact of either being rescued at sea by a British boat or being in one of the camps in Hong Kong was enough for an individual to be accepted as a refugee, and hence eligible for resettlement under the UK’s UNHCR quota. Having reached Hong Kong by boat, or having been rescued at sea, ‘boat people’ was an accurate label, for the first ten thousand arrivals at least: the roughly nine thousand later arrivals came via the ODP, and had therefore neither escaped clandestinely, nor left on a boat. The ‘Vietnamese’ descriptor was more ambiguous. For, as Becky Taylor discusses in Chap. 4, although the refugees were certainly people who were Vietnamese citizens, the majority of those coming to Britain were ethnically Chinese, and indeed in no small part had left Vietnam following the targeted discrimination enacted on them by the Vietnamese government. This fact might have been explicitly acknowledged by the organisation which co-ordinated Britain’s reception and resettlement programme—named for this reason as the Joint Committee for Refugees from Vietnam—but was largely obscured in public discourse.

1 INTRODUCTION 

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Karen Akoka shows us how France’s perspective was rather different. Here the word ‘Indochinese’ was in common circulation, locating their presence within the longer trajectory of France’s colonial relationship with the region. Although the phrase ‘Vietnamese boat people’ had popular currency, in most cases this was a misnomer: less than a third of the people resettled in France were from Vietnam and might have fled the country by boat. Two-thirds were from Laos and Cambodia and had reached refugee camps, mostly in Thailand, overland, from where they were selected by the French authorities. Here it is helpful to pause and tease out France’s distinctive relationship with the region as a whole, and the UNHCR, when compared to other European nations. Its previous colonial connections to the region fed into its decision to play a significant role in resettling Vietnamese—taking 55,000—but France was the only European state to also accept substantial numbers of Laotians and Cambodians—34,236 and 38,598 respectively. These figures stand in stark contrast to the roughly 3500 Laotians and Cambodians taken by the Netherlands, Britain and Germany combined.29 Moreover France’s resettlement efforts significantly predated those of the rest of Europe, beginning with the fall of Saigon in 1975, four years before wider international engagement. In Germany, despite the high-profile nature of boat rescues in its media, in the first months of the crisis, the phrase ‘Vietnamese expellees’ (Vietnam-­ Vertriebene) was used in media and political discourse alike, often interchangeably with ‘Vietnamese refugees’ and ‘Indochinese refugees’. The former phrase explicitly harked back to the eleven million ethnic German expellees from Poland, the Soviet Union and elsewhere who had arrived in West Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. It consequently explicitly mobilised memories of the arrival of co-nationals who had played a major role in Germany’s post-war economic reconstruction. And yet over time the descriptor of the Vietnamese as ‘expellees’ fell out of use and was replaced by the less historically charged ‘Vietnamese refugees’. Marcel Berlinghoff in Chap. 3 suggests that this linguistic shift reflected deeper understandings of the nature of national belonging. In line with a wider immigration policy which continued to treat second-generation Turks living in Germany as Gastarbeiter (guest workers), Vietnamese refugees could not hope to ‘become’ German over time. Expellee, in the final event could only be used for ethnic Germans, whose right to belong had never been in doubt.  UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees, 99.

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In the Netherlands the media, politicians and sometimes the publications of the national refugee council used the term Vietnameze bootvluchtelingen (Vietnamese boat refugees), or simply bootvluchtelingen (boat refugees) during the years of reception. A small group of those arriving preferred to characterise themselves as ‘Vietnamese refugees from Communism’, to emphasise not how they left Vietnam, but rather why. This label worked to highlight the refugees’ political position, but overall was less used among refugees themselves in, for example, the names of their self-help groups and organisations, most of which settled for the more neutral term ‘Vietnamese refugee’. Things sat quite differently in Israel, where, if the Vietnamese newcomers were most often referred to as ‘Vietnamese refugees’, print media from this time revealed that they were sometimes referred to as ‘the ‘olim from Vietnam’. The term olim encapsulates a concept used for Jewish migrants to Israel, one which literally designates them as those who had ascended to the Promised Land. In doing so, the term olim linguistically constructs the movement of Jews to the land of Israel not as a migration but as a return. The use of this concept, often in brackets, for the Vietnamese newcomers demonstrated their entanglement, not only with a concept which was historically embedded in Zionist ideology, but also with modern-day state policies. For, in the Israel of the 1970s and 1980s—and to some extent until today—there was no formal migration or asylum policy for non-Jews, and in such a context, olim was the only category of migrant legally and socially accepted by the Jewish state. As Shira Havkin shows in Chap. 6, this was to have a number of consequences for the Vietnamese who were taken in by the country.

One Resettlement Programme but Many Asylum Systems As we have already suggested, although the resettlement of Vietnamese from camps across south-east Asia was run, with the exception of France’s separate schemes, under the umbrella of the UNHCR, for this international effort to be successful, it needed to be mapped onto national structures. At the macro-level there was enormous motivation to facilitate this. For, in the context of the Cold War, Western and aligned nations felt the need to demonstrate the superiority of liberal democracies, where the value they placed on individual and human rights demonstrably set them

1 INTRODUCTION 

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apart from totalitarianism.30 But things were not so simple. The 1973 oil crisis had ended nearly three decades of economic growth across Europe, prompting European governments to attempt to regain control over unwanted immigration, and in so doing, ending the relatively open-door migration policies which they had crafted to ensure plentiful supplies of labour.31 How did the arrival of vulnerable strangers from south-east Asia map onto different national contexts which saw states grappling with the desire on the one hand to provide asylum to those fleeing Communist oppression and on the other domestic imperatives to assert control of their borders? Before the rolling out of Dublin II in the 1990s, which created a pan-­ EEC umbrella framework for asylum seeking and granting refugee status, there was no hegemonic European system standardising practices across the Community. Rather, each nation operated independently, so that even among signatories of the 1951 Refugee Convention there was a patchwork of practices and systems which governed the recognition and reception of refugees. These ranged from France, which had developed a strongly centralised system with a dedicated bureaucracy and highly formalised administrative status for refugees, to the UK, which managed asylum applications alongside other migration matters within its Home Office and devolved post-entry refugee matters to voluntary organisations. In the post-war era West Germany had developed several dedicated but parallel asylum systems to manage different administrative categories for refugees based on a combination of its Basic Law and the Geneva Convention. It ran separate systems for ethnic German refugees from East Germany and Eastern Europe and for refugees arriving via UNHCR resettlement schemes or applying for asylum. On top of this, each of Federal Germany’s constituent states retained the ability to manage their own resettlement 30  For discussions on the contested place of human rights in the Cold War see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012) and his Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018); and for the perspective from a socialist state, Celia Donert, The Rights of the Roma (Cambridge: Cambridge University). See also Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Human Rights and History’, Past & Present 232, no. 1 (2016): 279–310. 31  Klaus Bade, Migration in European History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 227–240; Marcel Berlinghoff, ‘Labour Migration: Common Market Essential or Common Problem? The EC Committees and European Immigration Stops in the early 1970s’, in Elena Calandri, Simone Paoli, and Antonio Varsori, eds., Peoples and Borders. Seventy Years of Migration in Europe, from Europe, to Europe (1945–2015) (Baden-Baden: Nomos 2017), 157–175.

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policies and so could decide to take refugees independently, and even in direct opposition to, national-level policy. In the Dutch system the Ministry of Justice was responsible for granting asylum, which divided its decisions between granting unlimited (A-status) or limited (B-status) duration of residence. And, at the extreme end there sat Israel, which neither had an asylum system nor a mechanism for non-Jewish migrants, but which maintained an open border to any Jew who wished to ‘return’. The crisis in the South China Seas and the UNHCR programme disrupted these systems—which as we have already begun to see, were each grounded in their own historically developed asylum processes as well as their response to the Refugee Convention—in two particular ways. Firstly, through the high number of sea rescues, and secondly through the designation of those arriving in UNHCR-supported camps in south-east Asia as prima facie refugees. The former undermined established notions of what constituted a border as well as a nation’s ability to police who crossed it; the latter overrode assessments of individual refugee status based on individual nations’ established working criteria. To take the boat rescues first. These were characterised by a high degree of contingency, dependent as they were both on boats carrying Vietnamese exiles crossing paths with larger vessels able to provide assistance, and captains of such vessels authorising their rescue. It took a confluence of events and luck for, for example, one Vietnamese fishing boat to cross paths with an Israeli cargo ship, which then rescued its passengers, the consequences of which Shira Havkin explores in Chap. 6. The legal system governing the high seas rests on two main elements: conventions establishing an international maritime code; and their application through the formalisation of the relation between maritime vessels and their state, which bear ultimate responsibility for their acts.32 When any captain made the decision to assist a Vietnamese boat, they were complying with one of the key tenets of maritime law—that of coming to the aid of a vessel in distress— but in doing so, opened up questions for their state over what to do with the rescuees. Consequently, these unpredictable maritime encounters opened up a liminal and ambiguous space, one where the rescue vessels, for a short time at least, circumvented the usual binary logic of borders. In adhering to maritime code, ships’ captains intruded upon fixed national 32  Itamar Mann, Humanity at Sea: Maritime Migration and the Foundations of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 42–43.

1 INTRODUCTION 

21

immigration and asylum law. After rescue, normal practice was to take rescuees to the nearest convenient port for disembarkation. But the tensions surrounding the exodus of Vietnamese in late 1978 and the first half of 1979 saw neighbouring countries closing their ports to such vessels until a guarantee of resettlement had been given—normally by the rescuing vessel’s national government—to all rescuees on board. In this sense, although perhaps thousands of miles away from its territory, each rescuing vessel operated as a kind of mobile national enclave of the state under which flag it flew. Hence the act of climbing aboard a merchant ship crossing the South China Seas became tantamount to crossing a national border. How the incoming British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, dealt with this challenge to national sovereignty is one of Chap. 4’s points of focus. If the sea rescues offered one particular kind of challenge to nation-­ states, the UNHCR programme’s assumptions offered another. Although apparently flying in the face of the 1951 Convention’s focus on individual over group experiences, the construction of the Vietnamese cohort as prima facie refugees was not without precedence; indeed Hungarians fleeing the Soviet invasion in 1956 had been granted similar status. Such acts on the part of the UNHCR signalled that there was more continuity between its work and the League of Nations than is commonly supposed. For the League’s work with refugees in the interwar period had similarly focussed its attention on particular national/ethnic groups which were seen to have experienced persecution, rather than on individuals, as expressed in the 1951 Convention.33 But how did such blanket granting of refugee status interact with each country’s own established mechanisms for sifting and accepting asylum seekers? Britain, Germany and the Netherlands all accepted the UNHCR’s definition of people in their camps as bona fide refugees, and therefore accepted anyone from the UNHCR camps as part of their country quota: for reasons which we will see in Chap. 5, the only proviso for the UK was that they needed to come from one of the Hong Kong camps. France, as Karen Akoka shows in Chap. 2, worked actively to select individuals from camps across the region, and was interested less in their refugee status and more in the potential as new ‘docile’ workers for industries it felt had become too heavily unionised and intractable.

 Skran, Refugees in Inter-war Europe.

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But initial selection was only the first stage of a much longer process, as the refugees very quickly needed to become legible within their new country’s bureaucratic system. Here France had the most elaborate and bureaucratised system, run by a dedicated wing of government, OFPRA (Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides). Working under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with a legacy going back to the interwar period, the department was characterised by its institutional insistence on the assessment of each individual’s application for asylum. An insistence which Chap. 2 shows was largely a fiction. Germany too, built on a longer historical legacy. Both its bureaucratic infrastructure and knowledge stemmed from the post-1945 arrival, reception and integration of the twelve million expellees, the forcibly relocated ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe as part of the Potsdam Agreement. In the 1950s this structure had been adapted to manage the smooth integration of ethnic German immigrants (Aussiedler), who were perceived as the successors of the German expellees. In contrast, within the UK, despite abortive attempts in the mid-­1970s to create a permanent refugee reception system, for each major group of post-war refugee arrivals—Hungarians, Ugandan Asians, Vietnamese—a new mechanism for receiving and resettlement had been invented by successive governments.34 This meant that the British state retained no institutional memory of how to manage larger-scale numbers of refugee arrivals: rather, much of this expertise resided in the voluntary sector. We find a similar prominence of the voluntary sector in the Netherlands, where, following the nationwide organised reception of Chilean refugees in the mid-1970s, in 1979 the Vereniging Vluchtelingenwerk Nederlands (VVN—Dutch Refugee Council) was established. Julia Kleinschmit shows in Chap. 5 how this rapidly, in the face of the high number of Vietnamese refugees arriving as the Dutch contribution to the UNHCR programme, became ever more professionalised. Working with, and funded by, the Ministry for Welfare, National Health and Culture, the VVN became responsible for the whole reception and resettlement process, from helping the newcomers into housing, education and job placements to running courses in Dutch language and culture. For Israel, as we have already seen, there was no mechanism to manage the arrival of refugees beyond that which existed for the olim.

34  Becky Taylor, Refugees in Twentieth-Century Britain. A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

1 INTRODUCTION 

23

As Karen Akoka shows for France, even though the selection processes which determined who would enter the country from the camps of south-­ east Asia had little connection to the principles enshrined in the Refugee Convention, once they arrived in France they became the responsibility of OFPRA staff, whose mandated task was to examine all refugee applications with reference to the Convention. This led to a byzantine process whereby OFPRA examined each individual application on the basis of the usual criteria for admitting refugees, but at the same time turned a blind eye to the fact that most case files contained little or no evidence of direct persecution, while still others held clear evidence of identity fraud. And the outcome of OFPRA’s performance of diligence was an almost automatic granting of refugee status to all applicants. What was the point of this charade? Chapter 2 discusses how this practice was underpinned by a combination of internal, bureaucratic imperatives and a desire by the French government to construct an image of itself as a nation dedicated to welcoming and protecting refugees. In this way it might simultaneously lay to rest the unedifying spectre of its colonial past and allow it to recruit significant numbers of non-unionised workers for its economy during an era when most migration for labour purposes was banned. In Germany, we simultaneously see the mobilisation of pre-existing structures to manage the arrival of refugees and the creation of a new legal status. Although there were already two administrative processes in existence to deal with asylum and refugee applications—asylum granted in accordance with German basic law; and refugee status granted under the Geneva Convention—neither was deployed to manage the reception of Germany’s ‘boat people’. Instead, they were initially accorded status similar to that given to successful asylum applicants while bypassing the standard individual assessment process. Further reinforcing their exceptional status, in 1980 a new law consolidated their position via an entirely new legal category, that of a ‘humanitarian’ or ‘contingent refugee’ (Kontingentflüchtlinge / Im Rahmen humanitärer Hilfsaktionen aufgenommene Flüchtlinge), which granted them automatic refugee status and a range of labour and welfare rights on arrival. In addition, those rescued by ships sailing under the German flag—notably the Cap Anamur—were granted entry to Germany by special order of the Home Secretary. Whichever route by which a Vietnamese arrivee was processed, they were all treated as refugees rather than migrants, a status which was made administratively visible through the refugee stamp on their residence permission they carried in their passports.

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Standing in stark contrast to the bureaucratic routes adopted by the French and Germans, Britain’s system appears notably under-developed. Bypassing the normal process of individual asylum applications via the Home Office, refugees from Vietnam came to Britain via a pre-selection process in Hong Kong. There, those living in the camps and those picked up in UK vessels were selected by a delegation made up of Home Office and British Council for Aid to Refugees (BCAR) representatives. The criteria used by the delegation—to make up the ten thousand refugees who were Britain’s promised quota under the Geneva conference of July 1979—was loose. It ranged from those with a genuine ‘humanitarian’ reason to be resettled and those who expressed a ‘genuine’ desire to come, to those with ‘some knowledge of English’ or with skills which might help them find work in the UK. Almost inevitably, such a capacious definition contained contradictions: although single men were largely seen as the least likely to have a ‘humanitarian’ reason for being resettled in Britain, the fact that they were perceived by selectors to be more adaptable to British life made them more likely to be selected.35 Hence, for all that Britain’s motivation for its involvement in the UNHCR programme was ostensibly humanitarian, selectors’ focus largely rested on an individual’s fitness/willingness to come to the UK and not on an individual’s experiences, as defined by the 1951 Convention. Adding to those coming directly from the camps or British boats were those entering later under the Orderly Departure Programme to join relatives already in the UK. Once there, rather than holding any particular administrative status as a refugee, all those entering via the UNHCR programme either from the camps or the ODP, were granted indefinite leave to remain on arrival, from which point they held the same rights to welfare, education and work as British citizens. Chapter 4 shows how, post-selection, the reception and resettlement process was led by voluntary organisations with expertise in working with refugees, with the state taking a backseat from beginning to end. The Netherlands had, by the 1970s, divided refugees into two categories: invited (uitgenodigd) refugees and individual asylum seekers. While for the latter an annual quota of five hundred entrants was set, the number and selection procedure for the ‘invited’ was chosen by the Dutch 35  The National Archives, Kew, London (hereafter TNA): HO376/198, letter from CE Birt, Home Office, to JH Mallett, Migration and Visa department, FCO, January 24, 1979, emphasis in original.

1 INTRODUCTION 

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authorities on a case-by-case basis. This latter system was mobilised to manage the arrival of the Vietnamese: 7565 were ‘invited’ by the Dutch government as part of its UNHCR commitment, 5700 of whom had arrived by the mid-1980s.36 Once in the Netherlands, as in Britain, they were dealt with largely through the national refugee voluntary agency, the VVN, which was tasked with dealing with the initial reception phase and the resettlement of refugees across the country. And again, in common with the British case, it relied heavily on local voluntary groups to manage everything from registering the new arrivals with schools and doctors to organising language classes and cultural events to make the Vietnamese feel at home. With fewer than 450 Vietnamese refugees coming via three ‘humanitarian gestures’ following sea rescues, Israel stands out from the rest of our case studies, both in terms of scale and treatment. With no category of ‘refugee’ and no asylum system, it followed that there was also no screening process, and those going to Israel did so as rescuees picked up by Israeli boats. Once in Israel they were understood in popular and media discourses as refugees, but for administrative purposes they were treated as a sort of ‘foreign olim’, an ambiguous appellation that didn’t guarantee access to rights. In practice this meant that they were initially issued with a tourist visa with a work permit and later, those who remained in Israel were granted permanent residency. Chapter 6 shows us just how dependent on local-level interpretations of their official status the Vietnamese were when it came to building new lives for themselves in this very foreign country. What historical significance can we draw out of the different ways in which refugees from Vietnam were treated across these various national contexts? Paying attention to the process of translating the international refugee response into vernacular political and administrative systems allows us to unpick the process whereby French OFPRA officials, or German bureaucrats or British voluntary workers categorised and treated the Vietnamese. This process revealed far more of the historical legacies and contemporary political imperatives governing their reception than it revealed about an individual’s experiences of living in, and leaving, Vietnam, and their status as a refugee as defined by the 1951 Convention. For within the UK, the government’s low-key administrative response to the Vietnamese echoed the invisibility which the central state wished on  UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees, 99.

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them: not only did their arrival demonstrably undermine the new Conservative administration’s explicit anti-immigration stance, but those involved in the resettlement process were keen to deflect the Far Right’s attention away from the refugees’ presence. And as we shall see, this attitude was followed through into the resettlement programme’s dispersal policy, which aimed to ‘dilute’ their presence across Britain’s towns and cities. Elsewhere the opposite was the case. In France the government’s official resettlement programme was given great prominence in public life, with the programme itself ultimately involving almost all levels of government and key actors within the public and voluntary sector. In tandem with state efforts, humanitarian operations focussing on sea rescues were actively supported by prominent intellectuals and media personalities. While apparently expressing the collective unity of the French and their determination to come together to support the refugees of south-east Asia, in fact these efforts made visible some of the key fractures of modern French life: ideological, demographic, economic, intellectual and political. Thus Chap. 2 shows how underpinning France’s resettlement programme was a desire to access a new, pliant labour force which was hoped might replace Maghrebian workers—seen as intractable and culturally suspect—without seeming to go back on the decision, made some years previously, to limit active immigration. Alongside this goal—which sat somewhere between economic aspirations and social engineering— France’s efforts were pursued by some to further the cause of undermining communism in the context of the renewal of the Cold War. Supporting the refugees enabled the Right to turn an unforgiving spotlight onto the Vietnamese regime and its moral and political bankruptcy. In doing so, they sought to create distance between the moral present and an imperial past in which France was heavily implicated in oppression and atrocities. Linked to this, the resettlement programme was harnessed by those keen to undermine the dominance of Marxism as well as the place of Third World revolutionary liberation ideologies in France’s high-profile intellectual milieu. Although France appears something of an exception—certainly within the European context—in terms of the role the south-east Asian resettlement programme played in public life in the late 1970s and early 1980s, across our case study countries the arrival of the ‘boat people’ nevertheless acted as a lightning rod for contemporary preoccupations. In Germany public discourse both exoticised the arrivals, treating them as a benign exception to immigration, and echoed wider political solidarities being

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expressed in Germany—one of the front lines of the Cold War—which tapped into and articulated more general experiences of fleeing a communist regime. In Israel, the symbolic gesture of asylum was played up and used to legitimise the state as a Zionist project, which mobilised a narrative of Israel as a land of asylum and as a refuge state. Similarly, Julia Kleinschmidt shows us how, in the Netherlands the ‘boat people’s’ desperate position chimed with a Dutch self-perception of themselves as an open and humanitarian nation. An image which they held onto despite its increasingly restrictive immigration policy. Indeed, its left-wing government of the mid-1970s had positioned the Netherlands as a leader in state human rights activism and had in fact started intensive refugee care and integration programmes for Chilean refugees after General Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Although the anti-communist position of the Vietnamese refugees placed them at odds with a broader leftist rhetoric, the Dutch focus on humanitarianism along with its sustained anti-communist foreign policy ensured any political dissonances were side-lined. Moreover, the incoming Vietnamese challenged widespread perceptions among the Dutch public that most refugees were men—an image which had been encouraged by the strongly gendered idea of the refugee as a Cold War political dissident which had been pushed in public and political discourse over the previous three decades. This shift in focus towards vulnerable women and children in turn helped to reinforce the Dutch popular image of themselves as belonging to a strongly humanitarian nation.

Key Themes This book is organised by country and each chapter at heart sets out the domestic context which drove a nation’s engagement with refugees from Vietnam—and in the case of France, the rest of south-east Asia—as well as their respective reception and resettlement programmes. But running through each contribution are a number of themes which together allowed us collectively to look beyond individual national contexts and draw out both commonalities and differences across countries. We have already demonstrated the variety of ways in which the UNHCR’s category of ‘refugee’ became translated across different domestic contexts, and have seen the range of labels which became attached to the people coming from south-east Asia to Europe. In the rest of the introduction we set out the other main threads we follow through each chapter.

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Geo-politics and Historical Legacies A refugee crisis is rarely an internal domestic issue. Once people start crossing borders, other nations rapidly become drawn into the situation. And when refugees take to boats and make landfall on a number of different shores, as well as fleeing overland to direct neighbours, the number of countries becoming entangled in their fate multiplies. When we add a protracted and devastating independence struggle and post-colonial Cold War conflict, and the interests of the Americans in the region, it is easy to see why it was that the Vietnamese refugee crisis of 1978–79 became so quickly an international issue. All the chapters in this book grapple with the ways in which particular national interests and preoccupations intersected with contemporary global and historical issues. In particular the authors seek to answer two main questions. How did national priorities interact with the politics of the Cold War? And, how did post-colonial and other historic legacies map on to a country’s refugee efforts? The term ‘Cold War’, was, of course, something of a misnomer. While in Europe it may have been characterised by a military stalemate, in other parts of the globe the struggle between capitalism and communism was far from ‘cold’. Throughout the 1970s the political turmoil in South and Central America and the liberation struggles and postcolonial chaos of sub-Saharan Africa, as much as fighting in south-east Asia, were all refracted—and very often also funded—through the preoccupations of the Cold War. As the ‘Second Cold War’ intensified as a result of the Reagan Doctrine, America’s active support of insurgent movements fighting Soviet-supported states saw the creation of millions of refugees across Central America, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. The scale of displacement in south-east Asia in these years thus mirrored growing instability in other areas of the world: between 1977 and 1982 the number of UNHCR registered refugees more than tripled, from three to ten million. These years also saw UNHCR donor nations increasing the absolute value of their contributions—from $107  million in 1977 to $500 million in 1980.37 In this context we could see the response of the Western nations to the crisis in south-east Asia as a welcome signal of their engagement more broadly in refugee-related issues. But these statistics should be treated with caution, and we cannot read off from the experience 37  Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics, 202. See also UNHCR figures presented at http://data.unhcr.org/dataviz/ (accessed July 8, 2019).

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29

of refugees from Vietnam, whose plight spawned the single largest permanent population transfer between the global South and the North, the experience of other refugees in different parts of the world in the same period. Conflicts in, for example, Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia resulted in mass internal displacement and exodus. But in these and other cases—illustrated most starkly in Pakistan, which housed three million refugees from Afghanistan—UNHCR camps were not a step towards resettlement in a third country. Rather they became permanent settlement cities, sustained largely by US aid, and acted as much as bases from which anti-Soviet or anti-Communist fighters might build their capacity and launch attacks as they did places of humanitarianism and refuge. Even in south-east Asia, not all refugee movements were accorded equal status: Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge-instigated genocide and seeking to enter Thailand were incarcerated in camps, largely abandoned by the UNHCR and frequently forcibly repatriated to near-­certain death.38 Thus the West’s reaction to refugee crises in this period might be understood as one of fiscal generosity, but it was generosity which played out within a Cold War where broader geo-political concerns took precedence over absolute human need. Setting the different countries’ responses to the UNHCR programme alongside each other, and then locating these within this global bigger picture allows us to interrogate normative claims over the unproblematic humanitarian motivations for action. The chapters in this book show how humanitarianism has a logic driven in part by international law, discourses of rights and of empathy, but also more often by political imperatives and domestic considerations. Thus what appears at first glance as a direct engagement with immutable international law, on closer inspection is revealed as profoundly arbitrary, contingent and context-driven. And of course the Cold War had a European, and a domestic, element too, perhaps most obviously in Germany, which was divided at this time between East and West and which continued to receive German-speaking and other dissidents from the Eastern bloc throughout this period. But other countries brought their own Cold Wars to the story. In France, the historically strong Communist Party had been weakened first by the events of 1956 and then the fracturing of the Left post-1968. In the wake of these developments, Cold War politics became intimately bound up in the 38  For a first-hand account of working in such camps see Judy A.  Mayotte, Disposable People? The Plight of Refugees (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992).

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pronouncements and public positions of France’s leading intellectuals, and Chap. 2 shows us how its resettlement programme became yet more fodder for intensely fought political positions. In the Netherlands the Leftist government of the mid-1970s, which had been driven by a radical and internationalist agenda had, by the time of the Vietnam resettlement programme, been replaced by a centre-right government. Nevertheless, its legacy ensured that Dutch involvement in the UNHCR programme not only chimed with the country’s desire to be seen as standing alongside its NATO allies—something which also motivated the UK—but it also resonated with a growing section of its population who supported the idea of the Netherlands as a humanitarian nation. The role that Third World liberation ideologies played in these debates reminds us of the importance of considering the different ways in which ongoing imperial connections and post-colonial legacies intersected with the Vietnamese resettlement programme. We have already seen how France’s reaction to the crises across south-east Asia can be understood in terms of managing its post-colonial legacy. But we need to be wary of making any simplistic equations: as Karen Akoka makes clear, while the reception of the population fleeing Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam was typically officially justified in terms of France’s sense of responsibility towards its former colonial empire, it did not take the same attitude towards refugees from its former African possessions. The UK’s relationship with Hong Kong was similarly not straightforward. Still a Crown Colony running under a 99-year lease and already densely populated, Hong Kong saw tens of thousands of people coming by boat from Vietnam over 1978 and into 1979 at the same time as becoming reluctant host to thousands of Chinese illegal emigrants. Until it became clear that Britain— in an act of ‘proxy humanitarianism’—could cast Hong Kong’s refugees as its own, and hence demand an international burden-sharing effort, the UK government seemed largely content to ignore the pressures faced by the colony. Here was a powerful late-twentieth century example of the centuries-old imperial dynamic whereby a periphery’s needs were subordinated to the demands of the metropole. History inflected individual country’s responses to the refugee crisis in other ways too. The Displaced Persons (DP) camps, scattered across Germany and Austria in another post-war legacy, had only finally become consigned to history some fifteen years before. And it had been the resettlement of DPs which had been central to the formation of both the British and Dutch national voluntary refugee bodies. On the international

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31

stage, West Germany may have been keen to present itself as forward-­ looking, a dynamic modern economy and a key player in the EEC, but domestically the legacies of the war and the realities of the Cold War infused everyday political discourse and public understanding. Thus the initial labelling of the Vietnamese as ‘expellees’ was less a historical trope and more something which directly resonated with the lives and personal experiences of many Germans. In very different, but equally profound, ways the legacy of the Second World War reverberated through Israel’s acceptance and resettlement of its Vietnamese ‘boat people’. Here memories of the Holocaust were simultaneously mobilised to position Israel as the refugee-nation par excellence and to insist that, having become the place of refuge of so many Holocaust survivors, it had already played its part in solving international refugee problems. Consequently, its politicians argued that it needed to take no more than a token number of Vietnamese rescuees to maintain its position as global moral leader. Running through all these different preoccupations was the place of prestige. For France and Britain, both of which still liked to see themselves as major global players—even if they now accepted that the US was the global leader of the West and its international institutions—the Vietnamese programme was a chance to be seen as active and influential on the world stage. As we shall see, Margaret Thatcher liked to claim credit for the July 1979 Geneva Conference, while France pointed to the scale of its national resettlement schemes and its engagement in the UNHCR programme to illustrate both its moral weight and its continuing influence in south-east Asia. For Germany the resettlement programme offered the chance for it to act on an equal footing with other Western European countries, another symbol that it firmly belonged within the camp of liberal democratic nations, while the Netherlands’ relatively large refugee quota, as a per capita figure, similarly increased Dutch visibility in the international arena. And, although Israel’s concrete political action was numerically insignificant, it worked to establish Israel, not only as part of the Western world, but also as a country able to set a moral example to the international community.39

39  For a similar dynamic within an earlier UNHCR resettlement programme see Ellis Ward, ‘“A Big Show-Off to Show What We Could Do”: Ireland and the Hungarian Refugee Crisis of 1956’, Irish Studies in International Affairs 7 (1996): 131–141.

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National Contexts, Domestic Pressures As important as the international picture was to the resettlement programme, politicians always had to keep an eye on their national constituencies. As a result, all the chapters explore the importance of domestic pressures, different welfare models and traditions of voluntary and other action in determining formal efforts to provide for the incoming refugees. In their different ways, each of the chapters consider how domestic political imperatives fed into a government’s decision to engage with the resettlement programme. For while the resettlement programme may have been international in scope, its implementation and success rested ultimately on how national commitments translated into domestic policy and action. Such pressures were not always negative. In the Netherlands growing public awareness of religious persecution and poverty in Africa and the Middle East was largely driven by sympathetic coverage in the national media. This opened up a discursive and political space in which Christian refugees from Turkey and Morocco, as well as Polish refugees of the Solidarity movement, could count on Dutch civil and clerical understanding of, and support for, their plight. In this way, these totally unconnected refugee movements helped to pave the way for the public acceptance of the Vietnamese. Even in Israel where the numbers of arriving Vietnamese rescuees were tiny, there were domestic implications surrounding their reception. Indeed, the incoming prime minister, Menachem Begin, used his inaugural speech to signal how the ‘boat people’ were to be integral to his project of building domestic and international Israeli legitimacy at a pivotal moment when his election had brought to an end almost thirty years of political dominance by the centre-left. But despite these hopeful signs for incoming refugees, the wider picture was less promising. Even as governments were signing up to the UNHCR’s resettlement pledges at the Geneva Conference, almost universally their economies were entering one of the worst recessions for half a century. This downturn came on the back of years of economic uncertainty prompted by the 1973 oil crisis, which had seen country after country grapple with the implications of the end of three decades of economic growth and full employment. Immigration and foreign labour increasingly became hot political issues and national governments responded by restricting migration. In November 1973, Germany had banned worker immigration from non-EEC countries, and instigated assistance packages

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and vocational training programmes for foreign workers willing to return to their country of origin. Similar actions were taken in the Netherlands. Yet, these measures did not have the hoped-for result of reducing their migrant populations: workers, fearing that they would not be granted re-­ entry if they left German or Dutch soil, instead stayed in the country and sent for their wives and children. In the same period France had banned the entry of dependents as well as workers and offered a repatriation allowance to workers who would give up residence and work permits and take their family home. At the same time, certain parts of the economy, such as car manufacturing, were still expanding and in need of a workforce. Consequently, the decree of July 1974 to end labour immigration presented some sectors with an active problem, all the more given the strong unionisation of the increasingly strike-riven manufacturing sector. In this context—and where racial and political stereotypes positioned those arriving from south-east Asia as ‘docile’ and anti-communist and starkly different to ‘trouble-making’ existing Maghrebian workers—the ‘Indochinese’ thus constituted an ideal labour force. This dynamic helps to explain the French government’s decision to process the incoming migrants as ‘refugees’ as it enabled it to remain in apparent compliance with the 1974 anti-­ immigration legislation. The UK too, had been grappling with issues surrounding migration for some time. While it had in fact begun limiting migration from its former colonies as early as 1962, its 1971 Immigration Act had been designed to halt definitively the entry of migrants from the New Commonwealth. And, in the face of the perceived failures of existing legislation, as we see in Chap. 4, Margaret Thatcher’s new Conservative government had been elected on a promise to introduce new immigration restrictions. Unlike France, Britain’s manufacturing sector had been in general decline for some time, a situation which was to be accelerated by the recession of the early 1980s. And so, had it not been for the sea rescues by British vessels and Britain’s desire to be seen as a leader on the world stage, it seems unlikely that Thatcher’s Conservative government would have involved itself at all in the crisis. In fact Britain was a particularly stark example of the potential disjuncture between the international pledges made by national governments and the domestic realities facing Vietnamese arriving in Europe. Britain’s government may have pledged to take ten thousand refugees, but Becky Taylor shows us just how quickly it became clear that this was not to translate into extra spending or resources. In turn the rift between central and

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local government—the former having authorised the arrival of the Vietnamese, the latter tasked with supporting their needs post-­ resettlement—became one more strand in a bigger political conflict over the Conservative government’s policies to slash welfare budgets and aggressively shrink the state. In Israel, in a very different way, the treatment of the Vietnamese boat people revealed a mismatch between the national declaration of commitment to refugee protection and to the Vietnamese specifically, and the reality of their treatment by local state actors. Chapter 6 shows us how the micro-decisions of street-level and mid-level agents went, in many cases, against the official declarations of Israel’s generous reception, and served ultimately to reaffirm a national order based on the exclusion of non-Jewish migrants. Put next to the experiences of these other nations, both Germany’s and France’s experience appear unproblematic. Here the consensus around the reception programme—both in principle and terms of its extent—was so high that there were no significant conflicts between the different levels of the state. On the contrary, France’s reception of the 130,000 ‘boat people’ led to a unique collaboration between local authorities, NGOs and state actors, which saw them all working together to implement a broad reception and resettlement scheme that was so effective that it would later be used for other refugee cohorts. In Germany levels of sympathy for the ‘boat people’ were so high that individual states—Lower Saxony, Hamburg—acted to accept refugees before the national government had made any commitments to accept refugees. And firm commitments at the state and federal levels were to translate into a sustained and extensive resettlement programme which enabled the Vietnamese to build new lives for themselves across the country. It was not to be until after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany that internal administrative divisions began to play out. But rather than being between federal, state and local authorities now they were between former East and West Germany when the very different experiences and levels of targeted state support of their respective Vietnamese communities became visible. The distinctions, and often divisions, between different levels of a state remind us that rather being unitary organisms, states can often act against themselves and be internally incoherent and divided. This insight opens the possibility of constructing nuanced accounts of state (in)action, and of understanding how policy pronouncements might either become translated into on-the ground effects or alternatively become distorted or evaporate. Disaggregating the state also allows us to understand how refugees

1 INTRODUCTION 

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might be treated differently by, and have different experiences of, different arms of the state. Given how many refugees arrived in their new countries with almost nothing, this was often of particular importance when it came to welfare provision. Consequently, each of the chapters considers the relationship between the measures put in place to support newly arrived refugees and a nation’s wider welfare provision. In Israel, the Vietnamese had access to the same services as other olim, but crucially, as we shall see, this was by grace rather than enshrined in law. In Britain, the refugees went first to reception centres, where their costs were covered by a mixture of central government funding and voluntary effort. Here volunteer workers sought to prepare them for their new life through language and orientation classes and through finding them accommodation, and sometimes also work. Once ‘settled’ in their new home—and here central government was intransigent on this point—the Vietnamese were entitled to the same welfare, education and support services as the rest of the population, no more, no less. As we see in Chap. 4, this was to prove problematic. Not only did many of the Vietnamese have needs which could not be met by standard provision, but they also encountered institutional suspicion and racism, which left them vulnerable and ill-equipped to begin their new lives in the UK. The contrast here with the Netherlands is stark, for although the Dutch also primarily used the national voluntary refugee organisation—the VVN—to receive and resettle the new arrivals, its services were amply funded. While welcome, the contrast between the support offered to the ‘invited’ Vietnamese compared to individual asylum seekers acts as a warning to anyone wishing to depict the Dutch state as unproblematically generous to vulnerable strangers. In its state-centric approach, France was diametrically opposed to both the Netherlands and the UK. Arrivals from south-east Asia benefited from preferential treatment in a move which set them apart from both the general French population’s rights to welfare and those of other groups of asylum seekers and refugees. They received a wide range of benefits which crucially encompassed certain employment rights normally denied to those recently arrived in France. This included the right to a permanent work permit on the presentation of a three-month, rather than a year-long contract and the right to apply for any job without regard to the general employment situation. Financial incentives were offered to employers to encourage them to hire the new arrivals and a specific division was created for them at the national employment agency dedicated to offering them

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support in their search for work. In Germany too, the Vietnamese arrivals found a preferential climate, both vis-à-vis other refugees and other migrants: they received enhanced welfare support as well as orientation guidance, and were granted the right to work after only six months. State support in all the countries was important, but everywhere this was supplemented, sometimes to a very significant degree, by voluntary provision. And so, by setting the different countries’ responses to the crisis alongside each other, we can see how the reception and resettlement of these refugees also interplayed with particular national traditions of domestic humanitarianism and voluntarism. It has been a long time since we have thought of humanitarian intervention as unproblematically and intrinsically benign. And yet we also need to pay attention to how the story of the sea rescues, the UNHCR programme and the efforts of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens who were moved by the plight of the ‘boat people’ and who gave up time and resources to make vulnerable strangers welcome, is also a story of the internationalism of humanitarianism and voluntarism.40 For all that we can point to the cynical motives of national governments and geo-political imperatives of the Cold War, as each of the chapters show, we cannot make sense of this mass population transfer from south-east Asia to Europe if we sideline the place of ordinary people’s generosity. This is not to argue that this generosity was always disinterested, well-placed, free from uncomfortable power dynamics or from racialised and other stereotypes, simply to understand the need to write it into our understandings of the reception of the ‘boat people’. While the ‘boat people’s’ plight elicited sympathy right across Western Europe, in both France and Germany, it prompted something more: active sea rescues. As early as the end of 1978, France saw a number of its most prominent public intellectuals, alongside key politicians and media 40  Becky Taylor, ‘‘Don’t Just Look for a New Pet’: The Vietnamese Airlift, Child Refugees and the Dangers of Toxic Humanitarianism,’ Patterns of Prejudice 52, no. 2–3 (2018): 195–209. See Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity. A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Michael Barnett and Thomas Weiss, eds., Humanitarianism in Question. Politics, Power, Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Liisa Malkki, ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (1996): 377–404; Miriam Ticktin, ‘Medical Humanitarianism in and beyond France: Breaking Down or Patrolling Borders?’ in Alison Bashford, ed., Medicine at the Border. Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 116–135.

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37

personalities, expressing their support for the boat people. It led to the creation of a new organisation, which chartered a boat—L’île de Lumière— to rescue people at sea and the vessel’s high-profile rescues led to the then president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, making a commitment to accept additional numbers of Indochinese to France. The success of L’île de Lumière, and the level of donations it received though, saw its original goal of bringing back refugees being transformed. Buoyed by public generosity, the vessel was adapted first, to become a hospital ship so it was able to treat survivors as soon as they were rescued, and second so that it was able to undertake a high-profile nine-month voyage through the South China Sea. The fact that its passengers also included journalists from one of the main French television channels, only served to increase its public profile and success in publicising its activities. Inspired by the French example, and moved by the news coverage of the crisis, in Germany a couple— Christel and Rupert Neudeck—with some friends formed Ein Schiff für Vietnam (A Ship for Vietnam), raising funds to buy a boat, the Cap Anamur. In imitation of its French counterpart, it criss-crossed the South China Sea actively searching for boats in distress. As well as providing off-­ shore medical treatment for those living in refugee camps in the region, it rescued over ten thousand people, being so successful in its mission that the West German government eventually refused to take any more of its rescuees. We need, of course, to be wary of reducing such public sympathy and its material manifestations to any ‘natural’ expression of humanistic commitment to a just cause. Even when it appeared to transcend political cleavages and where its protagonists explained their involvement in deliberately apolitical language and in terms of the urgency of the cause, France shows us how other agendas could be being brought into play. Here ‘Indochinese’ refugees became a lightning rod attracting expressions of anti-totalitarianism, from the Left as much as from the Right, as anti-­ communists or disappointed Maoists sought to use it as a tool to discredit Marxism, which still held intellectual sway in the nation’s universities. This was not just an abstract intellectual debate: as we see in Chap. 2 anti-­ totalitarianism was instrumentalised from the mid-1970s to reconfigure the terrain of international political solidarity through the emergence of what was termed sans-frontierisme (lit. without borders). With Medecins sans frontirères at the vanguard, it challenged the New Left’s analysis—an analysis which had emerged during the anti-colonial liberation struggles of the 1950s and 1960s—that the Third World would become the engine of

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a world revolution. Taking its place, sans-frontierisme became intertwined with a wider shift towards an apparently apolitical, but fundamentally anti-­ communist, political ideology which promoted individualism via human rights advocacy.41 Within this context then, the reception of boat people built upon and fed the promotion of human rights and Western humanitarianism as a bulwark against the tyranny of communism. Britain’s first major Vietnamese refugee initiative—the emergency airlift of a hundred ‘orphans’ before the fall of Saigon in 1975 which was financed by the right-wing newspaper, the Daily Mail—was firmly articulated within an anti-communist framework.42 But this was not typical. Overall the British public’s responses to the Vietnamese crisis appeared a world away from the fraught intellectual atmosphere driving France’s resettlement efforts. Beyond a general acceptance that the Vietnamese were justifiably fleeing an oppressive regime, popular perceptions of the ‘boat people’ centred around the trauma of their flight and shied away from any engagement with wider political questions. As Becky Taylor shows, even at a time of heightened anti-immigration sentiments, this sympathy translated into significant fundraising and voluntary efforts. This was crucial. The leading role of voluntary initiative and NGOs in Britain’s reception and resettlement efforts were not only a tangible sign of the enthusiasm and good will of thousands of private individuals, but also became absolutely essential. In the context of a profoundly contracting state, voluntary initiative became the only means of providing post-­ resettlement support for the Vietnamese.

‘Foreignness’, Assimilation and Multiculturalism The final strand running through the chapters wrestles with how the arrival of significant numbers of people from south-east Asia reinforced or challenged the very different national projects of integration, assimilation or multiculturalism which were going on across Europe by the late twentieth century. In doing so, the different authors move beyond the practices of formal citizenship and models of integration, to include in their gaze 41  François Hourmant, Le désenchantement des clercs: Figures de l’intellectuel dans l’aprèsMai 68 (Rennes: PUR, 1997), 264 ; Michael Scott Christofferson, Les intellectuels contre la gauche. L’idéologie antitotalitaire en France 1968–1981 (Paris: Agone), 466; Eleanor Davey, Idealism beyond Borders. The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 346. 42  Taylor, ‘Don’t Just Look for a New Pet’.

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popular and informal perceptions and representations of strangers. It is this approach which allows us to notice, for example, that Vietnamese refugees in Britain were encouraged to use the government unemployment offices to look for work while also being told by the officials that they had no right to take jobs from British workers during a recession. Although the intense media coverage surrounding the ‘boat people crisis’ over late 1978 and into 1979 ensured that there was plenty of sympathy on hand when they first arrived in Europe, the chapters show that this was not always sustained in the longer term. As the incomers from south-east Asia began to build new lives for themselves in Europe their status as ‘refugee’ or ‘boat person’ could become blurred, as they also became workers, students and neighbours, often alongside others who had been born outside of Europe. In this respect, the position of the Vietnamese who went to Israel was perhaps most distinctive: while they were treated by the same institutions and were offered the same type of package of support elaborated for the integration of Jewish olim, unlike the former they were not granted the full range of citizen rights, at least for several years. Moreover, in the Israeli ethno-space of the 1970s, one characterised by a near total absence of East Asians, the Vietnamese were a very visible minority, racially marked in a way that essentialised their difference and refused to allow them to blend in with their surroundings. Their essentialised ‘foreignness’ and the quasi-­ impossibility of assimilation into the Israeli regime of citizenship and belonging undoubtedly played a role in many of the Vietnamese leaving the country in the subsequent years. While Israel’s experience was the most extreme, in different ways each country covered in this book faced the same issue. Across each chapter we explore the imagined and actual relationships between the wider foreign-born population and refugees from south-east Asia. France was no stranger to foreigners, having been a site of major immigration since at least the late nineteenth century, receiving workers, refugees and others from across Europe and parts of its empire. Underpinning its migration policies for much of the twentieth century were three principles. Firstly, the desire for cheap foreign labour, where it didn’t undermine French workers. Secondly, a presumption that foreigners might be granted a right to stay provided that they did not constitute a threat to social and political order. And finally, a desire to select the most ‘assimilable’ foreigners, something which after the devastation of the First World

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War was presaged by a desire to rebuild France’s demographic base.43 Perhaps surprisingly the Indochinese were seen as fitting all three of these requirements perfectly. As we have seen, they were seen as a potentially useful and malleable workforce; their perceived docility, discretion and anti-communism made them appear more assimilable than the growing number of migrants from Maghreb who the government was keen to repatriate; and they were viewed as ‘potentially French’ to such an extent that a bespoke naturalisation process was established for them. And yet, as Karen Akoka shows, their successful integration and acceptance in the French society was only extended on the condition that they did not challenge the racial and cultural stereotypes which became attached to them. For Britain, Becky Taylor identifies two contradictory threads running through attitudes towards the refugees from Vietnam. The first, reflecting the anti-immigration position of the Right, saw their arrival as a ‘problem’ to be solved through assimilation. This was expressed through an official commitment to dispersal which aimed to reduce their visibility, dissipate the effect of their presence and maximise the chance that they would rapidly assimilate. At the same time progressive forces in society were acknowledging just how profoundly Britain’s population had changed over the last three decades, and that any idea of assimilation into a ‘fixed’ and singular British culture was an impossibility. Coming out of this, a constellation of anti-racist and community activists, radical professional local authority workers and younger Labour councillors worked to develop and carry out new multiculturalist policies which aimed to re-shape British institutions and opened discursive and physical spaces in which minority populations might express their culture and find it valued. Vietnamese coming to Britain faced dispersal, but also found places which supported applications for Vietnamese-specific services, amenities and cultural events. We find a similar process occurring in the Netherlands where the preceding two decades had seen the crumbling of the Dutch ‘pillar’ system. Although this system had originally developed to accommodate the country’s Protestant and Catholic communities, it had easily encompassed the arrival of the Netherlands’ ‘guest workers’. Until the late 1970s, they had been largely left to practice their religion and speak their native language with no interference from the state, a policy driven in no small part that if they did so their return to their homeland would be easier. However, in common with experiences across western Europe, it increasingly became  Alexis Spire, Etrangers à la carte (Grasset, 2005).

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41

obvious that the majority would not be ‘returning’, not least because for the children of immigrants, the Netherlands was the only home they knew. In response to this, in the 1980s the Dutch government introduced a new minority policy. This aimed to support and empower the different ethnic communities and tried to tackle their often very apparent social deprivation and marginalisation by organising free language education and vocational programmes. The arrival of the Vietnamese thus coincided with this decisive shift in government policy towards a multiculturalism which might embrace them as much as the Netherlands’ other migrant populations. In contrast with this, despite its enthusiastic welcome of them, West Germany’s admission of boat people never aimed at their full integration into German society as their presence contradicted German self-­perception as an ethnically homogeneous nation. Right through the post-war period Germany’s immigration policy had actively favoured European and ‘Western’ (i.e., white) temporary immigration. Since the mid-1960s the twin principles of encouraging European migrants and preventing ‘Afro-­ Asian’ immigration had led all levels of state policy. Admitting south-east Asian refugees thus opposed the contemporary trend in German migration policy, which was directed at the return of labour migrants and the restriction of access for asylum seekers. Marcel Berlinghoff’s chapter explores this tension and identifies the importance of popular German stereotypes surrounding the ‘boat people’. While apparently standing as the absolute ‘other’ to the white German national norm, they were consistently considered as friendly, hard-working, education-orientated and, in common with French stereotypes, ‘docile’. In turn, this fed tendencies to feminise and infantilise the arrivees as soft and in desperate need for help and salvation—a perception strengthened by visual media coverage. These images might have worked to strengthen German sympathy towards them—especially when they became associated with post-1945 German expellees—but they did nothing to help the Vietnamese become fully accepted members of the West German nation. As a group they both faced racist assaults and benefited from the positive stereotypes they lived under—in marked contrast to the discourses surrounding the country’s Turkish or ‘Arab’ populations. However, they were not seen as fully ‘German’ by the general population, and, until the turn of the century, when German nationality law was revised, they had no prospect of becoming full and equal citizens. Only then, twenty years after their arrival, and with an emerging acceptance of Germany as a country of immigration

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(Einwanderungsland), did the Vietnamese experience a legal and cultural shift which opened up the prospect for them to become naturalised citizens and full members of society.

After Resettlement All the foregoing suggests that the lives of the ‘boat people’ in each of our case study countries were likely to take very different paths in the years after arrival. If the reasons which underpinned each country’s response to the UNHCR programme stemmed from very different places; if the structures which mediated their arrival and governed the resources and support to which they had access were different; and if each country had very different histories and ways of thinking about the place of strangers in their midst, it seems self-evident that the opportunities and challenges facing those arriving from south-east Asia as they attempted to build new lives for themselves would also be different. And yet, all too often the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of a particular cohort of foreign arrivals in a country was explained by external commentators in terms of a set of ascribed, and often racialised, characteristics. Indeed, although apparently positive, France’s belief in the ‘Indochinese’ as ‘docile’ and West German understandings of them as hard working ‘model immigrants’, both rested on uninterrogated beliefs about ‘their’ innate ‘character’. Part of the value of setting the experiences of different countries side by side is that we have been able to move beyond such narrow and essentialised national narratives, and instead consider the wider structural factors which might have helped to shape the experiences of people from the Indochinese peninsula post-resettlement. For while much was made in Britain, for example, of the ‘boat people’s’ lack of English proficiency, literacy and peasant and fisher backgrounds as an explanation for their eventual marginalisation from the mainstream British economy, stepping back we can see other factors at play. Not simply the deep recession—as that was something which was felt right across Europe in this period—but central government’s refusal to invest in sustained language teaching and the tendency to house the Vietnamese in the country’s poorest and most marginalised communities had considerable long-term consequences. Becky Taylor’s contribution shows us that these factors, alongside endemic racism, profoundly shaped the lives of Britain’s Vietnamese population in the years following their arrival. Concentrated in some of Britain’s most deprived ‘inner city’ neighbourhoods, Vietnamese people often

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experienced high levels of unemployment, crime and violence and found it hard to enter the mainstream of British life. However, within these physical and social spaces, the ‘boat people’ over time formed themselves into a British Vietnamese population which supported and sustained diverse grassroots community initiatives and a flourishing and growing entrepreneurial sector.44 Often, however, it felt that these achievements were realised in the absence of, rather than because of, state support. We see the opposite for France. Here the enormous state effort and mobilisation of the wider population meant that the arrivals from south-­ east Asia benefited from concerted support from national government, local councils and nonprofit organisations, which was directed at helping them finding housing and employment and in learning French. This all worked towards ensuring that those who came to France found relatively few structural barriers to integration, certainly in comparison to either those faced by the Vietnamese in Britain, or by other groups of migrants in France at the time. Although the media coverage of their flight and France’s process for recognising the arrivals as refugees made them highly visible as victims of communist regimes, in fact the national resettlement programme enabled them to enter French life and thus, over time become an accepted, even invisible, part of society. Thus France’s ‘welcome’ was by no means only symbolic: the level of material investment in the arrivals, in finding them stable and decent quality housing and pathways into work ensured that unemployment levels among those from south-east Asia remained low. In turn, this allowed them to side-step the usual suspicions attached to foreigners that typically linked immigrants with threats to French employment, social order or cultural identity. Adding to this material context, their experiences of communism combined with the lack of any realistic prospect of return and genuine feelings of gratitude towards France for taking them in, to make true predictions that they would act as a ‘docile’ workforce, appreciated by employers and the state alike. Even so, those who came to France, whether from Cambodia, Laos or Vietnam, almost universally experienced a reduction in their professional and social status. Most of the work found for them were in the trades, in 44   Susan Bagwell, ‘Transnational Family Networks and Ethnic Minority Business Development: The Case of Vietnamese Nail-shops in the UK’, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research 14, no. 6 (2008): 377–394; Annabelle Wilkins, Migration, Work and Home-Making in the City. Dwelling and Belonging among Vietnamese Communities in London (London: Routledge, 2019).

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factories, local communities or in private homes, meaning that although they were in work, for the large number of professionals at least, it was experienced as a move down in the world. It was this, rather than exclusion from the mainstream economy, as in Britain, which prompted many to open their own businesses. At the other end of the spectrum, a significant number of the ten thousand Hmong—an ethnic group who worked as farmers in Laos—moved into agriculture, especially in overseas Guyana, to the extent that twenty years after their first arrival they were supplying more than sixty per cent of the department’s market gardening needs.45 Despite the image given by the streets of the 13th arrondissement of Paris, the French Chinatown, that fuel the idea of ​​Asian immigration entirely turned towards food trade, the statistics show that this was, and remains, a minority activity. In 1990 only four per cent of the fifty thousand south-east Asian born working-age population were classified as such by INSEE, the French national statistical institute, and by the 2000s the share of entrepreneurs, craftsmen and traders still did not exceed ten per cent. If anything, by the early years of the twenty-first century, as they became more established in French society their occupations became more diverse, with growing numbers (re)entering the middle classes: the 2004 and 2007 censuses revealed that, of the 86,000 economically active workers born in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, nearly a fifth were in ‘intermediate professions’, and fourteen per cent were counted as executives and higher intellectual professionals.46 Here we can perhaps see signs of the longer-term benefits of France’s concerted resettlement programme being reaped, by country and individuals alike. Similarly, in both the Netherlands and Germany, boat people enjoyed strong social and welfare support and provision, especially when compared to other refugee groups: language and integration courses, training and other state aid facilitated the start in the new life and offered prospective opportunities for socioeconomic integration into society. But, irrespective of which European country they arrived in, there was a marked generational divide between the experiences of arrivees. Children and younger adults were most often able to adapt more quickly, learning the language, passing exams in the national education system and picking up new qualifications which would help them move into the mainstream job market 45  Karine Meslin, Les réfugiés du Mékong. Cambodgiens, Laotiens et Vietnamiens en France (Bordeaux: éditions du Détour, 2019). 46  Ibid.

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and economy. By contrast, their elders—particularly older male bread-­ winners—often struggled to adapt to a new environment, language and culture, while those whose experiences before or during flight were particularly traumatic, commonly found it hard to take the necessary first steps to build lives for themselves in their new country. In Israel, only 367 individuals had gained entry through its boat people resettlement pledges, but of these, by 2007 less than half—150–170 people, including their Israeli spouses and children—remained.47 The others had left, often to join relatives in countries with stronger Vietnamese communities, mostly the US, in Canada and in France. Israeli officials explained this departure in terms of essential and radical cultural differences—often highlighting migrants’ language problems, ‘mentality gaps’, and unfamiliarity with local food and weather—Chap. 6 points rather to another set of explanations.48 Despite the apparently comprehensive package of support offered to them, the newcomers encountered structural discrimination, exclusion and racial othering in a state characterised by an exclusionary racialised citizenship regime. As in France, life in Israel saw the arrivals positioned, socially and spatially as working class: they were sent to ‘absorption centres’ in working-class cities, highly affected by unemployment and poverty and were offered mainly blue-collar jobs. Thirty years later, a study revealed that this had fed through into their life chances. The very small Vietnamese community still living in Israel remained largely working-class, one whose members, both first- and second-generation, were mainly employed in the food-preparation and catering industries— often ‘Chinese’ restaurants. Others, mostly first generation, were employed in classically gendered working-class roles, with men commonly employed in factories and women as hotel chambermaids.49 Even so, unlike more recent groups that entered Israel hoping to find asylum, the Vietnamese who remained in Israel were finally granted permanent residency. In turn, this ensured that they might apply for mortgages and other loans to enable them to build sustainable lives for themselves in their new country. As with the differential experiences of the Netherlands’ Vietnamese ‘invited’ refugees and those who came as individual asylum seekers, this reminds us of the importance of paying attention not only to the differences between 47  Sabine Huynh, ‘The Vietnamese community in Israel: a profile’, unpublished article shared Shira Havin, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007. 48  Phone interview with Zvi Zeidner, October 30, 2019. 49  Sabine Huynh, ‘The Vietnamese community in Israel’.

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the arrivals from south-east Asia and the majority population, but also to the differences between them and other refugee, asylum and migrant groups. * * * This introduction has already suggested that if we are to look back to Europe and Israel’s reception of the ‘boat people’ and think of it as a ‘golden age’, we can only do so in the most carefully contextualised terms. Thinking historically and comparatively about refugee reception and resettlement allows us to explore different ways of reacting to vulnerable strangers. In a contemporary climate of extreme anti-immigration policies and asylum restrictions, the decision to relocate and actively welcome tens of thousands of UNHCR refugees appears a bold and expansive move. At a time which exhibits very little will for the mass resettlement of refugees, paying attention to the largest trans-continental refugee resettlement programme reminds us of the potential for inventive solutions from the international community at a time of crisis. And yet, the chapters in this book reveal time and again how generosity needs to be understood as just as contingent and politically driven as hostility. We cannot divorce the resettlement programme from the historical, geo-political and domestic contexts in which decisions to participate in the UNHCR programme were made. And it is to those separate domestic contexts that we now turn.

CHAPTER 2

France: Boat People Brought by Plane Karen Akoka

France’s interest in the Indochinese situation began immediately after the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. The question of refugees from south-east Asia reared its head just a few days after North Vietnam’s victory, when at a French cabinet meeting it was decided that the organisation of the reception of Vietnamese refugees would be entrusted to Rémi Lenoir, then Secretary of State for Social Action. Two days later, the newspaper Le Monde reported that President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the President of the Republic, had declared at this meeting that the refugees would be generously welcomed in France and that the policy toward them should be one of hospitality.1 The national reception policy set up by France thus started in 1975, four years before the international response channelled by UNHCR’s resettlement programme. Unlike this international response that was mainly directed towards resettling Vietnamese, France’s national reception policy also encompassed Cambodians and Laotians. The scheme 1

 Masse, L’exception Indochinoise, 276 and 301–305.

K. Akoka (*) Institute for Political Social Sciences (ISP), Paris Nanterre University, Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Taylor et al. (eds.), When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983, Palgrave Studies in Migration History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64224-2_2

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was structured around the principle of their transport to France on the basis of monthly quotas, although the exact figures of the quotas fixed were never published. As we shall see, this was because any principle of quota setting was inimical to the principles underlying French asylum and immigration policies.2 Two decades later several studies showed that consistently between 1975 and 1984, even after the change of government in 1981, about 1000 people per month were carried to France every year.3 Altogether nearly 130,000 people from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were brought to France from the fall of Saigon to 1990. These proportions had never been exceeded by any other group and have never been equalled since, and meant that France became the leading reception country for the ‘boat people’ in Europe, as well as the second in the world, behind the USA.4 Commonly called ‘boat people’, although mostly brought to France by plane, the Cambodians Laotians and Vietnamese resettled in France between 1975 and 1985, both at the time and since, embodied the idea of the refugee par excellence, which still infuses the public image of ‘real’ refugees today. They were brought to France from the Indochinese peninsula and recognised almost automatically as refugees in unprecedented proportions, granted exceptional rights and welfare assistance, and supported by the most prestigious intellectuals, fashionable artists of the day and French public opinion. In this chapter, my analysis of the context and the political issues underlying their reception and their recognition as refugees illuminates these representations from bygone days and shows the multiple interests and intense work involved in constructing the ‘boat people’ as archetypal refugee figures.

2  For this reason, the originally called ‘quota policy’ was soon renamed the ‘organised procedure’. 3  Among others, Jean Pierre Masse, L’exception Indochinoise. Le dispositif d’accueil des réfugiés politiques en France 1973–1991 (Phd. thesis, Paris, EHESS, 1996), 85. 4  This research is based on interviews with agents working at OFPRA during the late 1970s and 1980s and on OFPRA’s archives. For an analysis of this institution and the political dimensions of refugee labelling on a wider period (1952–2020), see Karen Akoka, L’asile et l’exil. Une histoire de la distinction réfugiés/migrants (Paris, La Découverte, 2020), 350.

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A Tailor-Made Welcome From the outset, France’s resettlement efforts were characterised by active government intervention. As early as May 1975, the idea of the Comité National d’Entraide (CNE, National Assistance Committee), a Franco-­ Vietnamese, Franco-Cambodian and Franco-Laotian National Committee ‘to welcome and assist Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians seeking asylum on French soil’ was adopted. Although formally created under the statute of NGO, the CNE, which would coordinate the widest reception system ever set up for a single group in France, was in many ways directed and founded by the state. Its various presidents were almost always state-­ appointed and its board of directors was composed of representatives of the Ministries of the Interior, Health and Labour, Foreign Affairs; French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless (OPFRA) and UNHCR, as well as parliamentarians and former ministers, who sat alongside representatives from non-state organisations.5 Each of the different ministries had their own role. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs brought the people to France and enabled them to benefit from the protection of the French state by granting them, through OFPRA, refugee status; the Minister of Health took charge of their initial reception; the Ministry of Labour their occupational integration; and the Ministry of Social Action their social integration through a vast programme that contributed to the institutionalisation of an intense collaboration between the state, local authorities and NGOs. From a concrete point of view the candidates were selected in refugee camps located in south-east Asia, mostly in Thailand, by the military mission of the French embassy. Here, rather than using the Geneva Convention to select individuals, criteria based around their connection to France sat at the heart of process. Key determining factors included services rendered to the French administration, the French army and the French government; knowledge of the French language; and the presence of a family in France. Also taken into account were an individual’s vocational qualifications and their length of stay in camps. Successful candidates were then granted a visa and brought to France on Air France flights, with which special fares were negotiated. Upon their arrival at the airport, arrivees were housed for a few days in one of the four transit centres in the Paris region created for this purpose. This time allowed officials to settle any 5

 Ibid., 301–305.

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administrative issues, carry out health checks and to refer the arrival to accommodation, which might be located anywhere across France. Among the administrative tasks which needed to be initiated was the filing, by every family, of an asylum request to OPFRA. OFPRA, under the supervision of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was in charge of examining all asylum applications as well as arranging the legal and administrative protection of anyone recognised as a refugee. Once these first administrative issues were resolved, those who wished to—ultimately around a quarter of arrivees—could join family or friends. The rest were directed to reception centres managed by voluntary organisations or local authorities, with most being sent to one of the fifty accommodation centres located across thirty-five departments. Once here, they could stay for up to six months; they were entitled to daily allowances as well as support in finding their feet in their new country. At the municipal level, host committees composed of state agents, voluntary organisations and individuals assisted in arrivals’ social integration and took charge of supporting them in all administrative procedures and in finding individual housing and employment. At the national level, many measures were adopted to facilitate these various administrative procedures, in particular through easing access to housing, work and social assistance. The memories of state support in the first months of arrival were strong for many, including Mom Tiev, who arrived from Cambodia in 1979: ‘We first joined a temporary shelter in the Vendée … I went to the communal school and my parents took French classes. A year later, several families were dispatched throughout the Vendée and mine arrived in Saint-­Hermine, in low-cost housing with all material comforts, but where we were the only Asian family’.6 Khoun Naka, who also arrived from Cambodia in 1981, at the age of twenty-four, shared similar memories: ‘I was welcomed in the shelter in the Vercors, I was given fifty francs a week to look for work or to continue my studies. After tests … I was encouraged to pass my high school diploma. Then I quickly found a job at a plastic company in Annonay where I got to know many French families’.7 Several hundred municipalities, thousands of volunteers, dozens of voluntary organisations and administrations, from OFPRA and the national employment agency to public housing offices, and hundreds of 6  Joseph Confavreux, ‘Accueil des réfugiés: le précédent des boat people,’ Medipart, November 1, 2015. 7  Ibid.

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prefectures thus supported the political will of the French government and participated in the construction of a reception system of unprecedented proportions. But to benefit from this aid and these measures, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians were nevertheless subjected to one condition: they had to apply for refugee status.

The Fiction of an Individual Refugee Application Unlike in Britain, where the arriving Vietnamese were automatically granted full work and welfare rights and indefinite leave to remain, or in Germany or the Netherlands, where they were issued a refugee card upon arrival, the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians brought to France had to submit an individual application to OFPRA, as the body in charge of screening all asylum seekers. This necessitated each arrival having to complete an individual application form, answer the twenty or so questions it contained and explain in writing the reasons why they left their country, their reasons for refusing to return and whether or not they had been in contact with their consulate. The request was then processed by OFPRA staff who would formally review the forms, write their decision in the dedicated box of each form and send an official letter informing the person of the answer. In ninety-nine per cent of cases, the application was accepted. In fact, recognition rates in OFPRA’s south-east Asia division even reached one hundred per cent in some years and consistently remained between ninety-five and ninety-nine per cent in every year from 1976 and 1983. It is worth thinking through the implications of this. Why, if individuals were screened and pre-selected in south-east Asia, and if virtually every application was approved, was there this instance on adhering to a process which appeared empty of meaning? ‘There was a quota programme and a government decision to take in refugees from south-east Asia’, explained Delphine Bordet, deputy of the head of OFPRA’s south-east Asia division at the time.8 Her colleague added: They were automatically granted refugee status because there was a prior agreement. It would have been very difficult to reject the people at that time who had been chosen. It was not disputed … I don’t know if you remember, 8  Interview of the 1 December 2009, collection of oral archives OFPRA/Archives départementales du Val de Marne/BDIC.

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at the time, the positions of Sartre and Aron. In a way, they had already been recognized as refugees.9

Their testimony echoes the institution’s activity reports which showed just how exceptional requiring individuals to attend interviews was in this period: ‘OFPRA almost automatically grants asylum to these refugees. The processing of asylum applications should thus be made easier; only in exceptional cases does it require a personal interview with the applicants’.10 This fiction of an individual asylum claim and of a screening procedure was pursued despite the fact that the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians were accepted by France on criteria which were far divorced from the requirements of the Geneva Convention. The fact that they were automatically accepted placed OFPRA in a delicate position. We see this in how it articulated its role in the process via its annual reports. Its 1975 report referred to the ‘scrutiny’ of asylum applications from people of the Indochinese peninsula; that of 1976 deplored how public authorities encouraged them to apply for refugee status in order to obtain benefits, and residence and work permits; that of 1977 mentioned, not a thorough examination of the asylum claims, but the use of ‘flexible criteria’, while complaining once again that the Indochinese were encouraged to claim asylum. From 1978 onwards, these type of remarks disappeared, as did the descriptions of asylum claim investigations and complaints about incentives. The only type of comment that remained were mentions or discussions of the profusion of false documents and false identities among applicants. It is as if the management of OFPRA had initially resisted the ‘exceptional’ treatment of the former Indochinese, which had undermined its professional scrutiny, and then abandoned its claim for jurisdiction to the field of politics and so ceased both to deplore this outside interference and to give an opinion about how asylum claims should be processed. Reinforcing this, Pierre Basdevent, OFPRA’s General Director at the time, even stopped going to meetings with CNE representatives: Pierre Basdevent participated for a time in the work of the CNE—the National Assistance Committee. He went to the meetings to learn that the government had set the monthly quota at 150, then 200, then 300. But he 9  Jeanne Ahier. Head of the Southeast Asia division between 1975 and 1987. Interview on 7 April 2008, Collection of oral archives OFPRA/Archives départementales du Val de Marne/BDIC. 10  Archives OFPRA, Activity Report of the year 1981, DIR 1/2.

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was not consulted … The Office was side-lined. The important things were dealt with elsewhere: in the corridors of the CNE and especially behind the scenes of the Elysée [the French President’s residence], and in the offices of our supervising ministry that was requested to give instructions to our consular posts in order to hasten the granting of visas. Pierre Basdevent stopped going to the meetings and practised the politics of the empty chair, sometimes sending the head of the south-east Asia division who, in less solemn working groups, began in turn to formulate grievances.11

The loss by OFPRA of its decision-making power in the Indochinese case and the political decision to give the arrivals from the sub-continent exceptional treatment and automatic recognition were not only unwelcome to its top-level officials. There was also misunderstanding and resistance from officials in its other geographical divisions such as the South American one: Certainly, in the mind of some people, the fact that their refugees came from an authoritarian system on the right and our refugees from an authoritarian system on the left. … They didn’t think that some people had as much right to refugee status as others (laughs). But it was almost inevitable. And maybe that’s why we were outcasts compared to other divisions. While being numerically the most important. I never really had a relationship with people from other divisions.12

However, by losing its actual ability to make decisions on individual asylum applications, and hence a key part of its autonomy, OFPRA paradoxically gained visibility, legitimacy and weight. In fact, thanks to the former Indochinese, its activity, budget and human resources increased as new staff were recruited. More than this, it also enjoyed increased public approval and prestige, standing as it did as France’s official body to receive and settle the ‘boat people’ who enjoyed remarkable widespread popularity among the public as well as near-unanimous support in intellectual and political circles. New staff were recruited; OFPRA’s scope was extended to encompass a new group; it gained media visibility and legitimacy. Its loss of autonomy was thus compensated for by a gain in legitimacy and 11  Gilles Rosset’s unpublished memoirs, written in 1993, and handed to the researcher in 2011. Gilles Rosset is a former Protection officer (1955–1982), Secretary General (1982–1987), and General Director of OFPRA (1987–1989). 12  Jeanne Ahier. Interview conducted on the 7th April 2008, Collection of oral archives OFPRA/Archives départementales du Val de Marne/BDIC.

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injection of energy—at a time when OFPRA’s ‘clientele’ had been declining, leading to a certain amount of institutional ‘lethargy’, to use, Gilles Rosset’s, OFPRA’S General Secretary of the time, expression. The arrivals from Indochina, and from Chile remedied this: Chileans fleeing Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973 and two years later, the flood of ‘boat people’ gave the Bellagio effect13 its fullest impact. These new waves of refugees from the Third World would draw OFPRA from its biennial lethargy—1970 and 1971—with a thousand cases opened each year.14

Is this though, enough, to explain OFPRA’s involvement in mass resettlement from south-east Asia to France? In part we also need to look closer at OFPRA’s own institutional culture. The south-east Asia division of OFPRA consisted mostly of agents who were from the Indochinese peninsula and brought their own knowledge and experience to their work.15 Jeanne Ahier, the south-east Asia division chief, was herself was a former Resistance fighter who belonged to the political tradition of the centre-­ right. Having had to flee the Alsace region during the war, she presented herself as a refugee: I was a refugee myself on several occasions. I was born in Alsace and with the Munich Agreements in 1938 we had to leave Strasbourg for the Vosges. Then in 1939, we were evacuated to Périgueux. After returning to Alsace in 1940 at the end of the war, we were expelled by the Germans to the department of the Gers. I had to work there because I could no longer study. In fact, the refugee problem always followed me.16

Jeanne Ahier was recruited as the head of OFPRA’s south-east Asia division in 1976, when she was already fifty years old and had almost never worked before in her life. She had spent three years, at the end of the 1940s, with the Ministry for Returnees and War Victims and had not worked since then. Why was she chosen as the head of the division? Was it 13  The Bellagio 1967 Protocol removed both the temporal and geographic restrictions of the Geneva Convention that limited refugee status to events that occurred before 1951 in Europe. 14  Gilles Rosset’s un-published memoirs, written in 1993, and handed to the researcher in 2011. 15  Archives OFPRA, organizational chart, DIR 1/8. 16  Interview of the 7 April 2008, collection of oral archives, OFPRA/Archives départementales du Val de Marne/BDIC.

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because her husband had just died and, as he had been a civil servant in the MFA, the institution cared for his widow? Was it her ideological closeness to refugees fleeing communism due to her political positioning on the centre-right? Was it her sensitivity to social questions? Was it her experience and identification with refugees? Was it her former experience, albeit twenty five years earlier, with the Ministry for Returnees? Was it her commitment to the Resistance? In any case, it was not her knowledge of the Indochinese question. She herself stated that she knew nothing on the subject and constantly relied on her assistant, a refugee from Laos. Even so, her identification with the social dimension of her OFPRA work as well as her lack of identification with bureaucracy was very strongly evident throughout her interview. I had this tendency to humanize, not to be too administrative; but he [i.e. a civil status officer of the South Asia section-Is] had this rigour that I didn’t have … a very administrative side that I didn’t have.

In her interview she also talked about the ‘liberty’ she had to grant refugee status for purely ‘human’ reasons to people who were not strictly refugees: a woman she felt sorry for because she was blind; another who lived in Japan but left because of a ‘wicked’ daughter-in-law. ‘We had the opportunity to do so … and so we did’, she concluded without any embarrassment, though she was very cautious throughout her interview, for example asking that a more anecdotal memory be erased from the tape. She evoked not only with some pride the purely humanitarian cases in which she was able to grant refugee status, but also with some regret the moment when she had to remove her ‘social hat’ to put on her ‘legal hat’ when the government’s quota policy came to an end in the mid-1980s. And yet, despite this emphasis on humanitarianism in Ahier’s memories, the reality of Frances quota system meant that neither the issue of victimhood or perpetrator status actually played any significant role in asylum applications.. This despite the fact that not only were the crimes of the Khmer Rouge already well known, but the Geneva Convention clearly states that those who are believed to have committed a crime against peace, a war crime or a crime against humanity are excluded from refugee status.

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–– Do you remember dealing with exclusions under the Geneva Convention? Files that you were forced to exclude, people, for example Khmer Rouge, who had committed crimes? –– No, I don’t remember. In the south-east Asia division, this is where it was a bit unusual, the individual case was less important.17 Why did the resettled Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laotians have to go through the fiction of an individual asylum request? Why did they have to provide an individual story of persecution and escape? This was more than simply adhering to France’s well-known insistence on centralised and highly bureaucractised procedures, as the asylum request to OFPRA and the individual asylum procedure made it possible to construct an image of the mass arrival of new migrants as a humanitarian act performed for the benefit of needy refugees. As we have seen, individuals in the camps in south-east Asia were selected on the basis of a number of aspects of ‘Frenchness’ and not according to the Geneva Convention. But receiving them as refugees, and having them going through an individual asylum application, sent important political signals and had important political implications. Welcoming them as economic migrants would have risked contradicting the decision to suspend labour immigration taken in 1974. Welcoming them as refugees made it possible to transform a decision based on political, economic and diplomatic considerations into a moral and humanitarian act. As stated by Michel Dupoizat, then UNHCR Deputy Delegate for France: ‘There was an ipso facto recognition, a kind of equation: an Indochinese who had fled equalled a refugee. Maybe partly because of questions of sensitivity, numbers, and lack of organization. But we also thought they were all refugees’.18 This performative dimension of asylum policy towards the former Indochinese made the stakes and political considerations that presided over its construction all the less visible. There were many reasons for the widespread acceptance and almost unconditional granting of refugee status to former Indochinese: political interests; diplomatic considerations; colonial heritage; the need for labour; electoral strategies; ethnic and professional preferences based on racial or social prejudices; and ideological divisions internal to the French political and intellectual field. 17  Jeanne Ahier. Interview conducted on 7 April 2008, collection of oral archives OFPRA/ Archives départementales du Val de Marne/BDIC. 18  Quoted in Masse, The Indochinese exception, 60–61.

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Colonial Issues In the neighbouring countries, refugees were crowded in the thousands into camps, and France, considering that it had responsibilities in the region, decided to receive a substantial number.19 And so, the reception of the population fleeing Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam was often officially justified by France’s sense of responsibility towards its former colonial empire. On this subject, France and the United States shared similar concerns which probably explains why they were the first countries in terms of numbers of people resettled from the Indochinese peninsula—France being the main recipient in Europe and the United States in the world. This reception first and foremost allowed the two countries to attest to the moral and political bankruptcy of their common victor, almost two decades apart. France’s war was denounced as an act of colonial oppression, and the United States was accused of imperialist domination. Both came out of these conflicts morally weakened, with France set against its colonial territories which were increasingly demanding their independence, and the USA castigated by international public opinion that denounced its imperialism. The reception of the boat people thus offered an opportunity for both countries to turn the spotlight onto the behaviour of those they had once oppressed and to try and reclaim the moral high ground. While several elements in the management of the ‘crisis’ of the boat people were connected with the French colonial past, we should be wary of seeing this as providing the whole explanation for France’s behaviour. After all, the feelings of colonial ‘responsibility’ were not extended to the displaced living in or outside France’s former African possessions. Even so, we can see how France’s imperial past was woven into its response to the crises of the region. First, there were the resettlement criteria applied by French missions in the south-east Asian refugee camps. Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians who had rendered ‘services’ to the French administration or the French army during the Protectorate were among those eligible for resettlement. In addition, France, like the US, resettled a very large number of Hmong, a Muslim ethnic group from Laos which had first supported the French colonial administration and later the American administration, and as a result had found themselves particularly 19  Jean Baptiste Brouste, Director general of OFPRA, quoted in Masse, The Indochinese exception, 35.

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targeted by the incoming communist regime. Second, in France some of the resettled ex-Indochinese were welcomed in places emblematic of France’s colonial past. As early as 1975, the Fondation Maréchal Delattre de Tassigny placed its chateau at the disposal of the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians and offered them medical care, psychological support, literacy courses and help with occupational integration. Maréchal Delattre de Tassigny was a former French High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief of the expeditionary corps in colonial Indochina, and had won several important victories against the Vietminh. He had a few years earlier welcomed into his chateau French veterans of the decolonisation war in Indochina.20 Finally, the connection with the colonial period was also reflected in the figures of the Presidents of the National Assistance Committee, the CNE, and some of the members of its Board of Directors. The first president, Jean Sainteny, was a former French Commissioner for the Tonkin and North Annam regions in Vietnam and the powerbroker in the Ho-Sainteny agreement with Ho Chi Minh, which had provided for Indochina to remain in the French Union. Its second president, Jean Jacques Beucler, had been a lieutenant in Indochina before being taken prisoner. Before joining the CNE, he was briefly Secretary of State for Veterans’ Affairs. This set the tone for other members of the board of directors of the CNE, several of whom were so-called qualified personalities because of their Indochinese past.21

The Cold War and Anti-communism But in the context of the hardening of the Cold War at the end of 1979, and as in the other countries of the Western bloc, it was also and above all because the boat people were fleeing communist regimes that France was committed to welcoming them. This analysis is far from being merely retrospective, and was made explicit at the time: Every effort is made to accredit this welcome as a welcome for refugees. Even more, we are trying to make it appear as the sole host of genuine refugees. We thus come across the old notion that had been outdated for years: refugee equals anti-communist. This unique reception of real refugees is naturally governed by the good will of the Prince.22  Fondationmarechaldelattre.fr/history.htm.  Masse, The Indochinese exception, 302. 22  France Terre d’Asile quoted in Masse, The Indochinese exception, 144. 20 21

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The political dimension of the reception of the people of the Indochinese peninsula by Western countries was particularly stark when compared to the treatment of the Rohingya of Burma who, at the same time and in the same region, just a few hundred kilometres away, were fleeing the persecution of the Burmese government and army. In the spring of 1978, two hundred thousand Rohingya Muslims, victims of the violence of the Burmese army due to their ethnic and religious affiliation, fled to Bangladesh. They did not attract the attention of western citizens who were then actively mobilising for the boat people from the Indochinese peninsula, although fewer (120,000) actually fled in that same year. But with no communist regime involved, their flight made little impact on international attention. None of the Rohingya would ever be resettled in France or in any other western country. The USA and France were the two countries that resettled the largest number of people from the Indochinese peninsula on their territory. The very political nature of the French and American commitment to such large-scale resettlements was particularly apparent in the light of the UNHCR’s criticism of their actions. Despite Western unanimity over the ‘boat people’s’ status as ‘real’ refugees, mass resettlements such as those undertaken by the US and France were criticised by some UNHCR representatives who considered them too attractive and politically motivated. In 1981, the official representative of the organisation in Thailand stated in a report that Cambodians, Vietnamese and Laotians were now simply attracted to the resettlement programme as a means to materially improve their lives rather than being driven out of their countries by any real fears of persecution.23 He assured that the high quotas were used as a tool by the West to fuel the exodus, destabilise the communist regimes of the region, show the world that these people were ‘voting with their feet’ and provide information to security agencies about what was happening in their countries of origin. The regional representative of the UNHCR in south-east Asia was of the same opinion: the people could not be considered refugees within the meaning of the Geneva Convention and the resettlement programme was functioning as a magnet. From his perspective, the UNHCR had fallen into a trap and should return to its tradition of assisting genuine refugees rather than sponsoring what he considered to 23  Martin Barber, ‘Resettlement of Indochinese in 1981–1982,’ UNHCR international memorandum, Bangkok, 22 April 22, 1981, quoted in Loescher, UNHCR and the World Politics, 208.

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be the migration procedures of Western countries.24 But the United States remained inflexible and the French government kept its high quotas unchanged. People fleeing the Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese communists regimes were strategic pawns in the Cold War context. Kept in refugee camps, they put pressure on the regimes they had fled by carrying out subversive actions at the border; relocated to the West, they were a symbol as well as a source of information. Therefore, even the Khmer Rouge were welcomed in the camps. And even when, in the mid-1980s, the United States reduced its resettlement quotas, it remained opposed to repatriation to Vietnam and despite concerted UNHCR lobbying, consistently rejected the idea of discussing the matter with its authorities.

An Allegedly Docile and Right-Wing Replacement Workforce The reception of the boat people was nevertheless far from being limited to diplomatic considerations and to questions of foreign policy. In France, the quota policy had significant domestic advantages. It brought to France a population characterised by its youth, its low level of qualifications and its reputation as a docile workforce distant from the unions at a time when it was particularly needed. With les trente glorieuses brought to a unequivocal end by the 1973 oil crisis, and its attempts to get rid of workers from North Africa involved in major strikes in the industrial sector, government was caught between its political decision to suspend labour migration while maintaining a pool of low skilled non-unionised workers. During the sessions of the CNE, arguments around the supposed assimilability of the people from the Indochinese peninsula, together with demographic considerations were often explicitly deployed to justify the scope of the reception. As Léo Hamon, one of the Presidents of the CNE pointed out: ‘At a time when the demography of our country is declining in a worrying way, immigration becomes a necessity. It is important to foster the acceptance of people who are most easily assimilated’.25 And so France’s Indochinese quota policy began in May 1975, less than a year after the official cessation of labour migration in July 1974. This was a moment when, despite the overall shrinking of the economy, a number  Ibid.  Report of the Comité National d’Entraide (CNE) of September 29, 1979 and November 26, 1976. Quoted in Masse, The Indochinese exception, 135. 24 25

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of industries, particularly in the car sector, were not yet affected by the economic crisis.26 The ‘Indochinese’ were doubly more welcome as their low skills not only fitted the needs of these industries but because of their—highly racialised—reputation for being ‘docile’, ‘serious’, ‘discreet’ workers outside the sphere of influence of the unions.27 The conditions they needed to fulfil in order to obtain temporary and renewable work cards were consequently explicitly different to the procedures that applied to other groups of asylum seekers and refugees. As early as June 1975, instructions were given to the Prefecture to ‘ensure as soon as possible both placements for them … and the issuing of the necessary work permits’.28 The preferential treatment they received included a wide range of benefits: the right to a non-temporary work card on the presentation of a three-­ month, rather than a year-long, contract even when an individual was working on a part-time basis; the right to apply for any job without regard to the general employment situation; the creation of specific sections reserved for them at the national employment agency; and financial incentives offered to employers to encourage their hiring.29 By the early 1980s, a reputation of being docile workers was even more valuable as it was a time of major strikes in car factories. These strikes involved a significant number of workers from North Africa, and the ‘Indochinese’ were thus constituted in opposition to them, as an ideal labour force to replace workers deemed too unionised and politicised. And more generally the arrivals from south-east Asia were seen as an ideal group to replace Algerian migrants who had been arriving in growing numbers and were increasingly being constructed as a ‘problem’: a problem which might be solved through formal state repatriation measures, as part of what Patrick Weil has called the French government’s ‘Algerian obsession’.30 The success of the repatriation programme had been partly 26  Claude Guillon, ‘Le SSAE : soixante ans d’accueil des réfugiés,’ Revue européenne de migrations internationales 4, no 1–2 (1988): 115–127. 27  Michèle Guillon, ‘Les asiatiques en France’, Migrants-formation, no. 101 (1995) 6–17. 28  Circular 14–75 of the Ministry of Labour on Khmer and Vietnamese nationals of 3 June, 1975, quoted in Masse, The Indochinese exception, 159. Emphasis added. The Laotians were not included because the circular pre-dated the communist takeover in August 1975. However, the measures applied to the Vietnamese and Cambodians were extended to them. 29  Karine Meslin, ‘Accueil des boat people : une mobilisation politique atypique’, Plein droit, no. 70 (2006) 35–39. 30  After an unsuccessful attempt at forced removal, in 1977–78, a voluntary return incentive policy was finally introduced in 1983–1984. See Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers:

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ensured after the main firms in the car industry, Citroën, Peugeot and Talbot, had agreed to implement the voluntary return policy for North Africans in general and Algerians in particular. To off-set their loss they both received state funding, and had access to the pool of recently arrived new workers from the camps of south-east Asia.31 Overall, then, granting refugee status to the former Indochinese made it possible for the French state and key industries to remain in apparent compliance with the anti-­ immigration decree of July 1974 while providing industries with a needed and un-unionised workforce. We need to pay attention to how the persistent stereotypes about people from the Indochinese peninsula, far from being a reflection of their natural essence, were the product of a deeply racialised co-construction of minorities. As sociologist Karine Meslin has usefully pointed out, descriptors such as ‘docile’ or ‘hard working’, while apparently positive and contributing to a ‘good reputation’, only makes sense in relation to the reputations of other, negatively positioned, groups.32 If most of the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians refused to join the strikers or union members, this was first of all because of their great distrust of organisations identified as being close to the (far) Left. It was also because of the historical moment in which they were entering the labour market, with its scarcity of employment, the declining momentum of protest movements and the disintegration of the workers’ collectives. This context tapped into and reinforced some of the formative values of 1950s Cambodian society and of traditional Buddhist attitudes over respect for social superiors. Further challenging racialised ideas of their ‘docility’ as an innate trait, it conspicuously weakened over time and a whole range of attitudes to work developed among these workers. The social origins and the type of factory where they worked were important factors in the degrees of closeness and compliance they entertained with their employers. The stereotype of a docile, malleable and ‘participatory’ worker was often reinforced among those whose origins were bourgeois and urban and who worked in factories where the workers’ collective was weak. In contrast, in places with ‘working-class’ workers with educational resources that gave them a L’aventure d’une politique de l’immigration de 1938 à nos jours (Paris, Gallimard, 1991), 144–192. 31  Weil, La France et ses étrangers, 256–259. 32  Karine Meslin, ‘Cambodian refugees from docile workers? Genesis and ways of perpetuating a stereotype in migration,’ European Journal of International Migration, no. 27 (2011): 83–101.

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certain confidence and who worked in factories strongly marked by workers’ history, ‘docility’ was much less present.33 Overall, the docility of the former Indochinese, whether real or projected, constituted a social surplus-­ value on the labour market that reinforced the political added value that they had brought to the asylum market. Finally, the arrival of thousands of people who had left communist states in south-east Asia was seen to have potential electoral advantages, with the government offering them naturalisation—and therefore voting rights—in the hope that they were sufficiently anti-communist and grateful for having been welcomed to vote for it.34 A circular from the Ministry of the Interior allowed them to get round the lack of the standard civil status document, normally necessary for naturalisation, by giving their word of honour, while the Hmong could even apply for naturalisation as soon as they arrived without being subject to a period of residence. These provisions were explained by Jean Sainteny, the head of the CNE, as due to the fact that the Indochinese were all ‘potentially French’.35

The Politics of Human Rights: against ‘Third-Worldism’. In other countries in Europe, while the arrival of ‘boat  people’ excited public and political opinion, it did not, by and large, elicit intellectual controversy. The arrival of thousands of people from south-east Asia to France, by contrast, did. The particular status of public intellectuals, and their relationship with the media and politics ensured that their positions became entangled with domestic politics and the wider diplomatic and geopolitical stakes involved in what became the strongest resettlement programme in Europe. The mobilisation of French intellectuals, followed by the high levels of popular enthusiasm for the boat people, developed especially after 1978, with the much-reported tragedy of the vessel Hai Hong, which went adrift in the China Sea.36 Following this event, Bernard Kouchner one of the co-founders of Médecins Sans Frontières and the philosopher André  Ibid.  Masse, The Indochinese exception, 23 and 116. 35  Report of the Comité National d’Entraide (CNE) of the 2nd of July 1976. Quoted in Masse, The Indochinese exception, 141. 36  Ultimately 230 of its 2500 passengers would be resettled in France. 33 34

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Glucksman, launched the well-publicised operation Un bateau pour le Vietnam (A Boat for Vietnam).37 The idea of chartering a boat to rescue people at sea was, in late 1978, soon supported by intellectuals, politicians and media personalities from all political sides who came together on the committee. They included Sartrians, notably Sartre, de Beauvoir and Pontalis; former leftists and Maoists who had turned to liberal center-left and anti-communism, such as Brauman, Glucksmann, Revel, Furet and Broyelle; the left intellectuals, Foucault, Lacouture and Todd; anti-­ communist liberals, Aron, Revel, Ionesco and d’Ormesson; the prominent religious personalities Rabbi Josy Eisenberg and Cardinal François Marty; artists including Montand, Signoret, Bardot, and Bedos and supporters from abroad, most prominently the German writer Heinrich Böll. L’île de Lumière, the organisation’s ship, chartered in early 1979, gave its name to Kouchner’s best-selling book, an account of his journey in the South China Sea, published in 1980. The original goal was transformed, partly due to the high level of donations. What was originally intended to be a salvage freighter became a hospital ship on which survivors were given treatment. With two journalists from Antenne 2, one of the main French television channels, on board, it undertook a high-profile nine-month voyage to the South China Sea, before navigating up the Mekong to Cambodia and being the first Western ship to bring in supplies to a Phnom Penh, just ‘liberated’ by the Vietnamese. During 1979, Un bateau pour le Vietnam diversified its actions and gave numerous press conferences, especially in the major Parisian hotels. It was in this context that Kouchner and Glucksman organised, in June 1979, a meeting between Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron, the two most French prominent intellectuals of the time who had parted ways several decades earlier over political differences. Sartre was a Marxist, close to the Communist party until the Hungarian revolution of 1956, and Aron was rooted in the liberal right. Given ‘the urgency of saving lives’ they pleaded the cause of the boat people together in front of French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The President had already adopted the Indochinese immigration quota policy for a number of years, and so, despite later claims, it was obviously not this meeting that persuaded him to do so. The significance of their encounter lay more in the staging. The 37  Glucksman was a philosopher, a writer and an activist, member of the French ‘new philosopher’ school, known for promoting the idea that Marxism leads inevitably to totalitarianism, tracing parallels between the crimes of Nazism and Communism.

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handshake between Sartre and Aron was immortalised by photographs whose rights were sold to over one hundred news agencies around the world.38 The meeting embodied the idea that ‘the boat  people’ transcended political differences and demanded that all sides needed to abandon ideological splits in the name of the moral cause of rescue. At the same time, there were increasing numbers of petitions for the boat people, signed by personalities from across the political spectrum, with the exception of the Communist Party; the cause was so popular that personalities from the media and political fields, especially on the right, adopted Cambodian children: they included Michel Drucker, Charles Million, Philippe Douste-Blazy and Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, whose adopted daughter would accuse him in a book published some decades later of having used this opportunity to soften up the Asian community and public opinion for electoral purposes.39 However, ‘it was not enough for a small group of individuals to launch the idea of a boat to rescue the refugees from Southeast Asia, to end up overcoming the most established splits among the French intelligentsia’, contrary to Glucksman’s statement.40 These splits were in fact already diminishing. The operation that brought ‘an ideology that dared not speak its name—humanitarianism—to the heart of the French public space took place at a time of shifts in intellectual and political life and profound transformations in ideological and intellectual paradigms.41 We therefore need to push at any idea that the success of the media coverage surrounding the boat people can be reduced to the natural result of a humanistic commitment to a cause so that it transcended all political splits. This, despite the words of their supporters who all justified their actions by referring to the urgency, morality and the duty of humanity to respond to people in distress in a deliberately apolitical language. Barely four years earlier (1974), the French translation of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago had profoundly reconfigured the relationship  Davey, Idealism beyond Borders, 197.  Michel Drucker was a famous television producer and a TV animator. Charles Million and Philippe Douste-Blazy were two prominent French political figures. See Anh-Dao Traxel, La fille de cœur: souvenirs (Paris, J’ai lu, 2006), 380; and Anh-Dao Traxel, Chirac une famille pas ordinaire (Paris, Editions Hugo et Compagnie, 2014), 236. 40  André Glucksmann, ‘La preuve par le Cambodge’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 November 25 1979. 41  François Cusset, La décennie. Le grand cauchemar des années 1980 (Paris, La Découverte, 2006), 34. 38 39

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within and between the intellectual field and the political field around the concept of anti-totalitarianism. The publication of this book was an opportunity for a number of anti-communists or disappointed Maoists, Glucksman among many others, to include communism with fascism in the concept of totalitarianism, to denounce ‘the blindness of the left’ to communist crimes and to discredit a still powerful Marxism. Enzo Traverso showed that the crimes of the Soviet regime had in fact been known for a long time in France and elsewhere, at least since the Khrushchev report (1956), the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s first book (1962), the publication of excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago in the Times Literary Supplement (1968) and the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to its author in 1970.42 France did not ‘discover’ Soviet crimes in the mid-1970s but had, along with Italy, owing to the importance of their communist parties, remained aloof from the growing movement to make totalitarianism a ‘weapon of combat’ against communism, a movement which had in fact, its roots in the early days of the Cold War and could be found almost right across the Western bloc. The ‘discovery’ of Soviet crimes was thus largely staged. The American historian and student of Paxton, Christofferson, has shown that anti-totalitarian discourse as a form of anti-­ communism was developing in France at a time when it was elsewhere giving way to anti-imperialism, thanks largely to the Cuban revolution, the Vietnam War and anti-colonial movements. Its late development in France was mainly a response to considerations of strict internal policy: to prevent the rise to power of the Union of the Left, an electoral alliance sealed in the mid-1970s between the French communist and socialist parties around ‘le programme commun’ (common programme).43 Anti-­ totalitarian discourse as anti-communism was all the more powerful as the ‘new philosophers’ who fostered it, including Glucksman, Bernard-Henry Lévy and Pascal Bruckner, were the first intellectuals to invest their time and attention in the media. This new paradigm shift in the politics of French intellectuals was so important that it was carefully followed by the CIA, which has long been involved in the global cultural war. Jean Paul 42  On these questions see: Traverso Enzo, ‘Le totalitarisme. Histoire et apories d’un concept,’ L’Homme et la société no. 129 (1998): 97–111; Michael Scott Christofferson, Les intellectuels contre la gauche. L’idéologie antitotalitaire en France 1968–198 (Paris, Agone), 466; Cusset, La décennie; François Hourmant, Le désenchantement des clercs : Figures de l’intellectuel dans l’après-Mai 68 (Rennes, PUR, 1997), 264. 43  Christofferson Michael Scott, Les intellectuels contre la gauche. L’idéologie antitotalitaire en France, 1968–1981, (Paris, Agone, 2014): 624.

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Sartre was monitored, the texts of the new philosophers studied at length and colloquia and conferences organised via screen organisations by the CIA agents based in Paris to promote the change of paradigm.44 Culture and theory were indeed seen as crucial weapons for promoting American interests and the new anti-Marxist, anti-Soviet, and neo-liberal atmosphere in France was viewed as a new essential datum. It also was seen as offering a way to divert public attention from the wars waged by the United States and the CIA in Latin America in particular.45 These ideological transformations also contributed to those of the field of international solidarity. In a certain way, anti-totalitarianism found its counterpart in the ‘sans-frontiérisme’ (lit. without-borders-ism), which reconfigured tiers-mondisme (Third-Worldism) in specific ways. Tiers-­ mondisme encompassed movements, political leaders and thinkers who attributed the ‘underdevelopment’ of the Global South to the ongoing legacy of colonialism, arguing that it continued to be expressed, but through different institutions and forms. It also asserted that the revolution would come from the Third World, and here the Cuban Revolution, the African anti-colonial struggles and the revolutionary struggles of South America were seen as leading the way. Against this, sans-frontiérisme emerged as part of a shift in political ideology towards an apparently apolitical advocacy of human rights.46 But, like anti-­ totalitarianism, from which it derived, it was fundamentally anti-­communist and anti-revolutionary. In this sense, Un bateau pour le Vietnam, marking the turn towards the ‘sans-frontiériste spectacle’ can be analysed as a sort of a revision or a ‘re-examination of forms of political activism of tiers-­mondisme’.47 The choice of the name—A boat for Vietnam—exactly the same name as that of the great campaign for Hanoi organised by the French communist party in 1968 to support the Vietnamese against the United States, was highly meaningful. It fuelled the idea that the situation of oppression was the same, simply that the oppressor had changed, with the Americans 44  ‘France : Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals’, CIA. Directorate of Intelligence,1985, declassifed in 2011, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-­ RDP86S00588R000300380001-­5.PDF. Quoted in Gabriel Rockhill, ‘Quand la CIA s’attelait à démanteler la gauche intellectuelle française’, Médiapart, April 20, 2017. 45  Ibid. 46  On this see Moyn, The Last Utopia. But for a critique see Seyla Benhabib, ‘Moving beyond False Binarisms: On Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia’, Qui Parle 22, no. 1 (2013): 81–93. 47  Davey, Idealism beyond Borders, 346.

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having been replaced by the communist Vietnamese. Rony Brauman, director of the Médecins Sans Frontières, himself acknowledged this, years later, accepting there was ‘the idea of making Médecins Sans Frontières a machine … for something like an anti-communist war, a soft war’.48 Several of the people who initiated and campaigned with Un bateau pour le Vietnam at the end of the seventies were indeed repentant communists, Maoists or Trotskyists. In fact they were often the very same ones who had campaigned, ten years earlier, in 1968, for Vietnam and against the Americans in the ‘Comités Vietnamiens de base’ (Vietnamese base committees), like Kouchner or Jean Chesneaux. The latter, a former member of the French communist party and former head of an Indochina Solidarity Front against American imperialism in the 1960s, was for the example in the 1970s the author of an article published in Le Monde with the symbolic title: ‘Third World Year Zero’.49 Another factor fed into the raising of the stakes around Vietnam on the non-political level, and that was internal competition within the expanding world of humanitarian activity. A few months after the operation ‘Un bateau pour le Vietnam’, Kouchner found himself increasingly sidelined and left Médecins sans Frontiers. Its new leaders were now actively trying to carry out their own ‘coup’, all the more so as Kouchner was about to launch a new organisation which would compete with theirs: Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World). As such, Médecins sans Frontiers organised the ‘March for the survival of Cambodia’, which took the form of a procession of ‘opinion leaders’ across the Cambodian border. Launched on 6 February 1980, it assembled personalities from both right and left of the political spectrum who walked along the border, in front of the cameras, in a ‘Kouchner without Kouchner type of show’.50 The march brought together resistance fighters and high-profile survivors of genocide or persecution, including Elie Wiesel, Charles Aznavour, Ilios Yannakakis; media intellectuals such as Bernard Henry Levy and American celebrities Liv Ullman and Joan Baez. It also mobilised politicians across the spectrum, including liberals like Alain Madelin, Gérard Longuet, Bruno Mégret and the socialist-reformists Michel Sapin and Claude Evin. Once 48  Elsa Rambaud, Médecins Sans Frontières, Sociologie d’une institution critique (Paris, Dalloz, 2015), 203. 49  Hugues Tertrais, ‘La Cimade, l’Indochine et ses réfugiés (1969–1979)’, in Dzovinar Kevonian, ed., La Cimade et l’accueil des réfugiés : Identités, répertoires d’actions et politique de l’asile, 1939–1994, (Nanterre, PUR, 2013). 50  Rambaud, Médecins Sans Frontières.

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again, the event presented itself as apolitical and grounded on the principle of saving lives but was in fact highly ideological, since its leaders, Brauman and Malhuret, had accepted funding from the International Rescue Committee (IRC), then close to the CIA, which provoked considerable dissent within Médecins sans Frontières.51 Four years later, Médecins sans Frontières founded Liberté sans frontières (LSF—Freedom without Borders) and held a high-profile conference ‘Le tiers-mondisme en question’ (‘Questioning Third-Worldism’), which aimed to ‘get beyond ready-made thinking about the Third World’, and to which no thinker from Africa, Asia or Latin America was invited. It provided a particularly eloquent example of the highly political dimension of apparently neutral humanitarian initiatives based on the myth of a disembodied commitment. The creation of LSF, which brought together a large number of dissidents from the East, followed an agreement between its main initiator, Malhuret, and American neoconservatives, and which enabled MSF to receive subsidies from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organisation aiming to export US soft power through civil society.52 The reception of the boat people in France was thus part of a gathering consensus, explicitly humanitarian and implicitly anti-communist and anti-­ revolutionary, which built upon the promotion of human rights as a way of moving away from ideological clashes increasingly considered obsolete. This consensual logic was based on a discourse of morality that transcended political division, and its existence in French public life partly explains why the reception of the boat people was maintained even when the government changed, and continued under socialist President François Mitterrand once he came to power in 1981. Even more so given that the new President claimed from the start as an ally of the United States, and in a series of acts over the following years—from multiple summit meetings to the expulsion of USSR diplomats and taking the US’s side in the Euromissile crisis—proved that this was not empty rhetoric.53

 Elsa Rambaud, Médecins Sans Frontières.  Davey, Idealism beyond Borders, 346. The same Malhuret would shortly afterwards be appointed Secretary of State of a newly created Human Rights Secretariat before joining right wing political parties, the RPR and the UMP where he was in charge of Nicolas Sarkozy’s relations with intellectuals. 53  Ludivine Bantigny, La France à l’heure du monde. De 1981 à nos jours (Paris, Seuil, 2013), 222–227. 51 52

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Partisan, demographic, economic, diplomatic and political concerns as well as social and ethnic stereotypes and the reconfigurations of the intellectual and political fields all came together to shape the exceptional reception of the people of the Indochinese peninsula in France. As we have seen, this context and the fiction of France’s resettlement programme as the reception of individually identified refugees, reinforced by the performance of administrative procedures as much as by media coverage of the stories and testimonies of ‘boat people’, placed OFPRA in a difficult situation. It was pushed by the public authorities to doubly close its eyes. To turn a blind eye to the frauds, and to the mismatch between the requirements of the Geneva Convention and the complex stories of individual asylum seekers in which political and economic motives, individual and collective fears, the rejection of war and distrust of communism were often all intertwined.

Turning a Blind Eye These refugees were the most popular and welcomed … in France. But they were privileged fugitives, automatically accepted as refugees, and no one had noticed!54 And why were they accepted? Because Vietnam—a symbolic country—was also a bit of a special country, because of our love for it, because of the stakes accumulated by two successive wars.55

Contrary to these statements by Bernard Kouchner, the reasons for departure and the profiles of the applicants for asylum were in fact known to the public authorities. This can be seen in particular from Jean Pierre Masse’s study of 520 asylum applications to OFPRA, from the institution’s activity reports and archives, and from the major study commissioned by the President of the Republic in the early 1980s.56 Both Jean Pierre Masse and the two researchers, Condominas and Pottier, carried out their studies to understand why the Indochinese people had gone into exile. Masse based his work on the statements of people in the OFPRA files, while Condominas and Pottier drew on interviews conducted in the refugee camps of south-east Asia. For us the significance of their work lies in showing, in the context of a high rate of successful asylum applications,  My emphasis.  Bernard Kouchner, Refugees, April 1990, 41. 56  Masse, L’exception Indochinoise, 46–52; Georges Condominas and Richard Pottier, Les réfugiés originaires de l’Asie du Sud-Est, Report to the Président of the République (Paris, La Documentation française, 1983). 54 55

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how public institutions negotiated the gaps between what was expected from asylum seekers on the basis on the Geneva Convention on the one hand, and their statements on the other. The study conducted by Georges Condominas and Robert Pottier covered the period 1975–1980, and took the form of semi-structured interviews conducted by a team of researchers, in refugee camps and in the countries of origin. The study constructed a typology of the causes of departure, categorised by national group. Vietnamese flight after 1975 was explained by a variety of reasons, both political and economic: fear of unemployment and being sent to the new economic zones, fear of political re-education, and difficulties in daily life. The motivations of the Chinese of Vietnam were labelled as political even if the role played by economic considerations was considered significant since the majority would leave in March 1978, after the Vietnamese government abolished private trade and launched a policy of expulsion of the Chinese minority. In contrast, among Chinese traders in Laos, economic motives were considered to be predominant. Researchers considered the motives of Cambodians who fled before 1979 under the Khmer Rouge regime to be clearly political, although from that date on, it was famine that would explain most of the departures. The Laotians’ motives were labelled as both political and economic, in the same vein as for the Vietnamese. Overall the research demonstrated the range of motives underlying flight, disaggregated by national group, professional affiliation and moment of departure. The motivations of some groups—for example, Cambodians who left before 1980—were seen as clearly political, while others—Chinese traders from Laos—as clearly economic. Between these extremes other, groups—the general Vietnamese population and Laotians—were seen as having been motivated by a mixture of factors. Despite this more granular understanding, and despite the research’s wide dissemination, the practice of near-­automatic granting of refugee status lasted for several years after the writing of the study, while the image of this population as political refugees par excellence, and as being above all suspicion, still continues to imbue collective memories.

Asylum Applications Lodged with OFPRA ‘I am seeking political asylum in France because I know that my sister lives in Chambéry’.

The asylum claims analysed in Jean-Pierre Masse, were lodged between 1980 and 1990. When using them as a source, we need to be mindful of the

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fact that they mainly reflect what the applicants believed OFPRA expected of them. Nevertheless, they stand as a useful source, giving us a good idea of the types of applications that officials at the time considered and to which they granted a favourable outcome. Masse’s study—which reinforced the findings of Georges Condominas and Robert Pottier—found that the most common argument put forward in the accounts was the rejection of communism. Statements such as ‘I don’t like the communist regime’, ‘I can’t stand the new regime’, were found most frequently, such as this example: ‘I am asking for political asylum in France for the following reasons: my country has been invaded by communists. I don’t think I’ll stay there because life there was very unhappy. I must seek a country for my political asylum in order to escape the Communists. France is the country I know best’. While some applicants detailed the persecution they had experienced, or feared they might experience, most simply stated that they did not wish to live in a communist regime. The second major type of argument related to the economic difficulties and the deterioration of lifestyles which since the communist takeover. Finally, the third theme which emerged from the lodged documents were personal, often expressing a desire to be reunited with a member of the family living in France. Many accounts offer a mix of two or three of these arguments, such as ‘I do not agree with the Pathet Lao. I had a garage, but I wasn’t free to work the way I wanted. Moreover, getting paid was very difficult, sometimes I received threats: “you money or your life”. The tax had become very expensive. We really couldn’t manage anymore. The food was rationed. It was no longer possible to visit. In addition, I had a responsibility to my young brothers-in-law and sisters-in-­ law. So we decided to run away if we could’. Overall much of the actual content in these arguments was far removed from what today is considered legitimate grounds for granting an asylum application: It was not only that OFPRA was required to make decisions which would not stand up scrutiny when placed alongside the Refugee Convention, it was also constantly forced to manage a steady stream of obviously fraudulent applications. OFPRA has been inundated with false documents, false statements, suspicious certificates, interventions, pressure. And by necessity it has been forced to step out of its role and apply more flexible criteria to those who have escaped from the former Indochina than to foreigners from other parts of the world.57 57  Archives OFPRA, Activity Report of the year 1978, on South-East Asian nationals, DIR 1/2.

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From 1975 until the mid-1980s, OFPRA’S activity reports, still confidential until the end of the 1990s, were full of comments and complaints about fraud, and the use of false documents and false identities by Indochinese applicants. On 17 March 1977, a long unsigned letter, obviously from the director of OFPRA, was sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, under which he worked. It started with a note of warning: ‘France’s generous welcome to those who fled Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos has prompted a very large number of people to enter our country without complying with the regular procedures we have planned’. It continued with an apocalyptic description of the various methods by which ‘these people who have already too often lost the most elementary notions of honesty’ were entering France. First, they were entering through channels ‘that have sprung up all over Bangkok, Hong Kong and elsewhere’ to provide them with false documents, passes and passports. Second, they were using short-stay visas distributed ‘too generously’ by other consulates: ‘They land in Copenhagen, Madrid, Lisbon, Brussels or elsewhere and enter France clandestinely. They come from India, Pakistan, they hitchhike from Karachi or Tehran or in the holds of some ships’. The final stage of the problem lay with the laxness of French hospitality policies, which were ‘too readily accepting people’s word of honour or tolerating the establishment of places for faking papers in France itself’. The conclusion of the letter was clear: It is not desirable for the Agency to depart any further from the principles that have constantly dictated the recognition of refugee status … than circumstances have already compelled it to do so. Nor is it desirable for it to grant guarantees of refugee status to persons who have used false pretexts or dishonest or illegitimate methods to enter our territory and who seek by all means to stay.

Despite this very explicit signalling of extensive abuses within the system and the letter’s urgent use of language—channels, fraud, invasion, overflow, chaos and public disorder—the government continued with its quota policy. The priority was not the fight against fraud, but rather the opposite, to enable the reception of people and the granting of refugee cards to them: The identities and relatives mentioned on the safe-conducts were sometimes fanciful: the woman was not the man’s wife, the minors had other parents.

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At the CNE, it was not a question of quibbling over trifles, but of helping the thousands of Asians who needed urgent help. … The mission was to save who we could. The volunteers were empowered to draw up documents of official value on the basis of simple declarations: certificates of birth, marriage, and death. In view of these documents, the prefecture issued r­ esidence permits valid for three years and the Office issued its refugee certificates.58

Like Gilles Rosset, Jacqueline Massat, who headed the legal division of OFPRA at the time, also recalled the prevalence of fraud in the south-east Asia division. She remembered how OFPRA tried to hide it from the media. And gave as an example the discovery of large-scale fraud network involving 1200 refugees in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Rather than breaking the network, OFPRA management’s first concern was to avoid media coverage of the affair. Then there was south-east Asia. It really was a scam. There was a lot of skulduggery. Did I tell you about the false deaths? We acted like a registry office. When a refugee died, we were informed. At one point we got thousands of death notices. Especially from the 13th arrondissement (laughs). Well, they made death certificates based on refugee certificates. They were altering the refugee card of a guy who wasn’t dead. They were sending this card to their country. And they were bringing people in afterwards with this altered card. We calculated that on the 13th we’d got to number 1,200! We covered it up. We said to ourselves: if the press gets to talk about it, we’re FINISHED!59

Within the south-east Asian division it was also the very notion of falsification that seems to have been modified. Jeanne Ahier recounted several cases that she describes more positively as community solidarity rather than fraud: I think that culturally for this population … solidarity was of great importance for them. I wouldn’t call it social security fraud. I think the children of the neighbours were taken in, registered … in many, many cases out of generosity. In any case, the problem was that we ended up with a 55-year-­ old woman who had given birth to a child; or with siblings for whom the 58  Gilles Rosset’s un-published memoirs, written in 1993, and handed to the researcher in 2011. Emphasis added. Gilles Rosset was the General Secretary of OFPRA at the time. 59  Jacqueline Massat, head of the litigation section from 1952 to 1986. Interview of the 30th October 2008, collection of Oral Archives OFPRA/Archives départementales du Val de Marne/BDIC.

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timing was wrong because they were born three months apart. So I contacted the chancery and they helped me a lot … Madame Bordet and I remembered this case of a man who said in my office ‘I’m not your father’; and the children and the mother said ‘oh yes you are.60

Here we need to pay attention to not only the difference in officials attitudes and behaviour towards asylum applications during this period and today, but also to differences, at the time, between the treatment of people from south-east Asia and asylum claimants from other regions. The arguments used to justify the fraud committed by people of the Indochinese peninsula, in particular those put forward by Pierre Basdevant, then Director General of OFPRA, would never be applied to Africans in the same situation: Refugees find it very difficult to get used to the rigours of French civil status that are imposed on them for the many administrative procedures which they are obliged to undergo, because the notions of offspring, dates of birth, marriage, and adoption are much more vague or flexible in their country of origin than they are in France.61

The relaxed cultural relativism expressed here stands in stark contrast to the media coverage of the so-called Zairian frauds at the same period. Indeed, the fraud among the Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese would never be publicised or constructed as a ‘public problem’, neither at the time, nor later. Indeed, in 2008, OFPRA’s official history completely omits any mention of these frauds. It however devoted a whole paragraph to what it called the ‘first’ large-scale frauds among African claimants, which were, however, later than those from the south-east Asia. In the same year [1981], there was a marked increase in applications from Africa and, within this continent, the first large-scale frauds were discovered in the form of multiple applications from the same person, under different identities and nationalities.62

60  Jeanne Ahier, head of the Southeast Asia division between 1975 and 1987. Interview conducted on the 7 April 2008, collection of oral archives OFPRA/Archives départementales du Val de Marne/BDIC. 61  Jean Pierre Masse, L’exception Indochinoise, 123. 62  De la Grande guerre aux guerres sans nom, une histoire de l’Ofpra, Ofpra, 2007.

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Just as for frauds, that have different meanings according to the population that commits them, so do judgments on polygamy vary with the group that practises it. As a cultural practice it was treated with great tolerance when found in the south-east Asian population. Jeanne Ahier recounted the efforts of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to find solutions for polygamous families from the Hmong ethnic group. ‘There’s been a lot of discussion with family allowances about how to deal with this. And if I remember correctly, the first wife and children were considered the family group and the second woman as a single mother’. Polygamous Hmong families were even housed in shelters, as evidenced by the testimony of a former head of a housing centre in Rennes for whom the ‘problem’ of polygamy was then only a problem of logistics. In 1977 a family was announced. In addition to getting off the Paris bus wearing unusual clothes (…), there was this peculiarity: the father was officially bigamous. How were we going to find adequate housing for this Hmong family? In fact, the Hmong would be integrated without any particular problems, proof that a rural population is able to adapt to urban life.63

* * * The case of the reception the ‘boat  people’ from south-east Asia in France makes it possible to develop nuance analyses that explain too systematically the suspicion and rigour facing a group of applicants solely in terms of being produced by the sheer number of people involved. It also qualifies the commonly accepted view that the high rate of refugee statuses awarded from the 1950s to the 1970s can be explained by the low number of applications, and the high rejection rate in the period that followed by its increase. The almost automatic granting of refugee status shows that numbers in themselves do not explain the institutional responses to asylum claims. They remain one explanatory factor among others that need to be taken into account in a broader context. This case study thus shows that in a context of political will, a high proportion of asylum requests does not automatically lead to a policy aiming to reduce flows.

63  Luc Mainguy, ‘L’accueil des boat people entre 1975 et 1985’, Hommes et Migrations, n°1234, (2011).

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The quota policy came to an end in 1984. The automatic granting of refugee status to former Indochinese was then replaced by an individual processing of all asylum claims. The cessation of this quota policy led to a significant reduction in the number of asylum claims in the context of an increase in the number of applicants from other parts of the world. As a result, and at the request of the NGO, the national reception system, previously reserved for Indochinese, was extended in 1985 to all refugees and asylum seekers, without distinction of origin. Refugees from the Indochinese peninsula were thus ‘reintegrated into the common law of refugees whom they have helped to redefine’.64 This reintegration into common forms of treatment was marked by a decline in the number of people recognised as refugees. Even though a favourable bias persisted until the beginning of the 1990s, the differences in treatment between groups of nationalities started to lessen throughout the mid-1980s, and recognition rates were homogenised in the early 1990s. The logic of recognition based on membership of a national group, despite the absence of individual fears, then came to an end. Within fifteen years, ‘Indochinese refugees’ had become asylum seekers like any others.

 Jean Pierre Masse, L’exception Indochinoise, 24.

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CHAPTER 3

Germany: ‘Refugie-surprise’: The Unlikely Reception of Indochinese Boat People in Germany Marcel Berlinghoff

While in the first half of the twentieth century Germany, more than once, had been the generator and source of refugees, in the second half of the century the Federal Republic was to become a destination country for refugees of both European and non-European origin.1 One of the largest cohorts to arrive during the era of divided Germany were the so-called Vietnamese boat people: by private action and official resettlement between 1975 and 1990, some forty thousand Vietnamese and Cambodian men, women and children came to West Germany. As in the UK, a significant proportion of them were members of Vietnam’s Chinese minority. Unlike other refugee groups in Germany at the time—Chilean All translation of primary sources are the author’s own.  Klaus Bade, Migration in European History (Oxford, Blackwell: 2003).

1

M. Berlinghoff (*) Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Taylor et al. (eds.), When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983, Palgrave Studies in Migration History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64224-2_3

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communists, Tamil fighters or Turkish intellectuals—they were unanimously welcomed by a broad majority of the German public, one which covered the whole political spectrum from left to right and comprised all socio-economic groups. In this sense, Germany’s reception of the ‘boat people’ can be reasonably compared to its reactions to the mass movement of refugees across Europe in the summer and autumn of 2015. Then too, a large part of civil society engaged in refugee assistance and pictures of people bringing food, clothes and toys to main stations in order to greet arriving Syrian refugees became totemic of the new German Refugee Welcome movement.2 Indeed this was a moment when a specific culture of welcome (Willkommenskultur) explicitly infused public discourse with historical parallels and harked directly back to the reception of the Vietnamese refugees (Vietnamflüchtlinge).3 As in 2015, in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Germans invited refugees to their homes to celebrate Christmas together or enrolled in mentoring programmes in large numbers to better support refugee families. For those unable to give the time or open their houses to the newcomers, there were other ways of showing support, not least through generous financial donations. For the Vietnamese, as we shall see, appeals for donations collected several million Deutsche Marks. Some private individuals went further, and actively solicited funds to try and solve the problem at source, with the result that private emergency sea rescue campaigns—mostly prominently Cap Anamur—not only saved thousands of lives but also became embedded within collective German memory. Such was the momentum behind public enthusiasm for the boat people that no one, it seemed, wanted to be left out. As the president of one south-west German administrative district remarked, both private individuals and municipalities were literally ‘scrambling’ to get ‘their Vietnamese’.4 We should not, though, make the mistake of thinking that their reception was proof of a universal German enthusiasm for refugees 2  Frank Bösch, Engagement für Flüchtlinge, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen, 14 (2011): 13–40, 25. 3  See for example Benno Müchler: Als Deutschland sein Herz für Boatpeople entdeckte, in: Die Welt, September 1, 2015; Josef Joffe, ‘Flüchtlingshilfe: “Wir schaffen das” vor 37 Jahren‘, in Bengü Kocatürk-Schuster et  al., eds., UnSichtbar. Vietnamesisch-deutsche Wirklichkeiten (Köln, 2017), 66–69. 4  Herbert Spaich, ‘Demontage eines Grundrechts – Eine Dokumentation‘, in Idem, ed., Asyl bei den Deutschen. Beiträge zu einem gefährdeten Grundrecht (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), 40–94; 53.

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per se. Rather, this chapter explores just how particular this enthusiasm was, and how it in fact stood in direct contrast to Germany’s response to refugees of other nationalities. Superficially at least it appeared that public enthusiasm was justified: from the point of their arrival, with few exceptions, Vietnamese people and their descendants were fairly consistently represented by the press, public and politicians alike as humble, thankful, hard-working and educationally driven.5 Indeed what might be thought of as the ‘perfect immigrants’. Given Germany’s long-standing suspicion of other non-European migrant populations, and its less generous response to other refugees, the positive welcome and reception of the ‘boat people’ needs explaining. Was it simply that the Vietnamese, unlike other groups, were unproblematically ‘perfect’, or were there wider historical and structural factors which coalesced at a particular moment to create the ‘perfect welcome’? This is the question which underpins this chapter. To understand the dynamics that led to the reception and resettlement of more than forty thousand Indochinese refugees in West Germany, we need to unpick the specific historical, political and cultural contexts of this unlikely migration. We begin by outlining West Germany’s migration regime during this period, before moving on to explore the decisive factors which came together to produce the warm welcome of the ‘boat people’. We see how the underlying context of the Cold War combined with sympathetic media representation, federal dynamics, foreign policy objectives and the active role of transnational networks of humanitarian civil organisations to shape West Germany’s Vietnamese reception and resettlement programme. The chapter then moves on to discuss how these different factors played out over time and demonstrates the importance of understanding the interaction of international, national and local scales of concern when attempting to capture the dynamics of West Germany’s response to the crisis in south-east Asia. At the international scale, Germany’s relationship with and its commitments to the UNHCR’s 5  See for example Olaf Beuchling, Vom Bootsflüchtling zum Bundesbürger (Münster: Waxmann, 2003), 92–98; Phi Hong Su/Christina Sanko, ‘Vietnamesische Migration nach Westdeutschland. Ein historischer Zugang‘, in Kocatürk-Schuster, UnSichtbar, 6–23; Urmila Goel et  al., ‘Selbstorganisation und (pan-)asiatische Identitäten: Community, People of Color und Diaspora‘, in Kien Nghi Ha, ed., Asiatische Deutsche. Vietnamesische Diasopora and Beyond (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2012), 57–71; Uta Beth, Anja Tuckermann and Jörg Metzner, ‘Heimat ist da, wo man verstanden wird’: Junge VietnamesInnen in Deutschland (Berlin: Archiv der Jugendkulturen Verlag, 2008); Patrice Poutrus, Umkämpftes Asyl. Vom Nachkriegsdeutschland bis in die Gegenwart (Berlin: Chr. Links Verlag, 2019).

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resettlement programme set the parameters of its activity. However, this was not a fixed process but rather became (re)shaped at the national level not only by media coverage and the response of humanitarian activist initiatives, but also ultimately the passing of a new law facilitating the reception of ‘humanitarian refugees’ in West Germany. The local scale also proved an important, rather than a subsidiary part of the equation, and so the chapter explores the role of West Germany’s individual states (Länder), politicians and local reception practices, as well as the agency of the Indochinese arrivals themselves. For, as we shall see, people such as Ernst Albrecht, then prime minister of Lower Saxony, played a decisive part in constructing the moral framework within which Germany’s response to the crisis was popularly and politically understood. The chapter ends by showing how, although the ‘boat people’ faded from public view and became a normalised yet hidden part of life in West Germany, the persistence of particular tropes and stereotypes attributed to them in popular discourse ensured that they were periodically ‘resurrected’, often to act as a foil to newly arrived refugee and migrant populations.

An Unlikely Reception West Germany was not alone in the countries of western Europe in the late 1970s in needing to work out how to respond to migration. This section sketches how West Germany managed different types of migration in this period and so gives context to what we might characterise as the surprising welcoming of the Indochinese ‘boat people’. To analyse the circumstances, conditions, structures and outcomes of migration, the mobility of people, its governance and social settings, scholars have made use of the concept— and heuristic tool—of a migration regime.6 This perspective allows us to look beyond the international governance of mobility, to include the interaction of groups and individual actors—including, but not limited to, migrants—in their political, social and cultural struggles, as well as the decisions of courts and the socio-political and discursive ‘production’ of migration. If we think of West Germany’s migration regime in this way, we find three important threads which we need to pick up. First, this was a country dealing with a rising number of asylum applicants, which also, and 6  Frank Wolff and Christoph Rass, ‘What is in a migration regime? Genealogical Approach and Methodological Proposal’, in Andreas Pott, Christoph Rass ans Frank Wolff, eds., Was ist ein Migrationsregime? What Is a Migration Regime? (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2018), 19–63.

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second was, by the mid-1970s, living with the legacy of its ‘guest worker’ era. And third, we need to bring into view the ethnically framed immigration of the Aussiedler. These were people of German heritage from Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union countries who had exercised their right to come and live in West Germany—and also included Germans who had fled socialist East Germany. The latter two groups were usually excluded from political discussions of ‘immigration’ which tended to focus on the mobility and impact of Ausländer (foreigners). By contrast, both Aussiedler and East Germans were automatically treated as German citizens upon arrival. And yet, for reasons we will see below, it was the administrative structures created to support their civic and economic integration, rather than measures targeting Ausländer, which were to play a central role in the Indochinese reception programme. Of all of these different threads making up post-war migration to Germany, the most important group, both in terms of numbers and their representation in public discourse, were the so-called Gastarbeiter (guest workers): labour migrants who had been actively recruited from across the Mediterranean states of, among others, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia and Turkey. As a result of direct government policy, between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s over fifteen million workers—male and female—arrived in West Germany within the framework of bilateral recruitment treaties on temporary migration. Of these the majority were indeed temporary, with approximately eleven million leaving Germany either to return to their home country or to move on to another destination.7 Even so, that left a significant foreign-born population, and one which, from the outset consisted of a large proportion of women. The prominent role of women in this migration was to have unexpected long-term consequences. Once they were living in Germany, they were both able to find work and apply for dependant visas for their husband, father or brothers. It was through this chain migration that the number of foreign-born workers considerably expanded while laying the foundations for new communities in Germany’s towns and cities. Over time, even if Germans still thought of them as ‘guests’, as relationships formed between workers and they began to bring up families in Germany, they settled down in their ‘host’ country for the long term. When the 1973 oil price shock hit, it prompted fears of economic contraction, rising unemployment and inflation. In common with the response 7

 Bade, Migration.

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of other Western European countries, West Germany stopped all active recruitment of foreign labour, extending this the following year to ban all worker immigration from non-EEC counties.8 The government may have been able to legislate to end recruitment, but this was not the same as being able to repatriate its existing foreign worker population. And in fact many of its policies had the unintended effect of further strengthening Germany’s existing Gastarbeiter populations. Some guest workers, driven by the concern that they would not be allowed to re-enter the country if they left, sent for their dependants to join them in Germany rather than to risk returning to visit home. Similarly, child allowance reforms after 1975, which changed the emphasis of state support so that larger payments were made for children of claimants living in Germany than for those living abroad, led to many workers bringing their children to live with them in Germany.9 Despite the growing and solidifying presence of foreign-born workers in the country and second- and third-generation German-born family members, until the late 1990s West Germany maintained its self-­perception as a Nichteinwanderungsland (not a country of immigration).10 But this led to a profound disjuncture between the public’s mental picture of Germany and the evidence of modern German urban life, causing a tension which spilled over into its Turkish population’s everyday experiences and treatment at the hands of both the state and wider society.11 The manifest contradiction between a large and visible immigrant community living in a self-declared non-immigration country lay at the heart of political and public debates on migration and integration in West Germany well into the 1990s. While the so-called Turk-problem (Türkenproblem), as the growing Turkish communities in Germany’s big cities and industrial areas were labelled, dominated the national discourse on migration, the mobility of Western Europeans, other citizens of EEC-member states, and other 8  Marcel Berlinghoff, Das Ende der ‘Gastarbeit’. Europäische Anwerbestopps 1970–1974 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2013). 9   Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans. Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indianapolis University Press, 1992), 187. 10   Klaus J.  Bade and Michael Bommes, Migration und politische Kultur im ‘Nichteinwanderungsland’, in Klaus J. Bade and Rainer Münz, eds., Migrationsreport 2000: Fakten – Analysen – Perspektiven (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2000), 163–204. 11  Karin Hunn: ‘Nächstes Jahr kehren wir zurück’ Die Geschichte der türkischen ‘Gastarbeiter’ in der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005).

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migrants racialised white—North Americans, Swiss and Austrians as well as Israelis or Australians—was seen as unproblematic. Already in 1965— the heyday of guest worker recruitment—the Ministry of the Interior decreed four principles which would underpin German immigration policy. The second of these principles asserted that foreigners from non-­ European states, excluding citizens of allied Western states such as the USA, should not have the right to work (and live) in the country. The unpublished and strongly racialised reasoning behind this principle was driven by a presumption that unlike the citizens of Western nations, ‘Afroasians’ were inherently less capable of integrating into German society and the German way of life.12 Although this principle would not always be enforced, particularly where it collided with dominant corporate interests, it remained a central influence on German migration policy and discourse for the rest of the twentieth century and on into the new millennium. The recruitment stop of 1973 not only closed the doors to low-skilled workers from non-EEC-countries but also tightened rules surrounding the emergency entrance of those fleeing undemocratic regimes, persecution and unbearable living conditions. During the 1960s, political refugees from the Mediterranean fascist dictatorships, communist Yugoslavia and military-led Turkey had predominantly used labour migration pathways, rather than asylum claims, to enter West Germany. But after 1973 the situation reversed. Now migrants who wanted to earn their living in Germany, and who no longer could use labour recruitment schemes or family reunion as the means to do so, joined political or humanitarian refugees in making an asylum application to cross the border or stay and work in the country legally.13 Thus the numbers of asylum requests, which had been relatively low up to the early 1970s, rose to more than ten thousand in 1976 and topped one hundred thousand in 1980.14 Adding to 12  Bundesarchiv B106 69872, »Grundsätze der Ausländerpolitik (Beschlossen von der Ständigen Konferenz der Innenminister der Länder bei ihrer Sitzung in Berlin am 3./4. Juni 1965)« (VS—nur für den Dienstgebrauch); cf Berlinghoff, Gastarbeit, 151f.; Karen Schönwälder, ‘Why Germany’s guestworkers were largely Europeans: The selective principles of post-war labour recruitment policy,’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 27, no 2 (2004): 248–265. 13  Family reunion was one of the few legal migration channels left to migrants from former guest worker recruitment states. Nonetheless this was heavily contested and debates surrounding who counted as ‘family’ and up to which age children could join their migrant parents in Germany continued throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. 14  Ursula Münch, Asylpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Entwicklung und Alternativen (Opladen: Leske und Budrich 1996), 253.

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these asylum applicants with multiple motivations were refugees fleeing the political crisis in Poland, which had followed the declaration of martial law; and the political unrest in Turkey which was to culminate in the coup d’état in Ankara in 1980.15 Once in Germany these asylum seekers sometimes directly joined family members already in the country or became part of the country’s already significant Polish and Turkish populations. While the numbers of asylum applicants were still low compared to the massive migration movements in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War or in the high-times of labour migration, they were nevertheless interpreted by some with alarm, and were followed by occasionally hysterical debates throughout the 1980s.16 Commentators did not only point to the growing phenomenon of false asylum claims and accuse economic migrants of misusing Germany’s ‘generous right of asylum’, but often deploying water-based and sometimes apocalyptic metaphors, politicians and journalists conjured images of ‘floods’ of asylum seekers (Asylantenfluten) needing to be ‘dammed’ to protect German civilisation. Alarmist language both reinforced and fed into wider disquiet over the effects of Germany’s growing ethnic diversity on its society. These were concerns which were not confined to the country right-wing margins. The Minister of Justice and prominent Social Democrat Hans-Jochen Vogel predicted during his four-month tenure as governing mayor of West Berlin in 1981 that ‘[w]ithin ten years, Kreuzberg will be our San Salvador’.17 Kreuzberg, as a district with a high number of Turkish population, had become a by-word for untrammelled immigration and lawlessness and was often spoken of as a ‘ghetto’ where decent Germans feared to tread. Immigration was constructed as such a problem that an anti-immigration policy explicitly aiming to reduce Germany’s Turkish population became one of the four priority topics of Helmut Kohl’s ‘immediate action programme’ upon his election as chancellor in 1982.18  Other larger groups came from Afghanistan and Pakistan.  See for example Klaus J.  Bade, Ausländer, Aussiedler, Asyl. Eine Bestandsaufnahme (München: Beck, 1994); Deniz Göktürk et  al., eds., Transit Deutschland. Debatten zu Nation und Migration. Eine Dokumentation (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2011). 17  ‘In zehn Jahren haben wir in Kreuzberg unser San Salvador.’ cited in Nina Grunenberg, ‘Was tun mit den Türken? Parteien und Gewerkschaften stehen hilflos vor einem selbstgeschaffenen Problem’, Die Zeit 5/1981. As early as 1973 Germany’s leading news magazine Der Spiegel had titled ‘The Turks are coming – save yourself if you can’. ‘Die Türken kommen – rette sich wer kann’, Der Spiegel 31/1973. 18  Deutscher Bundestag (BT) Plenarprotokoll 9/121, 7219(D)-7220(A). 15 16

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All this disquiet over the impact of uncontrolled diversity, which sat entirely in line with the national government’s aim to reduce immigration, saw the national state introducing a number of measures to restrict access to asylum. It re-established a visa requirement for anyone arriving from the main countries of migration, irrespective of their reasons for entry; stricter guidance over the criteria determining who might be designated a political refugee; and cuts on social benefits made available to asylum seekers. Together with the occasional refusal of work permits for asylum applicants, these measures aimed to make immigration less attractive to those suspected not to be ‘real’ refugees. To this end, between 1978 and 1993, no less than seventeen amendments, legally binding resolutions of the Interior Ministers’ Council and the federal government, were taken restricting German asylum law. Although public discussion on migration focussed on the movement of the Turkish and those from the southern periphery of Europe, in fact two other major groups considerably outnumbered them: the Aus- and Übersiedler, ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who had a right to ‘return’; and later, East Germans escaping or leaving the GDR through official channels. Both groups grew during the Cold War détente (1969–74) as socialist states increasingly authorised members of their German minority population to leave, and as East Germans successfully claimed their human right of being able to freely leave their country, a principle which had been established in the aftermath of the 1975 Helsinki conference.19 In the following decade some 20,000 to 70,000 Aussiedler, mainly from Poland but also from the Soviet Union, Romania and other Eastern bloc states entered Western Germany each year.20 And they were joined by around 180,000 East Germans in the same period.21 Yet this rising movement was neither regarded problematic nor publicly discussed before the late 1980s. Thus while ethnic Germans and migrants 19  Frank Wolff, Die Mauergesellschaft. Kalter Krieg, Menschenrechte und die deutsch-deutsche Migration 1961–1989 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019). More generally on the rise of ‘human rights’ in the 1970s see Moyn, The Last Utopia. 20  Totalling 475,000 (1975–1984). Bundesverwaltungsamt: (Spät-)Aussiedler und ihre Angehörigen. Zeitreihe 1950–2017, Köln (2018). URL: https://www.bva.bund.de/ SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Buerger/Migration-Integration/Spaetaussiedler/Statistik/ Zeitreihe_1950_2017.pdf. 21   Frank Wolff, ‘Deutsch-deutsche Migrationsverhältnisse: Strategien staatlicher Regulierung 1945–1989’, in Jochen Oltmer, ed., Handbuch Staat und Migration in Deutschland seit dem 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 773–814.

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who were racialised white—primarily those from the EEC or Germany’s Western allies—were made invisible through their lack of presence in public and political discourse surrounding immigration, Gastarbeiter were highly visible, deeply problematised and denied a long-term place in West German society. All this suggests that although Germany experienced substantial in-migration in the decades after the Second World War, it refused to view itself as a country of immigration. When placed in this wider context the enthusiastic resettlement and welcome of forty thousand ‘Vietnamese boat people’ no longer looks like a ‘natural’ humanitarian response to the crisis unfolding in the South China Seas, and certainly requires explanation. The ‘boat people’ were not European or Western (not to say ethnic German), nor high-qualified professionals. Yet here we find, in a particular historical moment, a profound challenge to Germany’s established and dominant discourses of migration. What had happened?

The Entry of ‘boat people’ into West Germany Since the fall or liberation of Saigon in 1975, representatives and followers of the South Vietnamese regime had fled the country. They went predominantly to the United States and the neighbouring countries, but also to France and to Australia. Early on America’s plea to other countries to resettle these South Vietnamese was partially answered by the Bonn government when it pledged to receive up to three thousand persons. However, the pace of arrivals was slow, so that under half of this number had actually been resettled in Germany by 1978. And by this point, even the promised three thousand refugees appeared derisory when set against the growing and visible problem being experienced by Vietnamese people fleeing their country by boat and overland. The roughly fifty thousand leaving each month by the winter of 1978 and into 1979 included a significant proportion of ethnic Chinese who had been used as scapegoats for the regime’s emerging economic crises. Here we will explore how Germany became drawn into an international crisis in which it apparently had little interest or reason to intervene, for unlike both France and Britain it had no colonial legacies that tied it to the region, and unlike Britain its merchant shipping was not picking up significant numbers of rescuees. Instead, we find that the major driving forces behind Germany’s response to the ‘boat people’ included the geo-political parameters of the Cold War, extensive media coverage, the federal dynamics of German refugee admittance and historical legacies framing its resettlement discourse.

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We have already seen how the large-scale arrival of foreigners from south-east Asia to Germany could not have been predicted from its more general attitudes towards migrants. At this point though, we need to widen our analysis to think about how refugees as a category, and in particular, how refugees during the Cold War, might complicate the picture. Until the 1970s, post-war refugee migration to West Germany originated predominantly from the Eastern bloc, notably, of course, East Germany. Even so, numbers were small—except in 1956 following the Hungarian uprising and the Prague Spring in 1968—in the first two decades of its existence no more than four thousand refugees a year had officially sought refuge in West Germany.22 While in the aftermath of the Hungarian uprising West German authorities reacted to UNHCR quests for resettlement quotas with limited enthusiasm, arguing that it was still struggling to integrate ethnic German refugees and expellees as well as with ‘trans-zonal’ migration from East Germany, the public in contrast, welcomed the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian ‘freedom fighters’. For many they represented a resistance against Soviet domination that had failed in East Germany in 1953. Under public pressure, a pressure clearly framed by the Cold War, Germany finally officially accepted around eleven thousand Hungarians via the UNHCR plus a further thousand people, who came privately to live with families or friends. The pattern of Czechoslovakian refugee admission was similar and of a comparable scale.23 Things changed, and became more complicated in the early 1970s with, not only more non-European asylum seekers generally, but specifically the arrival of Argentinean and Chilean refugees. These were Leftists or even communists seeking shelter in West German embassies after the military coups and subsequent campaigns of terror—including torture and ‘disappearances’—against dissidents of the new regimes.24 Now the political fallout from the Cold War was less clear cut: yes, they were ‘genuine’ refugees, but from CIA-backed regimes which were Western allies in the global fight against communism. Controversial discussions followed,  Poutrus, Umkämpftes Asyl.  Cf. Patrice Poutrus, ‘Asyl im Kalten Krieg. Eine Parallelgeschichte aus dem geteilten Nachkriegsdeutschland ‘, Totalitarismus und Demokratie, 2 (2005): 273–288. 24  Cf. Silke Hensel, Barbara Rommé and Barbara Rupflin, eds., Chile-Solidarität in Münster. Für die Opfer der Militärdiktatur (1973–1989) (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2011); Jan Eckel, ‘Humanitarisierung der internationalen Beziehungen? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012): 603–635. 22 23

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both in the West German government and in public, which finally resulted in the admittance of token numbers of refugees: four hundred Argentineans and three thousand Chileans.25 So when public debates started on the admission of refugees fleeing socialist Vietnam, the Cold War order seemed to be restored to its former simplicity. But playing out unseen on the other side of the world, the reality was more complicated. The messy nature of post-war Vietnamese conflicts, which underpinned many individual’s reasons for leaving the country, as well as the complex regional geo-politics of south-east Asia where ethnic, ideological and strategic priorities within and between Vietnam and its neighbours played out in a constantly shifting array of formulations, were well beyond the gaze of most of Western Europe’s population.26 For the majority of West Germans it was simply enough to know that ‘the boat people’ had fled a repressive communist regime, often facing appalling conditions and dangers as they did so. This narrative was powerful and politically galvanising. For the Conservatives in parliament the Vietnamese joined the ‘95% of the world’s refugees [who were] fleeing Marxism’,27 and so fitting in with the rising number of East Germans exiles fleeing state socialism to the capitalist West.28 This shifted the terms of the refugee debate within West Germany. Whereas the ideological battle lines had become more entrenched during the debates surrounding the arrival of the Chileans—when conservatives had strongly opposed their admittance while social democrats and supporters of solidarity campaigns fought for their admission—now people across the political spectrum argued for relief for these ‘boat people’ in ­ bligation distress.29 Here we see the mobilisation of ideas of humanitarian o 25  Klausmeier, Vom Asylbewerber zum ‘Scheinasylanten’: Asylrecht und Asylpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland seit 1973 (Berlin: Express Edition, 1984), 27–32; Cf. Stephan Ruderer, ‘Die Beziehungen zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Chile 1973–1990’, in Silke Hensel, Barbara Rommé and Barbara Rupflin, eds., Chile-Solidarität in Münster. Für die Opfer der Militärdiktatur (1973–1989) (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2011), 32–35. 26  Beuchling, Bootsflüchtling, 48f; Cf. A. Lackshmana Chetty, ‘Resolution Of The Problem Of Boat People: The Case For A Global Initiative’, ISIL, Year Book of International Humanitarian and Refugee Law (2001), 8. 27  BT Plenarprotokoll 8/220, 17739 (D). The words were those of Christian Democrat MP Gerd Langguth, spoken during debate on the new humanitarian refugee law in 1980. 28  Cf. Wolff, Mauergesellschaft. 29   See for example Barbara Keys and Roland Burke, ‘Human Rights’, in Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde, eds., Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford

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towards vulnerable fellow human beings, regardless of ideology or ethnicity. Samuel Moyn has pointed to the emergence of the West’s preoccupation with human rights in the 1970s as a depoliticised, moral response to the perceived failures of the revolutionary political projects and anticolonial independence struggles of the previous two decades. These having failed, a new internationalist human rights ‘utopia’ would be created as a means to guarantee human dignity.30 As we discussed in the introduction to this book, while his argument has been challenged from a number of quarters, for Germany, his central proposition seems to hold true. In no small part the sea change in public attitudes towards refugee admittance was down to the effects of media coverage, especially the often iconic pictures carried in journals, magazines and shown on television. Images of helpless families huddling in a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean or of parents climbing the enormous walls of a cargo ship to bring their children on board touched the hearts and souls of a broad spectrum of the public and politicians alike.31 Although taking place thousands of miles away in the South China Sea, the urgent visual language of refugees in need immediately resonated with German public. Despite the physical distance separating the German public and the boat rescuees, these images in fact worked to tie them together, building as they did on collective German memories of refugees fleeing the Soviet army in winter 1944–5 and the pictures of civilian victims of the second Vietnam war. And crucially, unlike the pictures of other humanitarian crises of the 1970s, such as the wars and famines of Biafra and Bangladesh that came into western homes via television, they urged not only pity and donation but a more direct action in the form of rescuing and then receiving individual refugees. As Ernst Albrecht, then Prime Minister of Lower Saxony and rising star of the Christian Democrats, put it, when he cited his family’s discussions after watching the reports on the odyssey of the Hai Hong in the evening news day after day in late 1978, ‘[w]e couldn’t stand watching this anymore’.32 The reports of the Chinese freight ship, overcrowded with University Press, 2013), 486–502; Reinhard Marx, ‘Kontingentflüchtlinge’ – Asylrecht für ‘Freiheitskämpfer’? in Herbert Spaich, ed, Asyl bei den Deutschen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), 103–109. 30  Moyn, The Last Utopia. 31  For a visual history account to this see Lisa-Katharina Weimar, ‘Die visuelle Produktion von “Flucht” und “Asyl”’, University of Osnabrück dissertation, 2019. 32   ‘‘Das kann man ja nicht ertragen’, kommentierte Albrecht die TV-Bilder vom Flüchtlingsfrachter ‘Hai Hong’ und beriet mit Frau und Kindern, was da zu machen wäre.’

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Indochinese refugees, that was refused leave to land by the Malaysian authorities had brought the crisis in the South Chinese Sea into German homes. The powerful images had their effect. Together with his wife and older children Albrecht decided to stop watching and start acting, unilaterally taking the decision to welcome one thousand Vietnamese refugees in Lower Saxony, among them families from the Hai Hong. We should here, reflect on the degree of Albrecht’s autonomy which made this action possible, and which was unique among our case study countries. The semi-sovereign nature of Germany’s Länder gave their respective prime ministers far more independence—an independence which extended to being able to offer asylum of refugees separate from federal policy—than was ever attainable in centralised states such as Britain or France. Albrecht’s action seemed to capture the mood of the nation, and in opening Lower Saxony’s borders to the ‘boat people’ he acted vicariously for thousands of West German citizens who felt pity for ‘these people’ when watching the evening news. It had not only been the hearts of Christian Democrat partisans which had been touched, but also those of Social and Liberal Democrats. The well-orchestrated pictures of the first 163 rescued passengers of the Hai Hong landing at Hannover airport on 3 December 1978 showed refugee families covered in blankets, being fed and taken care of by Red Cross nurses and being personally welcomed by Albrecht and his oldest son. These refugees were delivered to German households in the weeks running up to Christmas, offering perfect material for the press keen to run uplifting stories of Christian or humanitarian charity: ‘Families invite Vietnamese for Christmas’, headlined the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, which described such offers of hospitality as part of a larger ‘wave of charity’ being expressed across the state.33 While we cannot rule out a degree of political calculation in his decision, one year before federal elections and his potential candidacy for the chancellorship, we cannot simply reduce Albrecht’s action to cynical opportunism, but need to see it as part of a bigger movement towards humanitarian action. So rather than positioning Albrecht’s actions as nothing more than a tokenistic political gesture, we can rather point to them as forming the beginning of a larger action-orientated response to the refugee crisis across Erlösende Tat, Der Spiegel 49/1978. 33   ‘Familien laden Vietnamesen zum Weihnachtsfest ein’, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, November 28, 1978.

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Germany. When in the summer of 1979 the influential Hamburg weekly Die Zeit started a campaign to save Vietnamese boat people, we can see the confluence of high-profile media coverage and humanitarian action. The newspaper had carried a piece highlighting the devastating situation on the island of Palau Bindong where journalist Josef Joffe had stayed for a week, accompanying an operation by the French humanitarian ship Ile de Lumière: Malaysian police boats circle around the island: from a distance of 500  meters, it reflects the South Sea romance. Countless, round-roofed stilts … Thin columns of smoke above the fire pit suggest picnic delights in the jungle. A tightly packed crowd of half-naked people reminds us of vacation fun in the crowded lido. Only when we moored to the jetty minutes later is it there—a hellish smell of feces and urine. There is only one official toilet for the 40,000 people on the island of Pulau Bidong—that is more than half of all Vietnam refugees in Malaysia.34

By focussing on individual refugees and their particular stories in his reportage, Joffe tried to move beyond accounts of the crisis as one of undifferentiated suffering, aiming to elicit his readership’s empathy. For example, a young man called Tran told his story: I was among the ‘best and brightest’, as they say in America. I graduated cum laude from Berkeley University and then flew back to Vietnam in 1974. At that time I was 24 years old and quickly became the second man in the Shell / Vietnam accounting department. I was fired from the Viet Cong in May 1975.35

Reader’s reactions to Joffe’s article were immediate and deeply felt, and the paper’s editors decided to launch an emergency appeal aimed not only at improving the situation in the refugee camps of south-east Asia, but also to fund rescue operations to bring people directly to Germany. Its appeal was accompanied by an editorial written by Marion Dönhoff, herself an aristocratic refugee that had fled her family’s estate in East Prussia in

34  Josef Joffe, Stehplatz in der Hölle. Das Vietnam-Drama geht weiter – Eine Woche auf der Insel Pulau Bidong, Die Zeit, July 6, 1979. 35  Ibid.

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winter 1945.36 Demonstrating the importance for her of setting the flight of the Vietnamese in a broader historical context—one which her readers would also recognise—her piece highlighted the refugee treks across Europe at the end of the Second World War. But she also set the Vietnamese experience within a far wider frame of reference, one which also drew in partitioned India in 1947 and forged a bridge from the deportation of fifteenth-century Sephardic Jews to present-day crises in Africa: I saw this phenomenon for the first time in the summer of 1944. At first it was a thin trickle that meandered from east to west across the East Prussian streets. The first were Lithuanians and Belarusians, sad, serious women with many children who sat on fully packed covered waggons pulled by small horses. […] Soon after, things started in Asia. With bloody slaughter, the Muslims separated from the Hindus in India, although they had lived there peacefully for centuries: a total of 18 million people gathered their bundles and fled—the Muslims in the newly emerging Pakistan, the Hindus from there to India. Since then, not a year has passed without people being massacred or driven out because of their tribal affiliation, religion or ideology anywhere in the world.37

Central to the editorial’s message was its announcement that Die Zeit would bring two hundred and fifty refugees to Hamburg in co-operation with the International Red Cross and the City of Hamburg’s council. Demonstrating the level of public support for the newspaper’s appeal, its campaign raised more than two million Marks within a few weeks, while similar campaigns by newspapers in other cities led to a rush of private offers of assistance ranging from clothing to jobs and housing offers for the arriving Vietnamese.38 The intensity of public reaction to the German media’s portrayal of the plight of the Vietnamese boat people was summed up by the situation in south-west Germany after local Christian-Democrats asked the electorate to invite Vietnamese boat people for their family Christmas parties. Here the public’s response far exceeded the number of refugees who had arrived, while in Hamburg a social worker noted they

36  Dönhof, Marion, Völkerwanderung des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, in: Die Zeit, July 27, 1979. 37  Ibid. 38  See for example Beuchling, Bootsflüchtling; Bösch, Engagement.

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needed to ‘start a calendar to arrange all the invitations we got for the refugees’.39 The close cooperation of Die Zeit with the City of Hamburg as much as Albrecht’s initiative as prime minister of Lower Saxony points to the importance of Germany’s federal structure and the independence of its individual states in determining refugee admission policies. This though, did not mean that the federal administration was entirely absent from the process. Up to this point in Germany’s post-war history, the standard procedure for asylum seekers wanting to claim refuge in West Germany was to enter the country and then notify border officials on their arrival that they wished to seek refuge. Until 1974, from this point onwards their case was handled by the central Federal Agency for the Recognition for Foreign Refugees in Nürnberg and applicants were housed in a central camp in close-by Zirndorf. With the camp becoming too small for the growing number of refugees, and their accommodation too expensive for the Bavarian government, this practice changed. So after 1974 foreigners claiming asylum stayed in the state where they had entered German territory or—if a state had exceeded its stipulated quota—were distributed to centres or camps in other states. Here they remained while their asylum application was processed by the Federal Agency.40 This process did not, of course, map well onto the Vietnamese refugees’ position. Reflecting this, in their case Article 22 of the German Foreigners Law 1965 was brought into operation, which allowed the Federal Minister for Home Affairs to ‘take over’ (Übernahme) responsibility for foreigners by decree. Even so, this only partly solved the problem. The administrative process of admitting refugees as well as the reception and accommodation of foreigners still remained the responsibility of the separate Länder. Without the active consent of a state’s prime minister, the federal government could not grant entry to any foreigners by decree or give any international commitment on to take a share of the displaced boat people. As a consequence, the Länder played a major role in admitting Indochinese refugees. This stood in stark contrast to, for example, the British situation where the national government made the decision to accept UNHCR refugees with no consultation with local government, but then expected councils to resettle refugees without giving them extra funds to do so.  Spaich, Demontage, 53; Beuchling, Bootsflüchtling, 94.  Poutrus, Umkämpftes Asyl.

39 40

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Agreements by the Länder, which consequently governed the entry of the Indochinese refugees between federal and state politicians, could by no means be taken for granted, and took the form of intense discussions within the Interior Minister’s Council. Here we should understand just how much of national-level action was in fact being driven by state-level initiatives. Before Albrecht’s public statement, although on the same day, the Interior Minister’s Council (Innenministerkonferenz) had debated new proposals for several hundreds of Vietnamese boat people to be taken in by Germany. So, Albrecht’s announcement that he would accept one thousand Vietnamese refugees in Lower Saxony not only went against all migration policy principals of his party, but also significantly out-shone the efforts of the West German government. Albrecht’s action then simultaneously challenged the socio-liberal national government and his fellow prime ministers in the Bundesländer to act with more generosity. What might have been a risky move, backed by public opinion, turned into a successful venture and stood as an example which other states were inspired to follow. So, in January 1979, the City of Frankfurt resettled 258 Vietnamese refugees from camps in Hong Kong, without any prior agreement with the federal government.41 As state-level initiatives accelerated, negotiations in the Interior Minister’s Council resulted in the commitment to resettle ten thousand persons in Germany in July 1979 via an agreement at the Geneva conference. By the end of August 1979, the West German government had started an ‘action programme for foreign refugees’, which allocated 64 million Marks and set out the resettlement and integration activities on which the funding might be spent. It also made clear that NGOs, including the International Red Cross, Diakonie and Caritas, would form an important part of the reception and resettlement process. But West Germany’s offer was soon raised to thirteen thousand refugees—a number that roughly matched the scale of arrivals after both the Hungarian uprising and the Prague spring—and again, later in 1979 its quota was extended to twenty thousand. This figure was upped again to 28,500 and again, so that in total 38,000 Indochinese refugees were finally resettled in West Germany. These figures included 23,000 people settled directly from UNHCR camps, those rescued by German ships and arrivals under the Orderly Departure Programme (ODP). By 1982, all arrivals from camps were halted, so that the remainder of Germany’s  Beuchling, Bootsflüchtling, 51.

41

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Kontingentflüchtlinge-quota could be reserved for family reunions involving underage children, spouses or parents. The successive raising of Germany’s quota-level was a reflection of the deep and sustained engagement of the Länder and the positive response of the German public to their arrival, but this did not mean that the states necessarily always kept humanitarianism at the heart of their initiatives or worked in entirely disinterested ways. This became most visible in the selection of refugees. Whereas Albrecht had sent his Interior Minister Wilfried Hasselmann to select refugees from both the Hai Hong and from refugee camps in Thailand and Malaysia, some Bundesländer tried to ‘order’ refugees à la carte, attempting to specify certain ages and levels of education, just as they were used to from the ‘guestworker’ era.42 Concerns over this ‘cherry picking’ approach led over time to the emergence of a more centralised procedure which operated under a general rule that the selected refugees should form a cross-section of the camp with regard to age, education and waiting time. Following this guideline, a team which included German embassy representatives and aid organisations chose a mixture of less qualified refugees, including those who had been living in the camps for long time, and those with good vocational training.43

Legacies of German Forced Migration It is useful here to pause and consider how the reception of the ‘boat people’ was framed in public discourse. Next to the general background of Cold War antagonism between socialist dictatorships and liberal democracies, Germany’s historical experience of forced migration was central to understanding of the Vietnamese experience. This did not include, of course, the deportation of forced workers and expulsions of civilians in the Second World War, with whom the majority of Germans did not identify, but occasionally commentators made explicit parallels between the experience of the Indochinese—particularly the minority ethnic Chinese—and the expulsion and deportation of German Jews from the Reich during National Socialism. In a piece called ‘The Jews of the East’, Der Spiegel assumed that the Vietnamese government’s goal was to make Indochina ‘Chinese-clean’, which aroused associations with Nazi efforts to make 42  See for example Franziska Dunkel and Gabriella Stramaglia-Faggion, eds., Zur Geschichte der Gastarbeiter in München. ‘Für 50 Mark einen Italiener’ (München Buchendorfer, 2000). 43  Bösch, Engangement, 33.

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Germany, and later Europe, judenfrei via forced deportation and the Shoah.44 Reinforcing this historical parallel, the article also reported on an ‘exit tax’ that had to be paid in gold to a middleman, another evocation of German-Jewish history of the 1930s, when for a time Jews wishing to leave Germany had to pay a special ‘emigration tax’. For those Chinese who did not go to labour camps or pay the exit tax, the magazine continued, two concentration camps would exist near Hanoi. And an unnamed European diplomat was cited: ‘[w]e call the overseas Chinese the Jews of the East, but they have no Israel’.45 In her editorial in the influential Die Zeit Marion Dönhoff even used the Nazi term ‘Reichsfluchtsteuer’(Reich flight tax) to explicitly place the Vietnamese policy into a very specific German historical context. While it might appear counterintuitive that sections of the German political public were keen to draw such unflinching parallels between their national past and an oppressive regime, these arguments served a widespread desire to underline just how far modern Germany had moved on from its Nazi past.46 Even so, the majority of the German public preferred to reach for a more comfortable and often personally resonant parallel: that of the twelve million German Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene (refugees and expellees) who arrived in West Germany during and after the war. Flucht und Vertreibung (flight and expulsion), had become one of the founding myths and lieu de memoire of West German post-war history, and through a process of historical extrapolation became the lens through which the Vietnamese experience of forced migration was framed. So when Dönhoff referred to the memory of the treks crossing East Prussia in her editorial, she was invoking a powerful topology which resonated strongly with her readership. The parallels between past and present were made most explicit when in the political debates over whether Germany should accept the ‘boat people’, a different descriptor, the term Vietnam-Vertriebene (expellees from Vietnam) began to be used. The use of this phrase ensured that all Germans would directly trace a lineage from these south-east Asian refugees back to German expellee ‘victims’ of Communist rule and forced relocation.47 In June 1979 the Christian-Democratic opposition in the Bundestag brought  ‘Die Juden des Ostens – ohne ein Israel’, Der Spiegel, 26/1979.  Ibid. 46  In early 1979 the TV-series ‘Holocaust’ had brought back to public consciousness to the German crimes of the Nazi era. 47  The term gained importance since the publication of a reportage about refugees in the Vietnamese-Chinese borderland undertaken by Die Zeit’s editor-in-chief in autumn 1978. 44 45

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in a request to rededicate all funds of development and reconstruction aid for Vietnam as a nation, to the benefit of expellees from Indochina. During the debate the MPs spoke of ‘the socialist Vietnamese government’s expulsion policy’ (Vertreibungspolitik), a policy which they saw as benefiting the Vietnamese state, which appropriate all the expellees left behind capital in the same way as did communist regimes after the departure of German Vertriebene from communist-governed Europe.48 Some went further, MP Hupka explicitly drew a line between the ‘expulsion … of around 10,000 Chinese from Vietnam’ with the German post-war experience, and urged fellow MPs to ‘condemn this expulsion just as much as the expulsion of millions of Germans from their homeland in 1945–6’.49 Appealing to a shared experience of victimhood produced a fragile solidarity that became expressed and re-worked as postcolonial charity. While these references were mainly used by the oppositional conservatives in parliament and public, more Left-orientated commentators also referred to Germany’s special responsibility towards people fleeing dictatorship, consciously mobilising the nation’s own autocratic history for progressive ends. However, the strongest symbol that set the boat people in line with the German Vertriebene (expellees) was the physical placement of the first groups of Vietnamese at the Lager Friedland. Friedland was a transition camp in southern Lower Saxony, close to the inner-German border, which as a Tor zur Freiheit (Gateway to Freedom) had hosted millions of German expellees, returnees and GDR-refugees since the end of the Second World War. Placing the ‘boat people’ in the same physical space as these previous, historically charged, arrivals on German soil constructed them as their direct heirs.50 Here they were registered, received medical treatment, and were given new, winter-proof clothes, taught basic language skills and some time to rest before they were sent to their receiving communities across the country.

See Theo Sommer, ‘Ein Hilferuf aus P’ing-hsiang. Hundertsechzigtausend Vietnam-­ Vertriebene hadern in China mit ihrem Schicksal‘, Die Zeit 44/1978. 48  BT Drucksache 08/3042; Plenarprotokoll 08/173, 13736(A). 49  BT Plenarprotokoll 08/161, 12850 (C). 50  Stefan Schießl, ‘Das Tor zur Freiheit’: Kriegsfolgen, Erinnerungspolitik und humanitärer Anspruch im Lager Friedland (1945–1970) (Göttingen: Schöningh, 2016).

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International and Transnational Aspects While internal factors such as public opinion, media coverage, federal politics and historical played a central role the resettlement of people fleeing Vietnam, they were underpinned by the strategic considerations of West Germany’s foreign office. The early 1970s had seen a fundamental shift in German foreign policy, a shift which resulted in the Ostverträge (Eastern Treaties) with the Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany.51 In finally settling their post-war borders and in the mutual recognition of the two German states, the treaties paved the way for both East and West Germany to establish official diplomatic relations with other states on a global scale. West Germany moved rapidly to take advantage of this shift, finally becoming a member of the United Nations in 1973. Here, as part of a wider strategy to improve its international standing and profile, and to mark a distinct break between itself and the National Socialist past, the West German government worked to promote UN structures aiming at preventing forced migration. And so having earlier in the decade taken a lead in codifying an international regime aiming at preventing forced migration, German diplomats could, in 1979, hardly refuse to accept UNHCR sponsored refugees: agreeing to a significant quota was therefore seen as essential to maintain its credibility at the UN.52 We need to remember that it is not only states that act at an international or transnational level, but that NGOs operate within, create and sustain these scales of action too. And when we look at the German response to the ‘boat people’ crisis, what very quickly becomes obvious was that it did not simply prompt established third-sector organisations to act. Just as Albrecht was moved to take matters into his own hands and make Lower Saxony a place of welcome for Vietnamese refugees despite national inaction, individual private citizens were also becoming impelled to respond. Decades after the fact, across Germany the names of Rupert and Christel Neudeck continued to stand for the private resettlement of 51  The Treaties can stand as a marker for the end of the post-war era, recognising the European borders established in 1945, especially the German-Polish Border following the rivers Oder and Neisse and recognising the sovereignty of the two German states. This paved the way for both the GDR and the FRG to establish official diplomatic relations with other states on a global scale. 52   Renate Finke-Osiander, ‘Die Initiative der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bei den Vereinten Nationen zur Vermeidung von weiteren Flüchtlingsströmen‘, in Otto Benecke Stiftung, ed.), Flüchtlinge in Europa (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1984), 19–25.

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more than ten thousand refugees to Germany through their work with the rescue boat Cap Anamur.53 Rupert Neudeck was a journalist who in February 1979 had spent some time in Paris where he had interviewed the French philosopher André Glucksmann, who had just returned from a trip to Malaysia. Instead of talking about the work of Jean Paul Sartre, Glucksmann reported on the Comité un Bateaux pour le Vietnam, an initiative by French intellectuals. As Karen Akoka shows in Chap. 2, this had successfully united France’s ideological factions to raise funds to charter vessels which were now criss-crossing the South China Sea searching for vessels of ‘boat people’ in distress.54 Neudeck, who as a child expellee had survived the flight from East Prussia after the war, was inspired by the French example of direct action to develop a similar initiative in West Germany. Together he and his wife founded Deutsches Notärzte-Komittee— Ein Schiff für Vietnam (German Committee of Emergency Doctors—A Ship for Vietnam). As in France, their plan to charter a boat rapidly gained numerous high-profile supporters, including one of Germany’s most prominent public intellectuals and Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, Heinrich Böll. The committee attracted enough donations to charter a ship—Cap Anamur—which was repurposed as a floating hospital and sent to the South China Sea to seek out and rescue boat people in distress. Soon Cap Anamur became a symbol across Germany for the rescue and resettlement of boat people. Its actions were not always uncontroversial, and its founders had a hard struggle to fulfil their aims, coming into conflict not only with the German government, but also with professional emergency organisations such as the Red Cross, which felt they were, and portrayed them as, dangerous enthusiastic amateurs.55 In fact this conflict with the Red Cross became part of Cap Anamur’s identity. In common with a trend which had become obvious right across western Europe since the 1960s, Germany had seen the rise of small-scale activist-campaigning pressure groups and 53  Frank Bösch, ‘Globalisierung am Wohnzimmertisch. Unbürokratisches Engagement für Flüchtlinge: Zum Tod von Rupert Neudeck (1939–2016),’ in Zeitgeschichte-online, June 2016, URL: https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/kommentar/ globalisierung-am-wohnzimmertisch. 54  Rupert Neudeck, ed., Wie helfen wir Asien? oder ‘Ein Schiff für Vietnam’ (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980). 55  Patrick Merziger, ‘The “Radical Humanism” of “Cap Anamur”/“German Emergency Doctors” in the 1980s: A Turning Point for the Idea, Practice and Policy of Humanitarian Aid’, European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire, 23 (2016): 171–192.

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NGOs. These were determined to solve the problems they saw as having been created by the post-war model of welfare capitalism and in the process were keen to set themselves apart from established charity working. In this new model of practice, donations were intended to go directly to funding action and not into a bureaucratic, often inflexible and expensive, apparatus that often was seen as being closely linked to state agencies and governments. The ‘radical humanism’ of these new NGOs often deliberately ignored larger-scale diplomatic and political considerations, focussing instead on directly helping people in desperate need. Derided by the Red Cross and other established charities as ‘amateur’, Cap Anamur nevertheless represented a very real threat to them, as it successfully attracted significant funds and publicity for its activities. This then was the background to the lobbying by the General Secretary of the German Red Cross, Jürgen Schilling, on a number of occasions of the German government against Cap Anamur, and his public criticism of its rescue missions as ‘half-humanitarian solutions’ and ‘acts of desperation’.56 With Cap Anamur sailing under German flag, the Federal Republic was morally obliged to take all of its rescuees, but government officials consistently challenged the applicability of this rule in the case of explicit private emergency missions. In their minds it was one thing to have a legal obligation to pick up fellow sea-farers in distress whom you chanced upon in your normal shipping routes, but it was quite another to actively seek them out with the purpose of resettling them in the West. Furthermore, the Foreign Office was adamant that it could not give guarantees to resettlement to rescuees who had been taken on board the Cap Anamur from other ships as this put them beyond the reach of the international laws of the sea.57 In a personal meeting between Neudeck and the Head of Division, Jestaedt, in late 1979, the West German government made its position very clear. Jestaedt claimed that Neudeck had betrayed the Foreign Office’s trust as he had failed to be honest with it about the Cap Anamur’s real intentions. Given that, the Foreign Office threatened to end all cooperation with the NGO. Ultimately this threat came to nothing—the government’s concern to appear to be actively welcoming the refugees and the Neudeck’s popularity together ensured that a compromise was reached. In the end, the Cap Anamur’s rescuees were included 56  Jürgen Schilling, interview with Deutschlandfunk, in Rupert Neudeck, ‘Ein Schiff für Vietnam’, in Idem ed., Wie helfen wir Asien?, 69–145, 99. 57  Ibid., 115.

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within West Germany’s overall resettlement quota, and by 1982, when the issue had become less prominent in people’s minds, the Federal government let the Neudecks know that no more of their rescuees would be resettled to Germany. Instead it would reserve the rest of Germany’s quota for family members who still remained in camps or had stayed in Vietnam. This brought this apparently successful example of private sea rescue to an end, although it leaves us with a question.58 If all the Cap Anamur rescuees were counted in the general West German quota, it raises the possibility that, dramatic and high-profile though its rescues were, they ultimately did not result in any more refugees being brought to Germany. Given that, was the Cap Anamur’s mission little more than a vanity project, as the Red Cross had implied, or did it ultimately save an uncountable number of lives as it claimed?

Integration Policies and Practices The first two years of boat people resettlement which followed Albrecht’s appeal in late 1978 were accompanied by massive public support and political will. Local authorities provided housing, the arriving Indochinese refugees had their expenses covered by the Länder-governments and were able to take advantage of subsidies for language courses and vocational training. The privately run Haus Nazareth, a protestant relief service, became one of the most famous reception centres, housing more than three thousand Vietnamese refugees from 1978 to the end of the reception programme. It was in centres such as this that the Vietnamese could find access to social care, language and vocational training as well as opportunities for networking with locals. All these services were provided on the assumption that after a year or so the Vietnamese would be able to find a job and become independent. While ‘normal’ refugees were distributed to the Länder according to an allocation formula, when it came to the ‘boat people’ each state government could decide how many boat people they were willing to resettle and how much funding they would provide to cover integration measures. And it was noticeable just how generous they were willing to be. In contrast to other foreign refugees, who generally had only limited access to social benefits, especially when it came to education and vocational training, the Indochinese were eligible for most of the same social welfare  Bösch, Engagement, 37.

58

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services as German citizens. Furthermore, their privileged status was reinforced by their immigration status, which gave them the right to work after only six months and an automatic right to remain in the country for up to eight years. Lower Saxony State’s Secretary Haaßengier rationalised it quite simply. When asked in an interview why Vietnamese boat people received so much more integration aid than, for example, Pakistani or Moroccan refugees, he answered: ‘These ones we get, those others just come’.59 By 1980 the Vietnamese refugees’ privileged status became regularised and clarified in a new law, which aimed to resolve their unclear legal position and the diverse ways in which they were dealt with across Germany. The new Federal Law on Admittance of Humanitarian Refugees (Gesetz über Maßnahmen für im Rahmen humanitärer Hilfsaktionen aufgenommene Flüchtlinge) allowed refugees to be admitted outside the regular asylum procedures through the creation of the new category of ‘humanitarian refugees’, a status comparable to refugees who had been granted full asylum. In doing so it became West Germany’s only refugee policy in this period that did not restrict migration and in fact also implied generous resourcing, as humanitarian refugees benefited from extensive social integration measures. The leading role of the individual states in West Germany in driving the reception of the Vietnamese arriving from the UNHCR camps would suggest that locality continued to play a part in driving the dynamics of the country’s resettlement programme. And indeed, we find that the administrative agency—and practice—of boat people reception diverged between both Bundesländer and local authorities.60 Even so, irrespective of any decisions made locally, we can still see a nationally consistent picture emerging. Beneath any superficial differences, what unified regional and local integration processes was the template the authorities used for their integration support processes. Universally, in another glimpse of how the Vietnamese experience could be linked back to the expellees, these had been developed and refined over the course of receiving and resettling the ethnic German Aussiedler. Both the transit camp infrastructure and the local processes for social assistance had been honed over a period of years,  ‘Vietnam: Erlösende Tat’, Der Spiegel, December 4, 1978, 62.   See for example Alfred Jensen: Integration einer privilegierten Ausländergruppe. Kontingentflüchtlinge aus Südostasien in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. PhD Dissertation, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 1983. 201–245; Beuchling, Bootsflüchtling, 84–112. 59 60

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meaning that there was already, for example, a well-developed employment placing service, vocational training networks and all Länder supported language classes to promote integration.61 For those who were resettled in Lower Saxony, which continued to assert its role as a leading safe haven for boat people, they benefited from a fully functioning and well-financed operation. Here, as in some other Bundesländer a three-stage procedure was adopted which was designed to ease the way for newcomers as they sought to build new lives for themselves in a very foreign country. After their stay in Friedland camp, where they were registered, received medical checks and were furnished with new clothes, the arrivees were sent to municipalities right across West Germany, but especially to ones in the east and the north-west of Lower Saxony. At this point Indochinese families were given a one-off payment of a thousand Marks, to help them furnish and equip their new homes, and then a further 1200 Marks each month from the local authorities. They were assisted with finding housing by local administration and local volunteer initiatives took responsibility for coping with everyday integration problems.62 In Hamburg, initial plans to immediately resettle its Vietnamese arrivees in individual housing from the beginning were thwarted through lack of available properties. Instead, people were accommodated in a temporary communal home (Übergangswohnheim) in a distant industrial district, where they encountered both practical problems of accessing services and work and feelings of isolation.63 Its first inhabitants were the refugees resettled by Die Zeit. Social workers were employed to assist and register the newcomers, get them access to medical treatment where necessary and settle them in orientation classes. After some months Hamburg’s resettled were given individual flats in the city’s biggest district of Grünthal. In common with Britain’s attempts at ‘dispersal’, the city administration tried to avoid establishing ‘ghettos’, but it also worked to facilitate contacts between members of its growing Vietnamese community as a means to support social integration. Despite these efforts, economic integration in Hamburg did not occur as fast as resettlement workers and the council 61  By that time other refugees had to wait for their recognition which could take much longer. 62  Bösch, Engangement, 34; see also Deutsches Rotes Kreuz, ed., 30 Jahre danach. Boat People in Deutschland (Beispiele gelungener Integration, o.O, 2009). 63  Beuchling, Bootsflüchtling, 90.

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had hoped. Throughout the early 1980s, most of the city’s Vietnamese population still depended on public or private assistance, such as unemployment and social assistance or public grants for education (BAFöG). Their access to the labour market was often obstructed by language barriers and Germany’s highly formalised qualification system for jobs which together served to exclude the refugees from work even where explicit racism was not present. Those who found work were mainly employed in crafts and technical occupations.64 For many first-generation arrivees, life in Germany was not necessarily easy, but for their children, who began their working lives having gone through the German school system and with both language skills and formal qualifications, the path was smoother.

Outlook After all the furore which had accompanied their escape from Vietnam and arrival in Germany, from late 1980 on public interest in the fate of the ‘boat people’ diminished substantially. Over the coming years they were to become increasingly invisible aside from occasional media reports discussing their ‘failed integration’, or accounts of racist hostility, such as the deaths of two Vietnamese residents in a Far Right terror attack on an asylum seekers’ hostel in Hamburg. Even so, and perhaps because of their invisibility, the Vietnamese community in West Germany by the early twenty-first century was widely perceived as a model immigrant community with high educational levels. Unlike Germany’s Turkish population, its cultural identity never became framed as problematic in public and political debates. After reunification, it became clear that, comforting though these popular stereotypes were, they could not be the whole story. Around the same time that Indochinese boat people were being resettled as Cold War refugees in West Germany, the East German government had been directly recruiting foreign labour from Vietnam. Bilateral agreements between Hanoi and East Berlin from the late 1970s led to some sixty thousand ‘contract workers’ (Vertragsarbeiter)—thirty per cent of them female— coming to East Germany.65 Most of these labour migrants found work in  Ibid., 106.   Patrice Poutrus, ‘Remigranten, Übersiedler, ausländische Studierende und Arbeitsmigranten in der DDR’, in Jochen Oltmer, ed., Handbuch Staat und Migration in Deutschland seit dem 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 967–995, 989f. 64 65

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manufacturing industries and, for all the rhetoric of a socialist international brotherhood, the authorities tried to keep them as separate as possible from the German population. Vertragsarbeiter were housed according to gender in separate communal accommodation and part of their income was automatically deducted and directly transferred to the Vietnamese government. In 1990, as the authorities began to recognise that end of the East German state was a realistic possibility, most of the Vietnamese workers were sent back to Vietnam. Even so, 21,000 remained in Eastern Germany.66 With the upsurge in Far Right activity and everyday expressions of racism which accompanied the profound social and economic upheavals of post-socialist Europe, many of them faced racist discrimination and physical violence.67 When Sonnenblumenhaus a Vietnamese block in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, gained international notoriety for being attacked by a large mob in August 1992, their experiences became briefly visible. But the tide of public discourse in general was moving against them, as throughout the 1990s the Eastern German Vietnamese, and especially those in Berlin, were increasingly characterised as members of organised criminal gangs (Zigarettenmafia). Throughout however, they remained discursively separate from the ‘good’ Vietnamese of erstwhile West Germany, the well-integrated ‘boat people’ and their descendants. Such polarised characterisations of the two groups of Vietnamese served to ensure that the positive stereotype of the Vietnamese former boat people was used as a rod to beat the ex-socialist Vietnamese comrades in East Germany, who were seen as having become criminal through their own personal inadequacies and poor decision-making. These stereotypes made invisible any racism or negative experiences the West German Vietnamese may have faced, while also ignoring the structural support they had received—notably a well-equipped and active integration programme— that had acted as a foundation for their new lives in the West.68 These divisive stereotypes and differential socio-economic positions laid the foundations for cultural and ideological cleavages between both communities—strengthened by the divergent German migration regimes they

 Ibid., 995.   Panikos Panayi, ‘Racial Violence in the New Germany 1990–93’, Contemporary European History 3, no. 3 (1994): 265–287. 68  Cf. Poutrus, Umkämpftes Asyl, 87. 66 67

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encountered—which continued to persist well into the twenty-first century.69 To bring this story forward: by the first decades of the twenty-first century other non-European refugees and migrants had begun to face ever stricter immigration and welfare regulations and hardships. At the same time the Vietnamese community—by which was often meant the West German Vietnamese refugee community—continued to enjoy a positive reputation, being held up as a model refugee community to more newly arrived refugee groups. Such simplistic positioning has its dangers. For anyone seeking to extrapolate forward from the Vietnamese refugees’ arrival to their later success, and to suggest that this offers an example for other refugee cohorts, they should remember that active, coordinated and well-funded integration measures paved the way for those individual success stories that form the empirical basis for this enthusiastic narrative. The warm culture of welcome offered by the West German society to the ‘boat people’ might have been a surprise and rather unlikely given Germany’s ever-tightening migration regime from the early 1970s. Nonetheless, it paved the ground for the strong political and administrative support at all levels of the state, and in public opinion, that made their unlikely reception a success—both empirically and as a good moral tale to be shared with later-arriving refugees.

69  Jessica Steinman: From North-South to East-West: The Demarcation and Reunification of the Vietnamese Migrant Community in Berlin, Paper for the ESSHC 2020 Leiden.

CHAPTER 4

‘Our Most Foreign Refugees’: Refugees from Vietnam in Britain Becky Taylor

From the autumn of 1978 when British merchant vessels in the South China Seas began rescuing people in distress from overcrowded boats fleeing Vietnam to the end of Britain’s involvement in the UNHCR’s Orderly Departure Programme, 19,355 people came to Britain from Vietnam. And yet, although Britain’s commitment to participate in the UNHCR scheme was made at the highest level of government, the process of reception and resettlement proved to be a difficult, and sometimes unhappy, process: The Vietnamese are one of the most disadvantaged groups ever to come to the United Kingdom. Many lack marketable skills or even skills which can easily be adapted to our society. Many lack education and literacy, even in their own language. Most, having come from North Vietnam, have had little contact with Western civilisation. For many Britain was a last resort as a settlement country following refusals from the USA and other countries.

B. Taylor (*) School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Taylor et al. (eds.), When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983, Palgrave Studies in Migration History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64224-2_4

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Unlike other refugee and immigrant groups they had no established community in this country to receive them.1

This government report into the reception and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam, published in 1982, was bleak, focussing as it did on how their previous lives had fitted them ill for their new lives in Britain. The challenges facing the initial quota of 10,000 refugees who came to Britain from Vietnam—a number which was eventually nearly doubled once family reunions under the UNHCR’s Orderly Departure Programme took place—were undoubtedly huge. But setting their experiences alongside those who were resettled in other European countries pushes us to question its assumptions, particularly as the report’s authors implied that the difficulties experienced by the refugees coming to Britain could be reduced to their individual or group characteristics. Yet at the heart of Britain’s reception and resettlement programme was a tension: despite Britain’s engagement in the UNHCR scheme, central government refused to fully fund the costs involved in their reception and resettlement, devolving them instead to local authorities and the refugee organisations. What was presented as an economic necessity in Britain— the need to limit state support for refugees as part of a wider programme of economic restructuring and government retrenchment in order to respond to the global recession of the early 1980s—looks rather different when placed alongside the response of other European nations. The recession was experienced globally, but elsewhere, as the other chapters in this book show, the level of support made available to arrivals from Vietnam was very different. Seen in this light, Britain’s position becomes exposed as the political choice it was, one driven by the ideologies of the New Right with its emphasis on the shrinking of the state, marketisation and individualism. One of the central concerns of this chapter then, after setting out the wider geo-political and national context behind Britain’s involvement with the ‘boat people’ is to explore the effect of that political choice on the grassroots and everyday experiences of those refugees who came to Britain. Important though state policies were, there were other factors at play in mediating the experience of refugees from Vietnam. The ever-growing diversity of Britain’s population, encompassing not only first-generation 1  National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh (hereafter NAS): HH61/1431, Report of the Joint Committee for Refugees from Vietnam (London: Home Office, 1982), 12.

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migrants and their offspring but also an expanding mixed heritage British-­ born population, had ensured that by the 1980s easy assumptions over the ‘assimilation’ of foreigners into the ‘host’ population was no longer a viable social model. The embedding of multiculturalism in local government policy and grassroots practice was accompanied by a growing acceptance that British institutions needed to change in order to fully reach and serve its diverse population and the emergence of a significant minority-ethnic economic sector. As we will see, together these developments opened a space in which refugees from Vietnam could find work, build their own businesses and community organisations and find a sympathetic hearing from local authority workers and others working who embraced the idea of a more diverse society. Before we look in depth at Britain’s reception and resettlement programme, it is worth briefly putting its response to the UNHCR’s Vietnamese programme within Britain’s longer history of refugee entry. While Britain understood itself as having a strong tradition of welcoming refugees, in fact its island position ensured that it had significantly more control over its borders than the countries of mainland Europe.2 It had thus been insulated from the mass population movements which had been such a significant feature for many European countries during the first half of the twentieth century. Legislative boundaries though, proved to be as important as physical ones. British immigration law up until the 1960s ensured that while there was freedom of movement to Britain for its imperial subjects and citizens, all others—defined as aliens—after 1905 found their entry tightly controlled by a series of Aliens Acts.3 These were designed to ensure that aliens entering the country would not become a charge on the public purse, were free of certain medical conditions and would not take employment from British workers. Although initially those seeking refuge from persecution were exempt from these requirements, by 1919 this provision had been removed, meaning that Jews and others fleeing Nazi rule in the 1930s were subject to the general restrictions placed

2  Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees. Then and Now (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 3  Most notably the 1905 Aliens Act and the Aliens Act of 1919. The terms of the 1919 Act were carried out under the 1920 Aliens Order, and its provisions and other relevant legislation were all consolidated within the 1953 Aliens Order. The Immigration Act 1971 rendered the distinction between aliens and British subjects/citizens obsolete.

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on all aliens.4 After 1945, 200,000 Poles who had fought on the British side were offered asylum and government support under the Polish Resettlement Act 1947, but in general Displaced Persons were selected on the basis on their ability to work and fit into British life rather than their experiences of persecution or need to claim asylum.5 The UK was an original signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention but it took decades to work it into domestic law: the requirement to consider asylum applications in line with the Convention’s articles was included in a footnote to the Immigration Act 1971; it took until 1987 for the Convention to become integrated into British case law following a House of Lords judgement; and it was only through the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993 that the Convention was finally granted primacy when assessing asylum applications.6 But the small number of individual asylum applications being made each year meant that civil servants and refugee agencies alike largely saw the discretionary nature of Britain’s asylum framework as unproblematic well into the 1980s. In the late 1970s, no more than three hundred individual applications were typically made annually, and if successful, generally resulted in the refugee being granted indefinite leave to remain.7 Once in the UK they normally received advice and specialist support from the voluntary British Council for Aid to Refugees (BCAR), but held no special status and were entitled to the same welfare benefits as others resident in Britain which they accessed in the usual way. Aside from these individual claimants, those seeking refuge in Britain broadly fell into two categories. The first were cohorts generated by the Cold War, and included the nearly 20,000 Hungarians who came to Britain following the Soviet invasion in 1956, 3000 Czechs following the Prague Spring and some hundreds of Chilean and Latin American refugees in the 1970s. The second category were those whose lives had been disturbed by decolonisation or post-colonial events, and where historic imperial ties, often reinforced by UK passport status, meant that Britain 4  Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 5  Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Post-war era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 6  Dallal Stevens, UK Asylum Law and Policy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 2004), 78 & 165. 7  The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA): HO376/210, minute from Clayton to Mr Howard-Drake, May 23 1977.

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was the obvious choice for those seeking to rebuild their lives. Kenyan and Ugandan Asians—first hit by Africanisation policies of their newly independent nations and then, in the case of Uganda, Idi Amin’s direct expulsion order of August 1972—came to Britain as UK passport holders. Two years later Cypriots coming to London after the Turkish invasion joined the city’s established Cypriot population, whose links to Britain dated back to when the island was a Crown Colony. And yet, despite the seriousness of the conflicts and persecution they faced, these post-colonial refugees were rarely regarded as such by the British public. In crude terms, prior to the arrival of the Vietnamese, Cold War refugees had been understood in Britain to be European and Christian while post-colonial arrivals were commonly elided with New Commonwealth ‘immigrants’, viewed as racially and culturally distinct and, with their numbers increasing, seen as needing to be controlled through immigration legislation. Those coming to Britain from Vietnam— as Cold War refugees, but also the product of years of (post)colonial conflict—thus complicated the picture, simultaneously eliciting sympathy from Britons as refugees from a communist regime while becoming a focus for street-level racism and legislative attempts to restrict immigration. This background is useful because it offers a way into contextualising Britain’s role in the Indochinese refugee crisis. Despite its self-perception as a place of refuge, compared to Germany or France, Britain’s involvement in refugee matters in the twentieth century was most often numerically marginal. Yet Britain’s participation in the UNHCR programme was striking. Not only has every UK government after 1971 been committed even nominally to reducing immigration to the lowest feasible level, but Thatcher’s incoming government in 1979 had a very explicit commitment to restrict non-European migration. The latter sections of this chapter explore how reception and resettlement policies affected the Vietnamese once they had arrived in Britain, but we begin by exploring how was it that Thatcher moved in a matter of weeks from her anti-immigration electoral platform to a position of granting entry to 19,000 Vietnamese to the UK.

Britain’s Response to the Crisis When in the winter of 1978 and into the spring and early summer of 1979 television screens and newspapers across Britain were filled of pictures of desperate Vietnamese ‘boat people’—those fleeing the toxic combination of ethnic repression, Communist restructuring and reprisals—their plight

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did not immediately seem a British concern. Yet Britain’s past and continuing imperial connections with the region ensured that it rapidly became implicated in the subsequent refugee crisis. Although Britain had not been active in Vietnam, either as a colonial power or a combatant force, it had consistently supported America’s fight against the Vietcong and had its own track record of fighting communist insurgency in Malaysia. Added to this, and crucially, was the position—geographically and politically—of Hong Kong as a British Crown colony.8 Hong Kong sustained a substantial British military presence and an ex-patriot population largely involved in a range of financial, commercial and investment activities. Its importance as a loci of British influence in south-east Asia had been strengthened following Singapore’s independence from Britain in 1959, while Hong Kong’s role as a major port in the region meant it acted as a key hub of British shipping interests, ensuring that ‘Britain’s responsibilities for Hong Kong … in one sense made her a Pacific power’.9 The large numbers of British vessels regularly crossing the South China Sea made it almost inevitable some would cross paths with the overloaded boats of refugees which by late 1978 were regularly leaving Vietnam. By this point, when the number of people fleeing Vietnam was reaching the hundreds of thousands, neighbouring nations had begun insisting that a boat carrying refugees would only be allowed dock if they were guaranteed settlement in a third country—normally the nationality under which a vessel was registered. So it was that in October 1978 the Labour government had to face the question of how to respond to the ‘boat people’ crisis. The Scottish-­ owned MV Wellpark had been on its way to Taiwan when it saw distress flares from a sinking refugee boat during a typhoon and rescued its 346 Vietnamese passengers. The incident proved a popular news story, where the story of heroic British sailors dramatically coming to the aid of desperate Vietnamese escapees played well across both tabloid and broadsheet press.10 Given the heightened tensions in the region over the high numbers of arrivals from Vietnam, Taiwan refused to allow the Wellpark to 8  Its status shifted to that of British Dependent Territory under the British Nationality Act 1981. 9  TNA: PREM19/129, record of call by the Soviet Ambassador, Mr Lunkov, on the Lord Privy Seal, 5.30 pm, May 29, 1979. These words were spoken by the Lord Privy Seal, Sir Ian Gilmour. 10  See for example John Dickie, ‘Lifeline for the Refugees,’ Daily Mail, October 10, 1978, p. 1; Guardian, ‘Captain Says: I’m No Hero,’ October 18, 1978, p. 3.

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dock unless Britain guaranteed that it would give asylum to all the rescuees. The Labour government responded positively, declaring itself willing to accept responsibility for anyone picked up by British boats and the Wellpark refugees were quickly transferred to Britain. Here they were placed in the care of the BCAR, the NGO which had specialised in receiving and resettling refugees in Britain since the late 1940s. It sent the new arrivals to its London hostel, Kensington Barracks, where they were warmly received. As one rescuee, Huy Nguyen, remembered: ‘when we got to the barracks people were waiting for us, to give us soup. They put flowers on our beds. Roses or carnations. I got a carnation. White. I was really happy’. Donations poured in, a ‘circus visited, complete with an elephant for rides. Woolworths laid on a Christmas party for the children’, and even the normally refugee-averse Daily Mail, mindful that the ‘boat people’ were refugees from Communism, extended the hand of friendship: Because we have closed the door to mass immigration—and rightly so—it does not mean we need be deaf to the knocking of some of those whose claim to help requires no passport or birth certificate to establish its piteous authenticity.11

But, if they were deserving of assistance, this came at a price, and that was of being depicted as abject and helpless victims. News accounts and pictures of the ‘boat people’, as they had instantly become labelled, were dominated by images of grateful survivors climbing aboard British ships from dangerously overloaded boats, or quietly squatting on decks, behind wire fences or in refugee camps while waiting to be granted entry. Representing the refugees in this way certainly had the effect of generating public sympathy for the rescuees, but it meant that if, once they had arrived in Britain, they failed to match up to this stereotype, sympathy could soon evaporate. If the Wellpark rescuees had been feted on arrival and the Labour government had agreed to take responsibility for rescuees on British boats, Margaret Thatcher’s new Conservative government, which came into office in May 1979, was determined to take a very different approach. Coinciding with Thatcher’s first weeks in government, the British 11  Quoted in Chris McGreal, “Vietnamese Boat People: Living to Tell the Tale,” The Observer, March 20, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/mar/20/ vietnamese-­boat-people-survivors-families (accessed June 26, 2017).

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merchant vessels Sibonga and Roachbank picked up nearly 1200 refugees between them. The situation became tense after Thatcher adamantly refused to take responsibility for the rescuees and Taiwan, the nearest port of call, retaliated by refusing to let them land. Hong Kong similarly closed its port to the vessels, not wanting the rescuees to join its already over-­ crowded refugee camps, which were already receiving a thousand new refugees each day. Intensifying the strain on Hong Kong’s physical and social infrastructure was the clandestine arrival of approximately 3000 migrants leaving communist China each week.12 Throughout, the stand-­ off conditions on the ship deteriorated, a situation which was closely followed in the British press. Despite significant expressions of public sympathy for their plight, Thatcher continued to maintain her anti-­ immigrant position, consistently eliding refugees with immigrants in general, asserting that ‘there would be riots on the streets if the Government had to put refugees into council housing’.13 And so, when her government was finally forced to guarantee the Sibonga rescuees’ entry to Britain ‘on humanitarian grounds’, ensuring they could disembark in Hong Kong, this was not accompanied by ‘any general commitment [to take] similar action in future’.14 Rather, the prime minister insisted that the government should continue to resist taking other rescuees. To bolster her position, in a confidential memo she ordered civil servants to explore ‘the elements of a political and legal basis for refusing to accept Vietnamese refugees’, including ‘plans for the possible withdrawal from the UK’s existing international obligations concerning refugees’ and shipping conventions.15 With two further British vessels having picked up more rescuees, Thatcher was anxious to develop ‘a cast iron position in legal and political terms which would enable the UK to hold out against admitting [them]’.16 She met with resistance. The Attorney-General and the FCO drew out the implications of her suggested approach, implications which ranged from the increased danger to people at risk at sea—‘not only for  Sir Paul Bryan, House of Commons Debates, vol. 967 col. 1228, May 24, 1979.  TNA: PREM19/129, note for the record, June 14, 1979. 14  TNA: PREM19/129, press notice, May 28, 1979. 15   TNA: HO376/200, letter from PM Private Secretary to JS Wall, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), confidential, May 29, 1979. Emphasis in original. 16  TNA: PREM19/129, Note of a meeting at 10 Downing Street to discuss the problem of Vietnamese Refugees, May 29, 1979. The Herring Bank and Whalebone were the two merchant vessels which had picked up refugees in mid-May. 12 13

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refugees’—to the difficulties of a ‘major maritime nation’ no longer abiding by international shipping’s rules and the resulting consequences for the UK’s shipping industry.17 This guidance, and increasing international pressure for Britain to follow the example of other nations in accepting all rescuees picked up by their flagged vessels, caused Thatcher to change tack. Instead of simply stonewalling, she started considering how Britain might maintain international standing while conceding entry to as few refugees as possible. Her solution was twofold. Firstly, in what Hong Kie Yuen has called ‘proxy humanitarianism’, she now claimed Hong Kong’s refugee effort as her own. This meant arguing that as a Crown Colony the territory’s refugee camps—by now accommodating around 80,000 people—should be counted as Britain’s contribution to the crisis.18 Secondly, and extending from this, Thatcher argued that other countries needed to help to shoulder this burden being ‘carried’ by the UK.  Her proposed mechanism for ensuring this was a UNHCR-sponsored conference. This was to have the twin aims of agreeing a formula for resettling the existing refugees located across south-east Asia and ending the massive exodus from Vietnam in order stem the crisis at source.19 Her call was strengthened by a deteriorating picture on the ground which, as we have seen, saw Vietnam’s neighbours further hardening their position.20 With this heightened political background and with the full and significant backing of the US and the UN’s Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim, the UNHCR’s High Commissioner, Poul Hartling, agreed to convene an international conference in Geneva in July.21 One of the conditions he set was that governments must come willing to make significant pledges of both resettlement and of money.22 This meant that the UN conference was something of a pyrrhic victory for Britain: Thatcher was pleased to have her strategy vindicated, but it was with some consternation that she discovered Hartling proposed that Britain take an ‘indicative’ 10,000  TNA: PREM19/129, FCO letter to Downing Street, May 30, 1979.  Hong Kiu Yuen, ‘Proxy Humanitarianism: Hong Kong’s Vietnamese Refugee Crisis, 1975–79,’ unpublished MPhil dissertation, University of Hong Kong, 2014. 19  TNA: PREM19/129, comments of Kurt Waldheim, UNHCR contained in telegram from UK UN desk, New York to FCO, May 31, 1979. 20  UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees, 83. These nation were Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. 21  TNA: PREM19/129, telegram from UK UN Mission to FCO, June 14, 1979. 22  TNA: PREM19/129, FCO telegram report of meeting with Poul Hartling, June 6, 1979. 17 18

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r­ efugees as its contribution to the resettlement total, as well as expecting it to sign up to the Orderly Departure Programme.23 Such an undertaking would, in effect, entail Britain accepting an unspecified number of people from Vietnam in the future, who chose to exercise their right to join family members already in the UK. Hartling’s demand that the UK offer a specific and significant commitment caught the new Conservative government in a dilemma: on the one hand it retained its determination to continue to be seen as anti-­immigrant, on the other was its strong desire for Britain to be seen as having a pivotal role in the international effort to solve this Cold War refugee crisis. The way out of this bind was offered by William Whitelaw, the new Home Secretary, who argued that the corollary of participating in the UNHCR programme was restricting the entry of other immigrants.24 Accordingly, the 1981 British Nationality Act was designed to cut down ‘the level of immigration into the UK, and in particular on the admission of dependants’, in part to ‘compensate for a higher intake of Vietnamese refugees’.25 Here then we see not a humanitarian democratic state spontaneously stepping up to its international responsibilities. Rather, this was a government which did its best to evade international maritime responsibilities, only grudgingly accepting the minimum of refugees after all other avenues were closed. And it was a government which attempted to avoid any further commitments under cover of proposing an international meeting and stressing its contribution to the crisis by proxy by drawing on its colonial relationship with Hong Kong. And, when manoeuvred into accepting a significant number of refugees, the UK government not only counted its existing commitment to boat rescuees as part of its UNHCR quota but also saw it as necessitating the introduction of further general immigration restrictions. Scholars have normally located the explicit coming together of immigration law and refugee policy in the later 1980s, but here we see their unequivocal alliance in Thatcher’s first weeks in office.26 Who then were these ten thousand ‘boat people’ which Britain had committed to take? Although they were most often called ‘Vietnamese boat people’ in the British press, this label hid more than it revealed. The  TNA: PREM19/129, FCO to Downing Street, June 20, 1979.  TNA: PREM19/130, confidential note to Prime Minister from William Whitelaw, July 9, 1979. 25  TNA: PREM19/130, note for the record, July 9, 1979. 26  See for example Stevens, UK Asylum Law and Policy. 23 24

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majority were in fact ethnic Chinese who had fled the country due to a targeted programme of anti-Chinese state discrimination, and to their numbers were added ethnic Vietnamese simply seeking to escape the repressive regime. But the invasion by China of northern Vietnam and the legacy of the war ensured entrenched tensions between ethnic Chinese and ethnic Vietnamese refugees. And intersecting these divisions were other differences: rural and urban; Christian and Buddhist; and between Cantonese and Vietnamese speakers.27 French colonial rule of Indo-China had ensured that French was the language of the Vietnamese elite and educated, who commonly chose France as their first destination. By contrast, in Britain, under three per cent of the incoming refugees had a university education, and among the ethnic Chinese refugees there was a first-language illiteracy rate of nearly forty per cent.28 Of those surviving escape by boat from north Vietnam, many ended up in Hong Kong simply as a result of its relative proximity. Once in Hong Kong, Britain’s ‘humanely drawn’ selection criteria meant that it accepted people who had been rejected by other countries.29 Whereas France, the US, Canada and Australia, which all had large and established Vietnamese populations, were often destinations of choice for refugees seeking to move to the West, Britain found itself selecting individuals for its quota people with little knowledge of the country and whose options for going elsewhere were limited.

Coming to Britain It was not a good time to be coming to Britain. The country was entering what would prove to be the deepest recession in fifty years: inflation, which had been rising steadily and alarmingly since September 1978, hit nearly twenty-two per cent in May 1980; unemployment, which exceeded five per cent in the summer of 1979 continued to increase every month, creating nearly a million new jobless in the first year of the Conservative government, affecting fourteen per cent of the workforce by September

 NAS: HH61/1431, Report of the JCRV, 17.  London Metropolitan Archives, London (hereafter LMA): LMA/4243/A/06/090, Ockenden Venture Planning Report on Boat Refugee Education in the UK, Annex 2, July, 1980. 29  Hale, ‘Vietnamese Refugees in Britain’, 278. 27 28

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1982.30 Intensifying this picture were the new government’s tough retrenchment policies. Although these were articulated as measures necessary to deal with the recession, they were inspired by New Right thinking which aimed to shrink the size of the state in order to make way for market-­driven solutions, enterprise and individualism.31 For refugees coming to Britain, this was to mean two things: that the level of support offered to them by the state would be severely constrained, and the possibilities for establishing themselves economically were sparse. Making matters worse, popular expressions of anti-immigration feeling, which had moved ever closer to the centre of mainstream political discourse since the late 1960s, made little distinction between economic migrants and refugees. On hearing of the government’s commitment to take refugees from Vietnam, Britain’s far-right party, the National Front, threw itself into action. It threatened demonstrations at Heathrow airport to coincide with the arrival of the first groups of Vietnamese refugees; handed out leaflets across the town’s closest to reception centres; sent alarmist hoax letters to elderly residents; and made its presence felt at public meetings called by residents concerned about the arrival of large numbers of refugees in their locality.32 One leaflet argued: IN GRANTING ASYLUM TO A GROWING NUMBER OF CHINESE, UNWANTED BECAUSE THERE ARE ALREADY 100,00–2,000,000 OF THEM [migrants] HERE.  What now of Mrs Thatcher’s no more ‘swamping’ and Edward Heath’s (at the time of the Ugandan Asian expulsions) ‘no more substantial settlements’?33

But this was not the whole story, there was another side to Britain too. One which challenged the anti-immigration preoccupations of the new government and racist elements of society. One which understood 30  Office of National Statistics, ‘Unemployment since 1881,’ https://www.ons.gov.uk/ ons/rel/lms/labour-market…/unemployment-since-1881.pdf (accessed July 11, 2017). 31  For the IEA’s outline of the key debates surrounding the economic choices of Thatcher’s first term see Philip Booth et al., ‘Were 364 Economists All Wrong?’ Institute of Economic Affairs Monographs, Readings 60, 2006, Cass Business School Research Paper, https://ssrn. com/abstract=892579 (accessed July 17, 2017). 32  For an example of a hoax letter see TNA: BS18/54, attached to minute from Alan Marshall JCRV to Guy Crawley, I1, Home Office, September 3, 1980. 33  TNA: HO376/301, Anonymous flyer, ‘A protest – the Vietnamese/Chinese boat people’, June, 1979. Emphases in original. The expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population in 1972 had seen 28,000 of them who were UK passport holders coming to Britain.

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Britishness as a capacious and diverse category and accepted that new migrants and Britons with second- or third-generation migrant backgrounds alike had the right to fully access all aspects of British life. Such understanding reconceptualised the job that needed to be done, moving away from an expectation that it was the work of the migrant to assimilate towards a realisation that much needed to change in British institutions, daily life and practice to ensure that they worked for all of its population. A borough such as Haringey in London, home to people from eighty-five different countries and where eighty-seven identifiably distinct languages were spoken in its schools, could not afford to ignore diversity or insist on assimilation.34 The emergence of multiculturalism across urban, often inner city, Britain, from the 1970s was a response to this diversity, as those living and working on the frontline began to develop new ways of working and thinking to take in account the differences they encountered in the course of their everyday lives. Anti-racist critiques, which had been the preserve of a small number of activists in the late 1960s, were by the 1970s becoming embedded in the everyday practices of a constellation of community activists, radical professional local authority workers and younger Labour councillors.35 There was a broader agenda here too: this New Urban Left viewed multiculturalism, as well as anti-sexist and anti-homophobic politics, as vehicles of resistance to Thatcherite policies, and saw them as part of a wider programme of reforming local service provision and democratising local politics.36 But the state was only one part, and often only one small part, of the wider reception and resettlement programme. For, even from the moment when refugees in the camps in Hong Kong were selected to come to 34  Stewart Ranson and Kieron Walsh, Community Education For Equal Rights and Opportunities in Haringey (London: Haringey Council, 1986), 6. 35  Camilla Schofield and Ben Jones, ‘“Whatever Community Is, This Is Not It”: Notting Hill and the Reconstruction of “Race” in Britain after 1958,’ Journal of British Studies 58, no. 1 (2019): 142–73. 36  Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 461; Daisy Payling, ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire: Grassroots Activism and Left-Wing Solidarity in 1980s Sheffield,’ Twentieth Century British History 25, no. 4 (2014): 602–627. For contemporary analyses see Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988); Gerry Stoker, The Politics of Local Government (Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1988), 192–214; Martin Boddy and Colin Fudge, eds, Local Socialism? Labour Councils and New Left Alternatives (London: Macmillan, 1984); Joy Holland, ed., Feminist Action (London: Battleaxe Books, 1984).

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Britain, voluntary action was central. In this the Vietnamese programme drew on a long and rich tradition of Britain’s active and diverse civil society generally, and the expertise of three well-established NGOs—BCAR, Ockenden Venture and Save the Children Fund (SCF)—specifically.37 Voluntary organisations had always sat at the heart of the work of receiving and resettling refugees, even during the arrival of Hungarian refugees in 1956–7 and the Ugandan Asian resettlement programme of 1972–3, both of which had seen significant government involvement and leadership. Now, however, NGOs were expected to lead the way.38 They were tasked with receiving refugees when they first came to Britain, housing them in reception centres where they received orientation and language training, finding housing, and sometimes work, for them in the part of Britain in which they were ‘resettled’ and providing continuing social, welfare and emotional support over the following months. The centrality of NGOs to the Vietnamese programme was the logical outcome of central government’s ‘front-end loading’ policy which set out the financial parameters for reception and resettlement. This, based on the American model, confined additional state funding to a highly circumscribed twelve-week period of reception. Even at this stage, the day-to-day costs of board and lodging were covered by the standard state supplementary benefit payments, to which all UK residents with an income below a certain threshold were eligible. Additional central government funding was confined to a direct grant to the NGOs to cover extra staffing and running costs associated with the programme. During this ‘reception period’: the refugees would be taught basic ‘survival’ English, receive medical screening, learn about life and opportunities in Britain and be found a suitable home. Thereafter, with the help from members of support groups and any

37  Ockenden Venture had been set up by Joyce Pearce in 1951 following her work with children living in Displaced Persons camps. SCF had been established in 1919 to provide support to women and children affected by the Allies blockade of Germany after the First World War. From this date onwards it routinely sent teams of workers to major international humanitarian crises. 38  Becky Taylor, ‘Good Citizens? Ugandan Asians, Volunteers and Race Relations in 1970s Britain,’ History Workshop Journal 85, Spring (2018): 120–141. Although the Hungarian programme of 1956–7 was led by BCAR, it benefited from seconded Home Office civil servants and crucially the Home Secretary retained ultimate oversight and responsibility for the programme’s success as he was ultimately answerable to Parliament.

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special facilities the responsible agencies might provide, the Vietnamese would have access to the same services as other members of the community.39

If there were any shortfalls, the Home Office expected that these would be covered by fundraising and donations managed by the voluntary agencies. Once an individual left a reception centre to be ‘resettled’, no additional government support would be available as they were expected to access the full range of health, education and welfare services provided to all British residents. So while the three national NGOs running the Vietnamese programme were maintained by a core of paid staff, much of the reception and resettlement work was only possible due to significant input from volunteers. In the period when the only refugees from Vietnam coming to Britain were the 1500 rescuee ‘boat people’ from the Wellpark and other vessels, the initial plan for their reception and resettlement followed a pattern familiar from previous refugee programmes. BCAR had responsibility for receiving the refugees on arrival, providing accommodation and basic orientation and language training at Kensington Barracks reception centre in London. Councils that had been moved by the desperate scenes of distressed boat people stepped forward with offers of housing to which refugees were matched dependent on family size. After resettlement, local authorities were expected to provide continuing additional support, particularly in terms of language tuition, but local voluntary organisations were expected to carry the ‘burden’ of social work. Initial readings of the resettlement programme were positive, as numbers of homes roughly equalled the number of projected refugees. Also the clustering of resettled refugees in London and a few other areas meant that ongoing specialist language provision appeared realistic and that there would be enough Vietnamese in each area to form what were considered to be viable communities. Civil servants were confident that they would not need to call on councils to provide many additional services, partly due to their belief that the Vietnamese were poised to become ‘good, industrious, conscientious citizens … keen to gain their independence and unlikely to seek recourse to local authority services for any longer than is absolutely necessary’.40  Home Office memo cited in Dalglish, Refugees from Vietnam, 64.  TNA: HO376/198, draft letter to Local Authority Associations from Home Office, January 15, 1979. 39 40

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But there were problems. Even before Britain agreed to accept ten thousand refugees from Vietnam, it had become apparent that despite its ambitions, BCAR did not have the capacity to support the refugees properly.41 The already inadequate arrangements that BCAR had been able to make at its Kensington hostel were ‘thrown out of gear’, first by the arrival of rescuees of the Sibonga and the Roachbank, and then the 10,000 refugees who made up Britain’s UNHCR pledge.42 But the Home Office rejected the possibility of either stepping in and leading the resettlement effort, as it had done during the arrival of the Ugandan Asians, or even seconding a number of civil servants to BCAR as it had during the Hungarian programme. Instead it emphasised the importance of ‘strengthening the voluntary organisations themselves’.43 To this end it invited Ockenden Venture and SCF to form, with BCAR, a Joint Committee for Refugees from Vietnam (JCRV) to manage the new phase of arrivals.44 This development did not change the central principles of the refugee programme. As well as maintaining the centrality of NGOs, the Home Office also continued to hold to its ‘front-end loading’ policy with its twelve-week target stay in a reception centre. This restructuring of the reception programme was accompanied by a decision to open two large camps, both ex-military establishments, one at Sopley in Hampshire, and the other at Thorney Island near Chichester in West Sussex. Both had the capacity to hold several hundred refugees at a time, but they suffered from being institutionalised, impersonal, isolated from their surrounding communities, with shortages of interpreters and internal power struggles between the different agency staff operating in them.45 None of these difficulties came across in the camp newsletter,

 TNA: HO376/201, Shearer, ‘Helping the Boat People’.  TNA: MH48/1364, letter from GI de Deney, Home Office, to Miss JM Forsyth, Treasury, August 15, 1979. 43  TNA: MH48/1364, letter from GI de Deney, Home Office, to Miss JM Forsyth, Treasury, August 15, 1979; NAS: HH61/1431, minute Philip to Reid, Scottish Health and Housing Department, August 22, 1979. 44  TNA: HO376/, note of a meeting to discuss reception arrangements for refugees from the Sibonga, June 5, 1979. 45  See Samantha Hale, ‘Vietnamese Refugees in Britain,’ in The International Refugee Crisis: British and Canadian Responses, ed. Vaughan Robinson (Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1993), 273–92, 278, 284–5; Peter Jones, Vietnamese Refugees: A Study of their Reception and Resettlement in the United Kingdom, Research Report No. 13 (London: Home Office, 1982), 36–39. 41 42

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however, which was written by residents and seems to have been fashioned in part to be an indirect comparison between Britain and Vietnam: Upon arrival at the Centre, each of our families was put in a separate room with adequate facilities … Every day … we go to classes to learn English taught by experienced English teachers using sophisticated teaching aids … [One] afternoon is dedicated to cultural and sportive hobbies … Sick people are properly cared for by doctors, with plenty of medical supplies … we are taken out by our teachers for visits to neighbouring towns where opportunities are created for us to get acquainted with the customs and habits of the English people … It is anticipated that we will leave the Centre after three to four months to resettle in the New Homeland. It can be said that we do not have to worry at all about our future.46

The Home Office’s insistence on voluntary organisations leading the reception and resettlement programme was not without its progressive elements. To bring in NGOs that had developed specific expertise of refugee issues, and which carried with them the potential for flexible working and had a tradition of taking a more personal approach to their charges, was a welcome step. The policy was also not unrealistic: there was considerable public sympathy for the refugees and a willingness to translate this sympathy into grassroots action. As with past cohorts of refugees, there were significant numbers of people willing to give their time, expertise and resources to welcome refugees to their areas. We can see some of the benefits of mobilising volunteers if we look at Stowmarket in Suffolk. Here the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service (WRVS)—which had a track record stretching back to the second world war of working with refugees and the displaced in Britain—set about furnishing the three houses which had been allocated by Mid-Suffolk District Council to ‘the Boat People’ coming from BCAR centres. Its volunteers collected items to equip the houses and put a great deal of effort into easing the process of orientation for the families: We had meetings with the Adult Education Department to plan English lessons, arranged for a local Playgroup to welcome the three year old, visited the local shops and explained about their new customers, and found a

 Dalglish, Refugees from Vietnam, Appendix D.

46

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­o-­ g between who persuaded two Cantonese speaking Chinese to act as interpreters.47

On top of these efforts, the men from the three families had been found work in the local iron foundry, and the WRVS volunteers undertook to continue visiting the families until it was apparent that they had fully settled in. Where there were fully functioning WRVS groups, evidence suggests that their volunteers were often highly effective at preparing and furnishing houses and ensuring that refugees were put in contact with all relevant agencies and services. One of the other NGOs involved in the Vietnamese programme— SCF—had five decades of experience working with refugees across the world. It prided itself on its decentralised mode of working and refugee empowerment, and also worked closely with local voluntary groups. In Ilkley three hundred volunteers were used to ‘renovate, repair, decorate and furnish’ a derelict building before it was opened as a reception centre.48 At Bishops Stortford, where it acquired the old hospital at a peppercorn rent, it put local enthusiasm to good purpose, furnishing and equipping the centre with donations, and as at Ilkley the work of preparing it for opening had largely been done by volunteers.49 The third NGO drawn into the reception and resettlement programme, Ockenden Venture, saw the ‘volunteer spirit’ as essential to its ethos and the running of its twenty-seven hostels. At these, while its ability to run full language training programmes was patchy and dependent on a range of highly localised circumstances, Ockenden’s volunteers enthusiastically ran a wide range of extra-curricular activities, including ‘teaching adults to drive, painting and decorating the house, or tending a vegetable garden’. These supplemented more basic enabling activities that included supporting ­residents to do their own shopping and cooking and going on social outings.50 The level of support given by, and engagement of, volunteers was to be crucial. As the refugees from Vietnam began to embark on the process of being taught English and introduced to British culture and expectations, 47  Royal Voluntary Service Archives, Devizes (hereafter RVS): 728-1-Mar-1980, WRVS Mid-Suffolk District Office, Report on Vietnamese Refugees, March, 1980. 48  Levin, What Welcome?, 93. 49  TNA: MH160/1270, Herts and Essex Observer, ‘Vietnamese Come to Stortford,’ January 17, 1980. 50  Levin, What Welcome?, 87.

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it was obvious that there was a significant gulf between their previous lives and any future life in Britain. Indeed, one of the striking features of the accounts of the arrival and reception process was the very ‘foreignness’ of the refugees. Few spoke English, even at a basic level, and many had previously been: fisher-people, peasant farmers and labourers, all occupations which with few obvious transferable skills which might ease their passage into British life. While not all those coming from Vietnam fitted this profile, evidence suggests that the three months basic language tuition provided during their stay in reception centres was utterly inadequate in preparing most Vietnamese for life in Britain.51

Dispersal Front-end loading provided the financial underpinning of the British resettlement programme, and was based on a presumption that incoming Vietnamese would need no further support after being given accommodation. In essence the policy assumed that from the point of leaving a reception centre, the Vietnamese were the same as the rest of the population. This may have been the financial rationale for the policy, but the social thinking driving resettlement—the principle of dispersal—was based on an opposite premise. This was that refugees from Vietnam would impose both financial and social burdens on the localities to which they were sent. Dispersal then, would simultaneously reduce costs for, and demand on, statutory services and voluntary support in any one area, while diluting the presence of the refugees to the point of near-invisibility. This second attitude stemmed from an explicit desire to prevent the development of ‘ghettos’ and to reduce ‘resentment’ from the local population.52 It was, of course, predicated on the belief that the perceived needs and comfort of Britain’s majority population and institutions should take precedence over newcomers. There was some official acknowledgement that in the short term dispersal meant ‘the initial resettlement period is unhappy for some’, but the 51  LMA: LMA/4243/A/06/089, minute, Vietnamese refugees: Post 3-month settlement period, February, 1980. See also Dorothea Hall, ‘Adult Education amongst Vietnamese Refugees,’ Education, 54, no. 2 (1981): 146–51. 52  LMA: LMA/4243/A/06/089, Advisory Council for the Reception and Resettlement of Refugees from Vietnam, meeting minutes, March 27, 1980.

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Home Office saw this as a reasonable price to pay for ‘better chances of good integration into the community’.53 Yet past experience—most recently the arrival of Ugandan Asians—comprehensively demonstrated the failure of official attempts at dispersal of the expellees. Indeed, the majority of Ugandan Asians had opted to live in overcrowded conditions in areas close to co-nationals, where it was easy to access familiar foods and clothing and cultural activities, rather than remain in relatively comfortable accommodation where they were isolated from their wider community and support networks. And beyond the practical failures of dispersal was the fact that as a philosophical position it was fundamentally at odds with a conception of Britain as a pluralistic country where people had a right to live where they wished and newcomers could participate in political, social and cultural activities while still maintaining their own ethnic and cultural identities. Dispersal instead suggested a more rigid world view in which newcomers were understood as a problem and where assimilation of individuals into majority culture was best promoted by diluting their presence. In theory, the combination of front-end loading and dispersal should have insulated the Vietnamese resettlement programme from the effects of government’s flagship policies: financial retrenchment and the shrinking of the state. On paper, if refugees were fully prepared for British life during their three months in reception and then dispersed across the country, their presence would have minimal financial impact on local authorities having to manage an intensifying climate of cuts. This was not only the result of the ever-deepening recession—although it was often portrayed in these terms—but also of the Conservative government’s deliberate policy of limiting state spending, with local government and Labour-led councils taking the brunt. This was to become a particular issue when it came to soliciting offers of council housing for the refugees. Even when only housing was taken into account, as the Association of Metropolitan Authorities pointed out, councils faced a dilemma: in areas of severe housing stress every refugee family housed means one extra indigenous family in hostel or bed and breakfast accommodation. The average cost of keeping a family in bed and breakfast accommodation is £3000 per annum.54  Jones, Vietnamese Refugees, 40.   LMA: GLC/DG/TD/1/25 (2), Chief Executive, Association of Metropolitan Authorities, to all members, April 18, 1980. 53 54

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Right across the country, councils grappled with the question of who was more deserving of their resources: their existing population, many of whom had spent years waiting for a council house, or homeless exiles from an iniquitous communist regime? In Haverhill in Suffolk, sympathetic councillors moved to allocate three houses to refugees, but they were challenged by colleagues expressing concerns over the refugees’ English proficiency and whether or not they would fit into the community and who felt that ultimately ‘our heads must rule our hearts’.55 These were not easy decisions to make. Every year after 1979 saw the Conservative government insisting on more cuts in public spending, while the recession bit harder and unemployment continued to grow month by month. At the height of appeals from the JCRV for housing, the Labour-controlled Derwentside District Council, in County Durham had pledged two of its new three-bedroom houses to the resettlement programme. But: Little did the Council know that by the time the houses were due to be ready for occupation, the District would become one of the worst unemployment blackspots in the whole of the Country. It was not expected that the Consett Steel Works would completely shut down in 1980 or that Ransome, Hoffman & Pollard would close their ball-bearing factor in 1981, nor that the Ever Ready battery-making factory would make more than 200 of their work force redundant in 1981.56

Again and again, even sympathetic councils asked how, when they were being forced to cut services for their existing population, could they justify spending scarce resources on Vietnamese refugees? Housing was of course, only the tip of the resettlement iceberg. Government funding might have been grounded in the principle of front-end loading, but those involved in community and equal opportunities work at the grassroots level were very clear about the need to offer post-reception support. Based on the growing body of evidence from everyday experience with ‘Commonwealth immigrants’, it was easy to predict that the refugees would ‘make special demands on local authority and health authority services’. At the very least, local authorities argued, if they were to ‘integrate properly into their new communities’, specific support would have to include ‘special 55  LMA: GLC/DG/TD/1/25 (1), Haverhill Echo, ‘Haverhill Homes for boat people?’ June 28, 1979 and ‘Boat people must be integrated says MP,’ August 9, 1979. 56   Refugee Council Archive, University of East London (hereafter RCA): Box 14, Ockenden Venture, Support Report, Winter/Spring 1981, 7.

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teachers to take language classes in schools, adult education classes, [and] information leaflets in appropriate languages on public services’:57 All of these cost money. The demand is coming at a time when Government has announced that it is looking for cuts in the volume of planned local government spending … of £800m this year with further cuts to be achieved in 1980–81 … Against this background, despite their sympathy for the plight of the Vietnamese, local authorities may be slow to offer permanent homes for the refugees if that can foresee the additional demands for services with no obvious way of paying for them.58

So right from the outset, in August 1979, as the scale of the new refugee programme became known, local authorities were anxious for central government funding as a ‘way of reducing the impact upon their own budgets of providing for refugees settled temporarily or permanently in their areas’. As with housing, although councils were often keen to help, they were wary of stepping forward to shoulder an ‘additional burden in a time of cuts’.59 We can see how the combined policies of cuts and dispersal fed through into experiences for refugees on the ground. As early as spring 1980, JCRV advisors began flagging up the ‘dangers of isolation’, and how the government’s ‘policy of avoiding ghettos’ had made it almost impossible to provide effective language tuition for refugees. With only two or three families in an area, it was neither financially nor practically viable to deliver dedicated ESL classes to such few students. A survey by Ockenden of 1530 refugees living in its resettlement zones found nearly half living three or more miles from their nearest ESL tuition, with nine people living over fifty miles away.60 So although the year following the beginning of the 57  LMA: LMA/4243/A/06/089, letter to ME Head, Community Programmes and Equal Opportunities Department, Home Office, August 24, 1979. More generally see file TNA: BS18/34. 58  Ibid. 59   For example, Hampshire, Staffordshire, North Yorkshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire all contacted their local government association to clarify what funding might be available if they took refugees. See LMA/4243/A/06/089, note for file: Vietnamese Refugees, August 24, 1979; minute from PJ Coles, Association of County Councils (ACC), September 6 1979; letter from North Yorkshire County Council to ACC, September 25 1979; letter from Hertfordshire County Council to ACC, October 22, 1979. 60  LMA/4243/A/06/089, The Ockenden Venture Resettlement Survey, Annex 2. The survey, carried out by its forty resettlement officers and support group volunteers, August-­

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mass reception programme saw the development, production and distribution of a wealth of learning materials—including a one hundred-page dossier compiled from those teaching at Kensington Barracks and a BBC ‘Speak for Yourself’ combined radio and television ESL programme— many places lacked the teaching capacity to be able to deliver them.61 Things were to worsen. And as local government cuts began to be felt in the withdrawal of frontline services, local language provision shrank. The effects of this were revealed in a survey in 1983—four years after the first arrivals—which found that forty per cent of Vietnamese refugees still had no more than ‘survival’ proficiency in English.62 With the economy in deep recession, the pressures on local authorities to restrain their finances did not disappear, if anything following the Conservative’s landslide election victory of 1983—in part won on the promise of reforming ‘overspending’ councils—they intensified. One by-­ product of this was the government’s continued insistence on the centrality of voluntary agencies in resettling refugees, so it could argue that it was not placing ‘additional burdens’ on councils at a time when they were being asked to ‘exercise stringent restraint’ on expenditure.63 In turn the three refugee agencies themselves relied ever more heavily on voluntary effort and local support groups to carry out the main tasks involved in resettlement. These local groups tended to be most successful when they were made up of members with a ‘range of expertise and ages’, and when they lived in the same area as the refugees. However, even given a motivated support group with a wide skill set, the breadth of duties they were meant to cover was formidable: Establishing contact with particular families at reception centres, liaising with housing and education authorities, arranging furnishing, checking that services are connected, welcoming the family, arranging visits to the DHSS, doctor, dentist. They should also deal with any difficulties arising after the

September 1980, covered overs 312 families, and 1530 individuals across twenty counties and metropolitan districts in England and Wales. 61  LMA: LMA/4243/A/06/089, Advisory Council for the reception and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam, Education Sub-Committee, minutes of first meeting May 8, 1980. 62  NAS: HH61/1431, Report to the Home Secretary by the Joint Committee for Refugees from Vietnam, October, 1983. 63  NAS: HH61/1431, letter from Robin Young, DoE, to JF Nicholson, Home Office, November 17, 1983.

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initial settling-in period, and consolidate support and friendship with the refugees.64

Facing such a list of demands was daunting, even with professional back up. No surprise then that the three NGOs’ fieldworkers could struggle to form groups in the first place, and then found it difficult to sustain their commitment after an initial burst of enthusiasm. This was all the more the case given that many local groups were made up of: Four, or more usually three, overworked ladies from working class families, and each with her own problems; and none of the ladies has very much experience or expertise in this sort of work, nor the knowledge of how to obtain the services of experts. The ladies tend to work very hard for the Vietnamese for a few days, then fall back exhausted and defeated65

It was in this context that the Home Office’s own researcher, Peter Jones, noted that a high number of support groups reported feeling ‘used’: ‘I did a lot of work (unpaid) which I feel should have been done by skilled workers’.66 Jones went on to conclude that the ‘general view’ was that resettlement had been ‘under-manned and under-financed’. Although Jones noted that local groups felt over-burdened, he didn’t extend his gaze to look at the underpinning reasons for this: the lack of central state funding and lack of active involvement by local authority workers. Many of these latter, particularly working within education, health and social services, had built up expertise in delivering services for a multicultural clientele, but were prevented by financial constraints from extending their work to Britain’s new Vietnamese population.

Building a New Life in Britain the implications of uprooting, of isolation and of being a stranger on a foreign soil … [is] very real. A new life-style to cope with seemingly insurmountable language and communication difficulties, unfamiliar practices and official procedures, and a host of mundane and seemingly trivial matters which he finds himself grossly inadequate to handle—social security claims, free school meals for his children, family income supplement, making enqui Levin, What Welcome?, 91.  Levin, What Welcome?, 85 66  Jones, Vietnamese Refugees, 47. 64 65

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ries and appointments, job search, water heater problem, rent rebates … [the] lowering of one’s socio-economic status and down-grading to what seems to be a menial position and a ‘dirty job’. Then, for families which had previously been independent, affluent and self-sufficient, there is also the feeling of humiliation and even of shame to be wholly dependent upon others and on ‘charity’ for even the bare necessities of life.67

All the foregoing suggests that once the refugees left reception centres, unless they had an exceptionally active local support group and were in easy reach of other Vietnamese households, life in Britain was likely to be challenging. And as the psychologist Jay Yao Ye-Chin quoted above pointed out, even then, the gulf between everyday life in Vietnam and that in Britain often meant that even the smallest tasks and interactions could feel insurmountable. In this final section we explore refugees’ experiences of looking for work and claiming welfare benefits, and how over time, and in ways not expected, or even approved of, by the official resettlement programme, refugees from Vietnam began to rebuild their lives in Britain. As the JCRV’s final report put it, with over three million people on the dole, ‘in terms of employment the Vietnamese could not have been received at a worse time’.68 By mid-1983 when national unemployment stood at over thirteen per cent, for ethnic minority groups it reached an average of twenty-four per cent but among the Vietnamese it was over eighty per cent.69 Those involved in the resettlement programme most often attributed their disproportionately high unemployment rate to the refugees’ limited English-language skills, but this was not the whole story. Grassroots resettlement workers reported how in a climate of joblessness, it was seen to be ‘bad, whether politically or in terms of industrial relations, to show any favour to a newly arrived group when long-standing residents [were] losing their jobs’.70 He goes to the Job Centre and meets with such remarks from the reception desk as—‘Even our OWN people can’t get jobs …’. He wishes he does not have to be part of the ‘dole queue’ each week, and recognises that in a sense

67  LMA: LMA/4243/A/06/090, Jay Yao Ye-Chin, ‘The Inner World of the Vietnamese Refugee: Stress and the Vietnamese Refugee in South England’, November 1980. 68  NAS: HH61/1431, Report by the JCRV, 14. 69  NAS: HH61/1431, Report by the JCRV. 70  TNA: BS18/6, JCRV, Draft Progress Report, February 1981.

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he has no ‘right’ to be there … that he is no help to the present economic climate in his host country.71

High unemployment meant many Vietnamese families were forced to rely on the residual parts of the general welfare system as they had not built up the necessary work record to qualify for the higher-level national insurance-related payments. Limited functional literacy in English and confidence in handling bureaucracy ensured that claiming was often a difficult process, with many ‘baffled by the forms they received concerning tenancy agreements, gas, electricity and DHSS payments’.72 Families could find themselves with ‘nothing to sleep or sit on, nor have items to eat or to cook with’, sometimes for months, until grants and extra-payments was disbursed.73 All too often it needed the active intervention of well-­ informed and motivated support group members to ensure they gained access to the benefits to which they were entitled. However, the better-­ functioning support groups tended to be those best-placed to equip households from donations in the first place. And it was often in London and the bigger cities where voluntary support was thin on the ground, where there was the least capacity to either furnish and equip houses before refugees arrived, or to provide ongoing support to refugees attempting to navigate the labyrinthine benefits system. Practical difficulties could feed into, and reinforce, more existential feelings of alienation and dislocation. Heads of household with little command of English could struggle with the ‘complexities of their communication difficulties … loss of status … and their frustration at an unnatural growing dependence on their children, for whom the acquisition of language skills [was] a simpler matter’. These could be exacerbated by rural isolation, but, as Ockenden’s head acknowledged, could also be a feature of urban life, where such feelings could ‘develop to the point where individuals [were] frightened to leave their homes’.74 The fractured nature of 71  LMA: LMA/4243/A/06/090, Jay Yao Ye-Chin, ‘The inner world of the Vietnamese refugee’. 72  Jones, Vietnamese Refugees, 41. DHSS was the Department of Health and Social Security and was the government department charged with delivering in- and out-of-work welfare payments. 73  TNA: BS18/41, Report on the procedures between the DHSS and the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees, August 14, 1980. 74  TNA: BS18/10, Joyce Pearce, Draft, ‘The “Stress”’ of the Vietnamese Boat Refugees, June 8, 1982.

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the refugee population—ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese, Buddhist and Christian, North and South, rural and urban—meant that even when refugees were resettled close together, it did not automatically bring with it a sense of community. Post-resettlement isolation then could mean isolation from the wider British population, but it could also mean living alongside co-nationals towards whom they felt no affinity, and perhaps even hostility. Liverpool’s Race Relations Committee painted a stark view of life for many of the 140 families who had been settled in ‘clusters’ across the city, so they could ‘support each other socially and culturally … particularly when they are faced with racial harassment’. Yet, workers noted how this strategy had failed, with internal divisions meaning they had enough ‘difficulty relating to one and other let alone the host community’: The alien culture and the language barrier often create a tremendous pressure on Vietnamese families. With no prospects on employment, the husbands of the Vietnamese women often turn to drinking and gambling. As a result, family violence erupts out of a drinking bout or a loss on the gambling table. This leads to wife battering and marital breakdowns.75

And as with unemployment, which often became reduced to discussions around English proficiency, social isolation could not be solely equated with failures to acquire language skills. In both cases xenophobia and racism played their part. Refugees often preferred to explain their experiences of crime as being a product of the ‘neighbourhoods in which they lived’ than of their ethnic background.76 But in some areas, most notoriously on the Pepys Estate in South London where some residents perpetrated a campaign of intimidation and violent attacks against its newly arrived Vietnamese residents, the racist intentions were unmistakable.77 Even in the absence of targeted brutality, for refugees, there was the feeling of being, ‘an unwelcome “intruder” upon the English

75  Refugee Council Archive, London (hereafter RCA): Box 6, Report of the Director of Housing, Liverpool City Council, ‘Funding for the support of the Vietnamese community’, February, 1984. 76  Dalglish, Refugees from Vietnam, 158. 77  Times, ‘Problem estate is “picking on” its boat people,’ March 12, 1982, contained within Michael Swann. Education for All: The Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Minority Groups (London: HMSO, 1985), Annex B, 732.

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socio-­economic scene, ‘“a burden on the state” and little more than a “tolerated presence” in the British society’.78 While it is important to set out the considerable challenges facing refugees from Vietnam who arrived in Britain in this period, we should not make the mistake of thinking of the refugees as passive demoralised victims. Rather than through formal channels, those who were able to get work often did so through personal contacts. Sometimes these were via resettlement officers and local support group members, but often opportunities came through pre-existing social networks and personal contacts with British Chinese entrepreneurs, many based in the catering, food and wholesale industries. Research into the Vietnamese families living in Rochdale and London showed that only about a quarter of families had someone in work, and that those in employment were mainly either working for a community organisation or refugee agency or for British-Chinese employers.79 This latter work had the advantage of not needing proficiency in English, but wages were often low, commonly not enough to sustain a family, and for those who were paid cash-in-hand, they lacked the formal evidence needed to claim low-income welfare benefits.80 As the researcher for the Rochdale-London study noted, most of the work found by the Vietnamese was ‘marginal, either within the Chinese community, or job creation to assist the refugee community’: only one of the seventy-two adults of working age in Rochdale was working ‘in the mainstream economy’.81 While her analysis assumed that work for Chinese employers somehow could not be considered proper employment and demonstrated a lack of understanding over the growing role of such enterprises in urban economies, it nevertheless usefully quantified the marginalisation of the refugees from large sectors of the British economy. Other grassroots workers found evidence of ‘refugees claiming benefits while covertly engaged in employment’.82 Possibly helped by the British Chinese population, or possibly through their own experiences, Vietnamese refugees joined countless thousands of the British claimant population who knew that the only way to rise above the grindingly low standard of living 78  LMA: LMA/4243/A/06/090, Jay Yao Ye-Chin, ‘The inner world of the Vietnamese refugee’. Emphasis in original. 79  Dalglish, Refugees from Vietnam, 157 & 162. 80  TNA: BS18/6, JCRV, Draft Progress Report, February 1981. 81  Dalglish, Refugees from Vietnam, 157 & 162. 82   TNA: BS18/5, JCRV, minutes of fourteenth meeting, 17 Jul 1980. See also LMA/4243/A/06/090, Advisory Council, minutes of fifth meeting, 22 Jan 1981.

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offered by a life on benefits was to work ‘on the black’ while also claiming benefits.83 Uncomfortable though this knowledge was, it was also, for those willing to accept it, evidence that Vietnamese workers were becoming familiarised with the realities of low-paid working life in Britain. As with other minority ethnic groups who found themselves marginalised or exploited by established British businesses, many Vietnamese responded over time by opening their own business, often supported by extended family connections both in Britain and in south-east Asia. By the end of the century, seventeen per cent of Britain’s economically active Vietnamese-born were registered as self-employed. Their businesses tended to be concentrated in restaurants, nail bars and ‘minimarkets’, but could also be found in areas providing specialist services, including hair dressing and car maintenance, to a mainly Vietnamese or south-east Asian clientele. Pushed to the edges of the mainstream British economy, many Vietnamese, along with other first-generation immigrants, turned to servicing their co-nationals, using it as a means of generating employment for themselves, wider family members and others who they saw as part of their community. Such ‘ethnic entrepreneurialism’ was long characterised as marginal to, and not part of, the ‘real’ British economy, but in fact it was to play an increasingly significant role. By 2000 BAME businesses in London were estimated as generating a turnover of £90 billion, or over ten per cent of the capital’s total income.84 For many who started their own business, or found work with Chinese entrepreneurs, this was possible because ‘dispersed’ refugees increasingly moved away from their place of resettlement to cities where they felt able to build a ‘liveable life’ for themselves. Some moved to be closer to other family members, or for work, or to be able to be part of a bigger Vietnamese population, others moved simply to escape racial harassment.85 Anecdotal evidence from early in the resettlement programme, confirmed by later 83  For a contemporary discussion of this phenomenon see Raymond Pahl, ‘Does Jobless Mean Workless? Unemployment and Informal Work,’ The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 493, no. 1 (1987): 36–46. 84  Susan Bagwell, ‘UK Vietnamese Businesses: Cultural Influences and Intracultural Differences,’ Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 24, no. 1 (2006): 51–69, 51. See also Susan Bagwell, ‘Transnational Family Networks and Ethnic Minority Business Development: The Case of Vietnamese Nail-shops in the UK,’ International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research 14, no. 6 (2008): 377–394. 85   Vaughan Robinson and Samantha Hale, The Geography of Vietnamese Secondary Migration in the UK, Warwick Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, 1989.

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quantitative evidence, flagged up cases of refugees leaving Wales and Scotland for England, or leaving smaller towns such as Skipton and Halifax to move to Leeds, Manchester or Bradford. London, Merseyside and the West Midlands—notably Wolverhampton—also developed significant Vietnamese populations, thus reinforcing their status as desirable destinations.86 At the other end of the spectrum, flight led to further flight: all the twenty-one families resettled in Northern Ireland had left by 1988; Glasgow’s original forty-two families had shrunk to one by the same year; and Vietnamese families disappeared completely from peripheral rural areas such as Barnstaple or the Cumbrian coast. Some of the movements fitted into the more general national trend of movements away from the north-west and other areas of high unemployment to the south-east and London. But overall the increasing concentration of Vietnamese-born people in the inner cities of major conurbations ran counter to the general British picture of migration out of cities into suburban and small towns. If this was evidence of how the Vietnamese had ‘actively redrawn their own pattern of settlement’, it was also evidence of cleaving to areas of Britain which were being abandoned by more affluent and typically ‘whiter’ sections of the population.87 The growing concentration of the Vietnamese population both reflected and reinforced a bigger change, as sections of mainstream British life began to embrace multiculturalist practices and ways of life. Britain’s major cities became ever more diverse, and this became reflected as much in those who were delivering front-line services—including refugee agencies—as it was in those who used them. Most notable here were efforts by BCAR and SCF/Refugee Action to establish a Vietnamese trainee social worker programme, a scheme which, exceptionally, the Home Office agreed to fund for a limited period of time.88 The initial scheme saw a cohort of ten Vietnamese and/or Cantonese-speaking refugees receiving ‘basic social work, counselling, practical and linguistic skills’ training, before being employed to support refugee families undergoing resettlement. It was illustrative of new social work practice which was emerging in 86  House of Commons, Third Report from the Home Affairs Committee Session 1984–5: Refugees and Asylum with Special Reference to the Vietnamese, (1984–5), House of Commons Paper No. 72, xxviii. London’s Vietnamese population rose from 3683 in 1982 to 5420 in 1984; in the West Midlands over the same period it rose from 1155 to 1604. 87  Robinson and Hale, Geography of Vietnamese Secondary Migration, 17 & 22. 88  RCA: Box 17, Para Social workers pre 1982, letter from John Goddard, Home Office to R Hood, January 13, 1981.

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certain cities in Britain, which aimed to adopt more open and less fixed and hierarchical working practices where workers were encouraged to ‘look openly at new aspects of life and allow people to decide for themselves’. Crucially, this meant valuing the cultural expertise and insights the trainees brought with them in order to enable them to decide how to meet refugees’ needs ‘in a culturally acceptable way’.89 The scheme was then, in a small way, a reflection of the gradual reworking of the local state, with practitioners both working within multiculturalist paradigms and themselves forming part of Britain’s ever-diversifying population. The increasing concentration of Vietnamese refugees in particular parts of the country could present opportunities for self-organisation, particularly in inner-city areas of Britain’s biggest cities. Here they could find financial and other support from primarily Labour councils which were both keen to promote their own strand of municipal multiculturalism.90 These organisations variously provided lunch clubs for the elderly, pre-­ school groups, play schemes and activities for teenagers, social events, shared news from Vietnam and within Britain and started creating their own community spaces.91 In tones very different from the gratitude of first arrivals, their publications could be assertive in expressing the needs of their users and explicit in their criticisms of the shortcomings of British society:92 the majority of us are struggling with serious difficulties and our morale is becoming very low, with an increasing feeling of isolation and alienation. Such feelings seem to be difficult to share with people who have not been through our common experience and with whom we have a language barrier … Elderly people or widows feel trapped in their flats, like birds in their cages, afraid to venture outside because of their limited English, the climate, the strangeness of their new environment and, in some places, racial prejudice and harassment. Middle aged people, as a result of their poor English too, have difficulty in finding employment and solving everyday problem … [And] young people, in their frustration and despair, they will turn to gam Ibid.  ‘Mandana Hendessi in Conversation’, in Southall Black Sisters, Against the Grain: A Celebration of Survival and Struggle (London: Southall Black Sisters, 1990), 11.. 91  Twenty-six different community organisations or Vietnamese-specific schemes run by local authorities were listed in the first edition of Vietnamese Community News 1, July (1986): 18–19. 92  Nam Thao, ‘More Vietnamese refugees’ relatives should be granted with entry visas,’ Vietnamese Community News 1, July (1986): 3–4. 89 90

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bling, drinking etc., in other words, an irresponsible way of life. This is already causing problems for the agencies and authorities.93

Here the writer proposed that a Vietnamese community centre would solve these problems, providing as it would a place where people could drop-in and get advice, as well as being able to offer a range of cultural activities which could ‘revive and transmit our common heritage—literature, art, traditional Vietnamese gymnastics—to the younger generation … strengthening our cultural identity’.94 Conceiving of and establishing social centres was one sign that Britain’s Vietnamese population was beginning to put down roots in Britain, creating structures which might support and sustain it into the future. But it is also worth noticing just how much this new community action was expressed via, and mediated through, the municipal multiculturalism of the mid-1980s. In many of the local-level initiatives we see expressions of ethnicity which fitted into the preconceptions of the period—the unproblematic idea of a ‘community’ with ‘a’ cultural identity and ‘a’ common heritage, an identity shorn of any political expression, internal rivalry, class or other divisions. Given the fragmented nature of Britain’s Vietnamese refugee population, claims of a unified community and culture appear surprising. But for those seeking resources, mobilising unproblematic ideas of ‘a Vietnamese community’ was a way of accessing scarce funds—a tactic Gayatri Spivak has termed strategic essentialising.95 Here their needs chimed with Labour councils’ strategic agendas: funding such projects was both a way to actively resist the Conservative government’s political agenda and to create social democracy on Labour’s own terms. But, in the context of severe cuts, deep recession, high unemployment and endemic racism, community initiatives could never hope to be anything other than a sticking plaster over engrained social marginalisation.96 93  RCA: Box 6, letter from Ta Thanh Thuong, Chair of the Vietnamese Refugee Community, Southwark, to Martin Barber, British Refugee Council, March 30 1983. See also Tuan Anh, ‘HELP the Vietnamese refugees help themselves,’ Vietnamese Community News 1, July (1986): 15–16. 94  RCA: Box 6, letter from Ta Thanh Thuong, Chair of the Vietnamese Refugee Community, Southwark, to Martin Barber, British Refugee Council, March 30, 1983. Emphasis added. 95  Gayatri Spivak, Other Asias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 96  For a critical analysis of community and public history see Kevin Myers, ‘Historical practice in the age of pluralism: educating and celebrating identities,’ in Histories and Memories.

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Conclusion Britain’s engagement with the Vietnamese refugee crisis was stamped with the preoccupations of Thatcher and of Thatcherism. Although the outgoing Labour administration had pledged to accept into Britain all refugees rescued by British-registered vessels, this policy was quickly overturned by the new Conservative government of May 1979. Thatcher’s administration first attempted to bypass international maritime conventions, and then, in a case of ‘proxy humanitarianism’, attempted to cast Hong Kong’s significant role in the reception of Vietnamese refugees as Britain’s own effort. To maintain Britain’s international standing while seeking to minimise the number of refugees coming to Britain, Thatcher promoted the idea of a UN-sponsored meeting to resolve the crisis. It was unwillingness to lose face on the international stage which caused Thatcher to agree to the initial quota of 10,000 refugees pushed by Poul Hartling and to sign up to the UNHCR’s Orderly Departure Programme. Her personal commitment to cut immigration and domestic government spending ensured that this pledge—which at best was only ever a grudging commitment— received the most parsimonious of support, and no oversight of the process by central government. Yet the initial response of the British public to the arrival of the ‘boat people’ was warm and enthusiastic. The outpouring of voluntary effort which was a reflection of this can be set within a longer history of individuals who stepped out of their normal lives to help refugees in a moment of crisis. Although the Cold War might have framed the general context for the arrival of the Vietnamese refugees, we can read the presence of individual volunteers as a far more apolitical, visceral and immediate response to the images of human suffering they saw on their television screens. While problematic and often riven with shortcomings, the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees across Britain after 1979 was made possible due to the work of hundreds of individuals motivated by little more than goodwill, keen to prepare houses, sort clothes, arrange cultural activities, show refugees around their new towns and introduce them to life in Britain. This was necessary. Central government’s refusal to provide funds postreception limited local authorities’ ability to respond to their arrival, and resulted in councils’ reluctance to come forward with offers of housing Migrants and their History in Britain, ed. Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi (London and New York: Tauris Academic, 2006), 35–53.

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and generated very real fears over the increased costs their presence might impose after resettlement. The climate of cuts interacted with the policy of dispersal which underpinned the JCRV’s resettlement strategy. Despite having failed during the last major refugee resettlement programme, and despite being at odds with images of Britain as a pluralist nation, dispersal was encouraged to reduce the impact of refugees on any one locality. But those who were dispersed often experienced high levels of isolation, as they lived in areas with no wider south-east Asian population, and where there were insufficient refugees to justify providing special language classes and other support. Those who were not dispersed often ended up clustered in places where there was a large number of empty housing units, normally because depopulation, deindustrialisation and high levels of unemployment had made these areas unattractive to the wider population. These problems were exacerbated by the worst recession in fifty years, strict control of local government spending, endemic racism and the deep differences between the incoming Vietnamese refugees and wider British life, not just in terms of language and work histories, but also of culture. There were more positive elements sitting alongside this picture, as across Britain’s largest cities everyday encounters between Britain’s increasingly diverse population and those working on the frontline of welfare delivery—who themselves were also becoming drawn from that diverse population—saw communities, grassroots activists and professionals challenging older ways of thinking and working. Simultaneously, sometimes via Britain’s established Chinese population, sometimes separately, across certain inner city areas, refugees created businesses, social and cultural institutions to provide the work and social networks necessary to sustain their lives in Britain. We need to be wary of constructing an over-­ celebratory account of this process, as it was as much through negative experiences—unemployment, racism, mental health issues, lack of language provision—as positive affinities with co-nationals that many Vietnamese retreated into family or national community networks to provide livelihoods and find support. This suggests that rather than being able to chart a simple discourse of welcome or rejection, the Britain which incoming Vietnamese refugees encountered was composed of two competing strands. One which positioned immigration and immigrants as a problem threatening a ‘white’ British life and aimed to shrink the state to the bare essentials; and another, which embraced the idea of a

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multicultural Britain and saw diverse local communities as places to generate a new agenda of equality as part of a rejuvenated democracy. Vietnamese refugees coming to Britain quickly found themselves caught up in both these strands.

Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

CHAPTER 5

The Netherlands: ‘Boat People’ as Changemakers in the Dutch Refugee System Julia Kleinschmidt

In the closing months of 1978, as more and more Vietnamese tried to escape their country, the international press transmitted pictures of wrecked, overloaded boats of refugees and poor hygienic conditions in makeshift camps across south-east Asia to the West.1 But it was not only journalists who fought to make this regional crisis visible: in Bangkok the Dutch ambassador Frans van Dongen publicly criticised his government’s reaction to events on the ground. His focus was on his country’s law which only allowed Vietnamese refugees to come to the Netherlands if 1  For West Germany see Julia Kleinschmidt, ‘Die Aufnahme der ersten “boat people” in die Bundesrepublik, in: Deutschland Archiv Online (26 November 2013), http://www.bpb. de/170611; For the Dutch reporting see e.g.: Nederlands dagblad: gereformeerd gezinsblad, Duizenden bootvluchtelingen mogen niet van vluchtschepen af,’ December 29, 1978.

J. Kleinschmidt (*) University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Taylor et al. (eds.), When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983, Palgrave Studies in Migration History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64224-2_5

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they had been rescued by a Dutch boat. His wife, a humanitarian activist in her own right and originally from Vietnam herself, bitterly summarised the events playing out in the South China Sea2: So the matter is resolving itself: the Communists in Vietnam take their money; the captains from the wrecked boats, their jewellery; the Thai fishermen and pirates, their dignity and the sea takes their life.3

In this sentence she simultaneously summed up the multiple perils facing those seeking to escape Vietnam and sought to shame the international community generally, and the Dutch government specifically, into action. Although the ambassadorial couple’s unusual intervention in the public sphere was publicly criticised by foreign minister Christoph Albert van der Klaauw, their emphasis on the urgent need for a humanitarian response to the crisis resonated with Dutch public opinion, and was to become a central plank of the Netherlands’ eventual response to Vietnamese refugees. The conflicting positions held by the Foreign Ministry and its ambassador on the ground were not the only varying opinions during the Dutch case of the Vietnamese. Building on this incident, which pointed to wider tensions in Dutch society between national understandings of its tradition of warm hospitality—now underpinned by a mature welfare system—and growing pressures to limit migration, this chapter seeks to understand why and how the Netherlands reacted to the humanitarian crisis in south-east Asia. In doing so the chapter shows how Dutch refugee and migration politics in this period was intimately entwined with civil society’s involvement in aid and domestic reception and resettlement initiatives. And although Dutch involvement in the UNHCR programme began as an exceptional response to exceptional circumstances, in fact we can see how it acted as a catalyst for change at home: the arrival of the Vietnamese intensified an emerging trend towards the institutionalisation of refugee reception. In turn, this both expressed and drove the growing professionalisation of refugee care and domestic immigration programmes for ‘invited refugees’, a trend which had emerged during the 1970s. And we can set this in contrast to the state’s reception of individual asylum seekers in this period. As  I have been unable to determine her name.  Henk de Mari, ‘Vietnamezen passen niet in ons vluchtelingenbeleid. Onvooorstelbare tragedies in gamele bootjes,’ De Telegraaf, November 30, 1978. 2 3

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we go through this history, it is useful to remember that at this time the Netherlands had a population of sixteen million diverse and often foreign-­ born inhabitants. Into this population it accepted 5700 people from UNHCR camps and boat rescuees and remained open to Vietnamese migration after this, so that by the early twentieth century it counted more than 23,000 Vietnamese-born inhabitants.4

Migration and Refugee Politics Up to 1979 Just as the other chapters of this book show for other European countries and Israel in this period, immigration had become a highly controversial issue in the Netherlands by the end of the 1970s. Here too, the combined effects of post-colonial migration and the economic effects of the oil crises ensured that not only labour migration but also the claims of migrants from the former colonies as well as those of political refugees were becoming questioned. The Netherlands, as with other western European countries, was struggling to manage the unintended legacies of three different migration regimes which had been in place from the 1950s to the 1980s. First here was the migration of around four hundred thousand people from the former Dutch colonies of Indonesia and Suriname from after independence in 1949 until the end of the 1970s. Roughly half of these were ‘Dutch Indonesians’, with mixed Indonesian and Dutch ancestry; approximately one hundred thousand were from Suriname, many of them arriving after independence in 1975; a similar number were white Dutch ‘returnees’; and to these we can add 12,500 were Moluccans. The majority of those from Indonesia arrived during the 1950s and 1960s, but the Surinamese migration continued right up to the late 1970s. This movement was only significantly halted at the end of the decade as the Netherlands introduced new visa restrictions, with the explicit intention of ending automatic entry to the metropole of its ex-imperial subjects.5

4  The Hague: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, Population by origin and generation, 1 January, 2019, ed. https://opendata.cbs.nl/statline/#/CBS/en. (accessed January 19, 2020). 5  Hans van Amersfoort and Rinus Penninx, ‘Regulating Migration in Europe: The Dutch Experience, 1960–1992,’ The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 534 (1994): 133–46. (accessed January 13, 2020). www.jstor.org/stable/1048504.; Guno Jones, ‘Dutch Politicians, the Dutch Nation and the Dynamics of Post-colonial Citizenship,’ in Post-colonial Immigrants and Identity Formations in the Netherlands, ed. Bosma Ulbe

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Although many of those who came to the Netherlands from its former colonies were seeking a better life for themselves, they can still be distinguished from the second migration group, who were explicitly labour migrants. In common with the West German Gastarbeiter, up until the first oil crisis, the Dutch authorities had actively encouraged labour migration from southern Europe, Morocco and Turkey.6 And again, as with Germany, these workers were considered ‘guests’ who were expected to return ‘home’. The wider political implication of this attitude was that the Dutch government actively set its face against developing integration policies. Indeed, guest workers were expected to continue using their own language, to follow their own religion and to keep their own traditions, all in order to make a return to their country of origin easier. But by the 1970s it was clear that many of these migrants had made the Netherlands their permanent home. And indeed, working counter to the post-oil crisis ban on labour recruitment, the Dutch law of family reunification (1974) served to consolidate the presence of migrant workers in the Netherlands. As in West Germany, France and Belgium, this enabled workers to bring their families who had been left behind to the Netherlands, with the result that many women and children, especially of Moroccan or Turkish origin, began to arrive in the Netherlands. And it was their presence, rather than that of refugees, which sparked nationwide debates in the 1970s and 1980s over the impact on Dutch society of migrants and their special health, educational and communitarian needs. The third migration regime was the Netherlands’ refugee/asylum system. Although its significance had begun to be picked up by scholars at the University Leiden by the early 1980s, refugees had in fact been a matter of national debate since the 1956 Hungarian uprising. As the significance of the Hungarians indicates, up until the 1970s domestic refugee politics had been dominated by Cold War preoccupations. This had the (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012) 27–48, 32. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt45kfpq.4, (accessed January 28, 2020). 6  Hans van Amersfoort and Mies van Niekerk, ‘Indo immigration as colonial inheritance: post-colonial immigrants in the Netherlands, 1945–2002’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32 no. 3 (2006): 323–346.; Omar El Bardaï, ‘Les Marocains résidant aux Pays-Bas: caractéristiques démographiques et sociales’, in Marocains de l’Extérieur (Rabat: Fondation Hassan II pour les Marocains Résidant à l’Etranger, 2003), ed. Khadija Kabbaj, 322–373, (July 2003), Archived from the original on 23 May 2006, retrieved 24 March 2009, https:// www.iom.int/sites/default/files/country/docs/morocco/Marocains_de_l%27exterieur. pdf (accessed 23.11.2019);

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knock-on effect of constructing an image of refugees in the minds of the Dutch public as mostly male anti-communist dissidents. Thus rather than viewing as potential refugees all those fleeing post-colonial wars and political repression in the Global South, in the minds of the Dutch public the idea of the refugee was—when not remembering the Jews during the 1930s—reserved for the handful of people, mostly from Czechoslovakia and Poland, who succeeded in reaching the Netherlands every year from the Eastern bloc. During the first phase of the Cold War, even if those fleeing communism were in principle welcomed with opened arms, in reality, on arrival dissident refugees were examined and closely questioned by the state before being allowed to enter the country, even as their presence was used by the government to show the supremacy of the capitalist world.7 This image of refugees began to change with the arrival of Portuguese conscientious objectors in the late 1960s, and as we see below, the single but high-profile American army deserter from the Vietnam war who sought asylum in the Netherlands.8 Alongside the small number of political dissidents were far larger groups of asylum seekers from persecuted communities from right across the globe. In fact, the arrival of three of these groups—Chileans, Turkish Christians and then the Vietnamese—added a new layer to national debates about asylum, so that by the 1970s the Dutch were beginning to see a more complex picture of asylum, one which went beyond European Cold War dissidents to encompass different kinds of movements and individuals. For all these new groups of refugees, their traumatic experiences of persecution and flight, and their visible status as vulnerable subjects seemed to set them apart from the dominant immigration and multicultural narratives of late twentieth-century Dutch society that increasingly attended discussions surrounding both post-colonial and labour migrants. Growing medical and public understanding of the experience of persecution and flight as traumatic, and so, by extension, demanding humanitarian action, became more established in international debates during the 7  Tycho Walaardt and Het Paard van Troje. ‘Het verlenen van asiel door Nederland in de periode 1945–1955,’ TSEG/ Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, 6, no. 2 (2009): 63–93. 8  Tycho Walaardt, ‘New refugees? Manly war resisters prevent an asylum crisis in the Netherlands, 1968–1973,’ in Gender, Migration and Categorisation. Making Distinctions between Migrants in Western Countries, 1945–2010, ed. Marlou Schrover and Deirdre M. Moloney, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2013), 75–104.

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1970s. We can understand this trend as both emerging from, and adding too, the work of established humanitarian actors in the Global South in post-colonial settings, including Vietnam, during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as new approaches to working with the poor and disadvantaged within the Global North.9 While we have seen how humanitarian positioning played a part in all our country case studies, in the Netherlands, by the mid-1970s, there was a very explicit intensification of the Netherlands’ self-perception of itself as a humanitarian nation. Indeed, the left-wing government of the mid-­1970s under president Joop den Uyl had positioned the Netherlands as a self-­ declared international leader in state-led human rights activism. Its actions did not spring from nowhere. From the 1970s, in common with their Scandinavian fellow-travellers, Dutch activists had increasingly been mobilised via the emerging discourse of human rights to extend their gaze beyond those who could not strictly be classified as refugees (vluchteling) under the Geneva Convention, and to think about how to adapt national refugee policy in the face of increasing humanitarian disasters across the world. In the Netherlands we find a different iteration of the emerging post-1968 new Left politics than in, for example, France. Unlike the French focus on human rights, via the work of Médecins Sans Frontières, which was underpinned by anti-communism, Dutch human rights analyses of the 1970s were shaped by socialist or left-wing internationalist perspectives. This was true even for prominent organisations like Amnesty International which publicly and consistently insisted on its apolitical position. It was also seen as such in a symbolic as well as practical sense. In political terms, the ‘ethics of left-wing solidarity groups extended directly into government policy’.10 Since 1976, the reception of Christians from Turkey and the Middle East as well as refugees from Ethiopia and Chile had not only preoccupied church associations and refugee organisations, but also the two relevant government ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs. During the 1970s, the Dutch political leadership was determined to develop a new type of 9  Johannes Paulmann, ed., Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press 2016); Lasse Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering. Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017). For Vietnam see Michael Vössing, Humanitäre Hilfe und Interessenpolitik. Westdeutsches Engagement für Vietnam in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018). 10  Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten, 460.

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foreign policy, one that acknowledged the Netherlands’ interdependence and shared destiny with other, less prosperous, regions of the world. This ambition partly came out of pre-existing close political connections, such as that, for example, between the new development minister Jan Pronk and the Nieuwlinks-Beweging. Pronk had been a founding member of the Chile Committee, and it was no surprise therefore that he gave a prominent platform to speakers from Causa Chile.11 Despite his political credentials, he still received criticism from the Left: Pronk had no easy relationship with the Dutch ambassador in Bangkok, Frans van Dongen, who attacked him for his ‘neo-colonial’ attitudes. Even so, when compared to either the foregoing or following administrations, under Joop van Uyl’s Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) government from 1973 to 1977, a new political ethos came into national political life, one which foregrounded morality and universal human rights. This positioning by government was not simply rhetorical and saw it initiate intensive refugee care and integration programmes for some two thousand Chilean refugees who had come to the Netherlands after Pinochet’s coup in 1973. And following on the heels of these arrivals were Christians from the Iraqi-Turkish border who found protection in the Netherlands in the years 1976–1980 as a result of proactive attempts by campaigning Dutch clerical groups that had concerned themselves with the fate of Christian minorities within the Middle East. Thus this shift towards governmental humanitarianism outlived van Uyl’s administration and could still be felt in the early 1980s, and helped to pave the way for the humanitarian discourses which accompanied the Dutch admission of the Vietnamese. Thinking about the arrival and reception of the Chileans and the minority Christians does not simply provide insight into governmental thinking over refugees in this period but also gives us a good sense of the two main constituencies within Dutch society which might have been counted on to mobilise for refugees in the years prior to the arrival of the Vietnamese: first Christians, either influenced by a long tradition of humanitarian ­assistance or by the new, Latin American-inspired, Christian liberationist movement of the 1970s; and second, the New Left, which again drew inspiration from Latin America, strongly identifying with the new models of state socialism that had emerged there after the Cuban revolution, up to an including the government of the deposed Chilean president Salvador

 Ibid., 440–461.

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Allende.12 Within the Netherlands, both Christian and socialist solidarity for the persecuted aligned closely, and merged with Amnesty International’s strong Dutch division, which advocated for human rights as a universal moral standard. Amnesty, since its inception, had not only pushed the case for human rights in foreign policy priorities, but had also helped to establish a new support system for refugees across the Netherlands, one based on a belief that human rights needed to be as central to the domestic sphere as it was to international politics.13 In many ways this action was not new, as public consciousness of refugees had been embedded in Dutch post-war society in multiple ways from the outset. After 1945 the liberated Dutch state had agreed with the International Refugee Organisation to give a new home to a limited number of displaced persons (DPs) from the camps scattered across defeated Germany. As was common across receiving states, the new arrivals had been selected not on their needs as refugees, but rather on the basis of their youth, ability to work and to fit invisibly into a Dutch post-war society that was in desperate need for labour to help with reconstruction efforts.14 Thus although fifty people with disabilities from the camps were granted leave to enter the Netherlands, when set against the five thousand DPs selected for employment purposes, this act was revealed as little more than a tokenistic gesture of humanitarianism.15 While the Netherlands was one of the original signatories of the Refugee Convention, and it was the Dutch Queen Juliana who took over the 12  David Tombs, Latin American Liberation Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Kim Christiaens, ‘From the East to the South, and back? International solidarity movements in Belgium and new histories of the Cold War, 1950s–1970s,’ Dutch Crossing 39, no. 3 (2015): 187–203; Kim Christiaens, Idesbald Goddeeris and Magaly Rodríguez García (eds), European Solidarity with Chile, 1970s–1980s (Antwerp: Peter Lang, 2014). 13  For a general history of Amnesty International see Tom Buchanan, ‘“The truth will set you free”: The making of Amnesty International,’ Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (2002): 575–597, and Jan Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten. Menschenrechte in der internationalen Politik seit den 1940ern (Göttingen: Wallstein 2014). 14  For a comparison with the British case see for example Becky Taylor, ‘A Change of Heart? British Policies Towards Tubercular Refugees during 1959 World Refugee Year,’ Twentieth Century British History 26, no. 1 (2015): 97–121. 15  Tycho Walaardt, Geruisloos inwilligen, argumentatie en speelruimte in de Nederlandse asielprocedere, 1945–1994 (Leiden: Leiden University Press 2012), 65–68; Frank Caestecker, ‘Displaced Persons (DPs) in Europe since the end of World War II,’ in The Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe: From the 17th Century to the Present, ed. Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C.  Emmer, Leo Lucassen and Jochen Oltmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 314–18, 316.

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patronage of the Nederlands Federatie voor Vluchtelingenhulp (Dutch Federation of Refugee Care) founded in 1954, these facts in themselves did not signal any significant change on the ground. In part this was because the Dutch signing of the Convention was more of a political flourish, one signalling its alignment with the emerging Western international regime than a substantial act which materially altered national refugee policy. But it also did not mark a break with the past because civil society had long been active, and was increasingly organised, in the work of receiving and resettling refugees: religious organisations had been taking care of ‘their’ co-religionists who had been arriving from the DP camps for some time. Even before the Refugee Convention and foundation of the UNHCR, in fact as early as the aftermath of the Czechoslovak coup d’état in February 1948, the first national refugee care organisation, the Stichting voor Vluchteling-Studenten—Universitair Asiel Fonds (Foundation for Refugee Students—University Assistance Fund, or UAF), was established by former Prague students and their Dutch supporters. The secular UAF, which was to become emblematic of Dutch refugee assistance over the next decades, worked to actively support Czechoslovakian political exiles, and in doing so broaden the terrain in which Dutch refugee support organisations worked. Thus the Dutch Federation of Refugee Care, founded in the aftermath of the establishment of the UNHCR in 1954, too, can be less understood as a major innovation but more an umbrella organisation for the already wide range of institutions which were active in refugee work. These ranged from the Reformist and Catholic churches, the Jewish Social Organisation and the Ecumenical Refugee Help Organisation to the secular UAF and the anti-communist Relief Committee of Czech Refugees.16 From the outset the Federation’s mandate was to settle refugees into the Dutch society and step in, if and when state institutions failed to cover their needs. Here integration was central to its ethos. Its stated goal for these newcomers to Dutch life was for them ‘get rid of the “refugee label” through rendering their refugee past invisible’.17 Through detailed case studies and in-depth analysis of immigration law, Dutch historians have suggested that this apparently progressive and inclusive approach to refugee resettlement may have had highly moral and  The Federation continued in this role until it was disbanded in 1975.   National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague (hereafter Vluchtelingenwerk, 2.19.152 inv-nr.2, Blue booklet, 17. 16 17

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laudable aspirations, but in reality largely served to act as window dressing and failed to challenge the bureaucratic hoop jumping required of, and obstacles of daily life faced by, refugees and labour migrants alike.18 For in reality, after the passing of the 1965 Aliens Act, Dutch migration politics became more and more restrictive and the state’s assumption that guest workers and even migrants from former colonies were going to return ensured that up until the 1980s there were no general government-­ sponsored reorientation programmes for new arrivals, which might have worked to enable them to quickly establish themselves in their new country. The 1965 Act had introduced five different types of residency permit, with these determined either by an individual’s heritage or their employment status. Even so, the Act demonstrated an appreciation of the growing power of the UNHCR, and laid the foundations for a standardised asylum process. This determined that, if the ministry of justice had recognised somebody as refugee under the Geneva Convention, they had to be granted an unlimited residence permit, ensuring that those claiming their rights according to the Convention could not easily be pushed back.19 Even despite these legislative developments in the Netherlands, as in other Western European countries, anti-immigration increasingly became a live political issue. In 1977 three confessional parties joined to create the Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA—Christian Democratic Appeal), which aimed to offer a new centre-right option to voters including demanding a clear immigration policy20; while politicians on the further right actively began demanding a reduction in migration. When the CDA, under the premiership of Dries van Agt, formed a coalition government with the centre-right VVD, such attitudes became translated into policy, ensuring that the hurdles an individual needed to surmount to obtain a work permit increased. And so, as in Britain, where Margaret Thatcher was elected in part on an anti-immigration ticket in May 1979, it would be the conservative government under the CDA-premier minister Dries 18  Jan Willen ten Doesschate, Asielbeleid en belangen: het Nederlandse toelatingsbeleid ten aanzien van vluchtelingen in de jaren 1968–1982 (Hilversum: Verloren 1993), 30. 19  Article 12 empowered to the state to withhold residence permits from aliens; Article 23 made it a criminal offence to enter or remain in the Netherlands without a residence permit. See Staadsblad van het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden Nr. 40, 73–79, 1965, https://vijfeeuwenmigratie.nl/sites/default/files/bronnen/Stbl_1965-040-vreemdelingenwet.pdf, (accessed March 20, 2020). 20  These were the Catholic People’s Party, the Anti-Revolutionary Party and the Christian Historical Union.

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van Agt that became faced with organising its country’s Vietnamese resettlement-programme. Thus in the Netherlands by the beginning of the 1980s there was a tension between the aspirations of a government that was in theory open to humanitarian action, but which also had no clear vision for its migration policies beyond working towards reducing numbers. Beginning with a ban on the active labour recruitment of foreign labour in the early 1970s, the result was an ever-expanded regulatory system for immigration which introduced piecemeal an increasing number of bureaucratic hurdles for working permits and visas alike, but lacked internal coherence.21 Standing in apparent sharp conflict with this ever-tightening immigration regime was government’s attempts to develop a humanitarian approach to international relations, and by extension, its aspiration to develop an inclusive approach to asylum claims from persecuted groups. The way through this apparent contradiction was via the creation of a new category of ‘invited’ (uitgenodigd) refugee. This category recognised groups who were experiencing particular persecution while allowing the Dutch government to carefully control the numbers it admitted. These invited refugees were set in distinction to individual asylum seekers, and although the entry of both was restricted, the difference between the two groups was further reinforced through the respective difference in the scale of entry. Individual asylum seekers faced an annual quota of two hundred entrants, but the number and selection procedure for ‘invited’ refugees was firstly set at 250, then 550 and later chosen by the Dutch authorities on a case-by-case basis. Thus, given the growing restrictions over other forms of non-European migration to the Netherlands, by the end of the 1970s being granted uitgenodigd status became one of the remaining routes to legal immigration. The first group to benefit from this were small groups—up to a hundred—of Christian families from Turkey and the border areas with Syria and Iraq. To this uitgenodigd group given backing by the Dutch government in the years 1979–1982, were added Chileans, and then, following the Geneva Conference in July 1979 the Vietnamese, with Polish refugees of the Solidarity movement being included the following year. Consequently the Netherlands had much in common with other European states facing the combined consequences of long-term global migration, Cold War anti-communist geo-politics and the economic  Berlinghoff, Das Ende der ‘Gastarbeit’.

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imponderables caused by the oil crisis. As we shall see, while these common factors underpinned the Netherlands’ response to the Vietnamese crisis, as was the case across Europe, it responded to events in its own way, in particular, through seeking to emphasise its specifically humanitarian approach to international refugee crises and in mobilising its new category of refugee, one which aimed to acknowledge the global scale of displacement while limiting the numbers of refugees for which it took responsibility. When the Vietnamese, and with them the smaller number of Laotians and Cambodians who also came to the Netherlands, began to arrive in the late 1970s, they were seen to fit into this widening definition of refugeedom, which by this point had moved far beyond the reductive understandings of refugees as European Cold War dissidents. In turn, being firmly positioned as refugees ensured that they were largely exempt from national debates over ‘immigrants’ and their impact on Dutch society.

Refugees from Vietnam: Vessels and Symbolic Quotas The war in Vietnam had excited public opinion right across the Western world after the USA had expanded its activity in the region in the mid-­1960s. In Dutch society, in contrast to its own (post) colonial war in Indonesia which received little attention or even opposition, the cruelty of America’s Vietnam war had long defined progressive political debate and was particularly influential in shaping broad parts of the Dutch New Left.22 The issues it raised were brought into sharp focus at the end of 1970 with the arrival of US army deserter Ralph Waver. Waver had deserted while in Germany, uniquely making his escape across the border to the Netherlands rather than to France or Sweden, which had tended to be the favoured destinations for other American deserters in Europe. In his public statements he not only outlined his personal pacifist beliefs but also denounced the horrendous conditions endured by rank-and-file US Marines. Across the Netherlands Waver became the lightning rod for a number of interrelated issues. He was understood as embodying a disruptive world order that saw the Global South pitted against the Global North while also ­personifying the generational clash between the new youth, who were seeking to build a more equal world, and the dominant global power which was seen as representing the outdated preoccupations of an older 22  Peter van Eekert, Duco Hellema and Adrienne van Heteren, Johnson moordenaar! De kwestie Vietnam in de Nederlandse politiek, 1965–1975, (Amsterdam: Mets, 1986).

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generation. As possibly the ‘most famous asylum seeker of the Netherlands’, the ‘Waver case’ had significant repercussions, both in how it influenced Dutch debates about the Vietnam war, and also the Netherlands’ reception policies towards asylum seekers. On the one hand it was a reminder to Dutch society of the atrocities perpetrated by (neo)colonial powers in south-east Asia and on the other hand Waver embodied the idea that there were times when an individual might be right to disobey their nation’s laws.23 Waver might have been something of an exception, in that the Netherlands received no further asylum applications from American army deserters, but in heralding the importance of Vietnam for later movements of refugees, his arrival on Dutch soil marked the first moment in a longer story. With the fall of Saigon, international diplomatic negotiations over what to do about people fleeing both the now-communist Vietnam and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime began.24 A day before the Viet Cong and the People’s Army of Vietnam walked into Saigon, the Dutch ambassador had already been confronted with an American diplomatic communication declaring that 130,000 Vietnamese needed a new home and asking his government to act and resettle one hundred persons. In fact, only eight people had asked to be given refuge in the Netherlands, but even this was resisted in the Netherlands: at this point Vietnamese refugees were associated with America and anti-communist activities, making them an unattractive cause for the Leftist Dutch government. Added to this, as the ambassador argued in his reply, ‘the Netherlands is already overloaded and has a lot of problems with minorities’.25 This answer both conflated wider migration with the specific circumstances of refugee flight, and pointed to the widely held feeling of the Dutch authorities—and especially the foreign ministry—that the Netherlands was having to deal with too many African refugees from South Africa and Namibia.26 Beyond the world of international diplomacy, April 1975 saw Vietnamese refugees coming to the attention of the Dutch authorities in a very different context, when twenty-seven ‘boat people’ were picked up by a Dutch cargo vessel in the South China Sea. Although this particular group of rescuees eventually went to Hong Kong rather than the  Walaardt, Geruisloos inwilligen, argumentatie en speelruimte, 149, 151.  Het Parool, ‘Komst antaal vluchtelingen Vietnam is mogelijk,’ May 23, 1975. 25  NL-HaNA, Justitie, 2.09.5027 Beleidsarchief Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst (IND), inv.nr. 2420 Vietnamezenaufnahme, Copie- Memorandum Amerikaanse Démarche over Vietnameze vluchtelingen, Genf April 29,1975. 26  Jan Willen ten Doesschate, Asielbeleid en belangen, 118–119. 23 24

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Netherlands, later that year pressure from the UNHCR led the Dutch government to agree to become involved in its refugee resettlement initiatives, at least on a small scale.27 Despite his personal view that the Netherlands should not take in any further refugees, the Labour foreign minister, Max van der Stoel, felt obliged to respond positively to the UNHCR, and promised to take in fifty refugees if asked. But parallel to these commitments, he told the Ministry of Justice, in the same tone as he had previously told the USA, that the Netherlands had already taken in ‘zeer veel vluchtelingen’ (a lot of refugees) and that he did not see any obligation to take ‘a significant number of South Vietnamese refugees’. Aside from the tens of people resettled through the UNHCR, the Vietnamese who made it to the Netherlands before 1979 generally did so after having been granted a tourist visa in South Vietnam granting them entry, and only after they had landed in the Netherlands did they then apply for asylum. These years also saw the International Red Cross working to develop other resettlement solutions, and saw it, for example, working through its Dutch section and domestic religious organisations as the Stichting oecumenische hulp, kerken en vluchtelingen (Ecumenical Refugee Help Organisation), to negotiate with the Dutch foreign ministry over particular individual cases. For example, in 1975 the IRC had asked for permission of the Vietnamese family Duong, the father of whom had been awarded a scholarship in photogrammetry. But because the family had left their home due to the persecution, they had no documents with them, leading the Dutch to drag their heels over his case. Such insistence on individuals providing documentation and proofs was to stand in stark contrast to the facilitation of group arrivals which was to be a feature of the UNHCR resettlement programme. Already in the years before the Geneva conference, we can discern a common pattern between the European countries that eventually took in significant numbers of Vietnamese under the UNHCR programme: starting in a piecemeal fashion, normally in response to boat rescues, the numbers of refugees envisaged crept up piecemeal. Thus the Netherlands in 1976 took, at the request of the UNHCR, a further sixty-two Vietnamese, and in 1977 another sixty people, who had reached Thailand by boat. These latter were largely viewed by the Dutch government as nothing 27  NL-HaNA, Justitie, 2.09.5027 Beleidsarchief Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst (IND), inv.nr. 2420, Vietnamezenaufnahme, Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, Ontvangen Codebericht, May 6, 1975.

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more than a goodwill diplomatic gesture towards its NATO ally, the United States.28 Engagement in the fringes of the UNHCR programme did not then mean that the entry of the Vietnamese to the Netherlands from this point was automatic. When in 1978 the Dutch embassy in Bangkok asked the foreign ministry without the intermediating role of UNHCR for sixty-nine people who were seeking asylum at the embassy, to grant immigration permits, its request was denied.29 And as late as 6 June 1979, the Council of Ministers decided to inform the UNHCR that the Netherlands would not accept a quota but would grant residency for individual cases on two grounds: firstly those who could prove to have a relationship—mostly family—with the Netherlands; and secondly those Vietnamese who were in the Netherlands at the time of the fall of Saigon. The government was also prepared to pay one million guilders to the UNHCR.30 Here we see the Netherlands torn between its desire to appear as humanitarian actors on the world stage while also aiming to resist mass immigration. In parallel to the Dutch government’s actions in receiving small numbers from Vietnam before the summer of 1979, it also actively began to intervene into the gathering crisis emerging as a result of the take-over of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. In part we can attribute this to the historically significant Dutch presence in the country which ensured there was some domestic awareness of the events as they unfolded, not least because upon the outbreak of war multiple Dutch institutions, unable to continue with their academic, labour and economic activities, had had to shut down. There was thus some reaction to individual border incidents, as people sought to leave Cambodia, typically into neighbouring Thailand, which was not, at this point, a signatory of the 1951 Convention. For example, after the push-back by Thai authorities of twenty-six people across the border to Cambodia and their subsequent execution by the

28  De Volkskrant, ‘Comitee Hulpverlening Zuid-oost Azie kritiseert Thailand,’ November 9, 1977. 29   Jan Willen ten Doesschate, Asielbeleid en belangen, 118–120. See whole folder NL-HaNA, Justitie, 2.09.5027 Beleidsarchief Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst (IND), inv. nr. 2420. 30  NL-HaNA Justitie 09.5027 Beleidsarchief Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst (IND) inv.-nr, 2420 Vietnamezenaufnahme; Aanhangsel Tweede Kamer 1976–1977 no. 168, October 26, 1976.

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Khmer Rouge at the end of 1976, the UNHCR and the wider international community, including the Dutch government, expressed alarm.31 Given Dutch interest in Cambodia, and the ambitions of the Labour-­ led government to promote humanitarianism its foreign dealings, the Ministry of Justice was keen to establish, in negotiation with the department of state, an annual quota for Cambodian refugees. A maximum annual intake of one hundred was suggested, but even this number was, in the event, seen as too ambitious. As willing as the Dutch government was to facilitate the admission of the persecuted from Chile—with whom, of course, they were aligned politically—it hesitated with the arrival of the Cambodian refugees, whose political allegiances seemed far less clear-cut. And we can contrast the small numbers taken by the Netherlands with its attempts to convince the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam to accept some fifty- to sixty thousand refugees from Cambodia. In this they met with partial success: the Vietnamese government’s preoccupation was not with numbers, but with ideology. Understanding the scale of executions taking place in Cambodia, the government did not deport Cambodian refugees, and largely agreed to accept and ‘re-educate’ those who had been farmers and workers. However, it drew the line at accepting potentially counter-revolutionary civil servants and academics, for whom it consequently asked the international community to take responsibility.32 Underpinning Dutch prevarications over accepting Cambodian refugees was a tension between domestic aspirations to forge a new form of international humanitarianism, and, as the Ministry of Justice pointed out, the scale and complexity of the crises affecting south-east Asia. In such a context, the Ministry argued, the Netherlands could quickly find itself being overwhelmed. The argument tapped into publicly deployed metaphors of ‘floodgates’ being opened—suggesting that the Netherlands were becoming ‘swamped’—and sat alongside arguments that the Netherlands could not possibly become responsible for the world’s refugees. This line of reasoning, that the isolated efforts of individual nations to grant asylum to refugees on purely humanitarian grounds were naïve or actively dangerous, while relatively novel in this period, was to become a 31  NL-HaNA, Justitie, 2.09.5027 Beleidsarchief Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst (IND), inv.nr. 2369 Cambodjanen, Brief Ambassador van het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden Niederländischen, Bangkok December 7, 1976. 32  NL-HaNA, Justitie, 2.09.5027 Beleidsarchief Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst (IND), inv.nr. 2369 Cambodjanen, Zaakgelagdigde, Peking, May 25, 1976.

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mainstay of refugee policy debates in the closing years of the twentieth century. We should be wary of always constructing this as a rightist argument, for although it was often undoubtedly about restricting migration, it was also the case that the Netherlands was anxious to ensure that other countries also accepted their international and humanitarian responsibilities towards refugees. Maybe because of the lack of confidence and ambivalence surrounding its refugee and, by extension, migration politics and its attempts to find its new role in international relations, the Netherlands looked to other European states—Belgium, France, West Germany and the United Kingdom—to compare their attitudes and actions towards the humanitarian crisis in south East Asia. But as in the Netherlands, their responses were muted: up until the ‘boat people’ crisis of 1978/9 Belgium for example, restricted its asylum policy to family reunions only; Denmark allowed a hundred Vietnamese people to resettle; and as we saw in Chap. 2, only France of the Netherlands’ neighbour states took any significant action.33 All this suggests that although in the years leading up to the Geneva conference the Dutch authorities were able to avoid admitting Cambodians, Vietnamese and Laotians en masse, they were not able to entirely side-step the problems of south-east Asia, but responded through piecemeal and tokenistic, rather than substantive, offers of resettlement. In common then with Britain, it took pressure from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Poul Hartling, and the momentum generated by the Geneva Conference for the Netherlands to move towards its offer to resettle boat rescuees and substantive numbers of people from the UNHCR camps. From the perspective of Dutch law, they entered as uitgenodigden (‘invited’) refugees, as did those coming under the ODP, either from camps in Malaysia but often from Vietnam directly.34 The ‘boat people’ were the second largest group to be recognised as ‘invited’ after the Chileans in the 1970s; so that by the mid-1980s, 5700 boat people had been accepted and already significantly outstripped the rather originally envisaged annual quotas for invited refugees. Of these most—over three thousand—were boat rescuees who had been picked up by Dutch-­ registered vessels, but as the ODP gained momentum, increasing numbers

33  NL-HaNA, Justitie, 2.09.5027 Beleidsarchief Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst (IND), inv.nr. 2369 Cambodjanen, Zaakgelagdigde, Peking, May 25, 1976. 34  NL-HaNA, Justitie / IND beleid 1956–1985, 2.09.5027, inv.nr. 2420.

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arrived through family reunions directly from Vietnam rather than via UNHCR camps in Thailand or Malaysia.35 While the arrivals were subject to the asylum paragraphs of the 1965 Alien Act, in effect they existed in a new category, as both Latin American and Vietnamese refugees had been guaranteed refugee status in accordance with the Geneva Convention and had been accepted before entering the Netherlands. Here we can see the consequences of the sharp distinction between invited and individual asylum seekers. The former, particularly in the case of the Vietnamese, came from conflicts which saw the reception of refugees aligning with the Netherlands’ geo-political ambitions. In contrast, individual asylum seekers—who had no help in reaching the Netherlands, and received far less welfare and social support after they had arrived—often came from countries, such as Turkey and South Africa, with which the Netherlands had friendly relations that they did not want to upset.36 This was the reality which sat behind the Dutch’s internationalist and humanitarian refugee policy.

New Care and Integration Programs for Refugees As in other countries in Europe, Dutch responses to the situation were not confined to government effort but saw a number of organisations springing into life. There was a brief attempt to found a Dutch organisation comparable to the proactive humanitarian efforts of the West German Deutsches Notärzte-Komittee—Ein Schiff für Vietnam (German Committee of Emergency Doctors—A Ship for Vietnam) or the French Comité un Bateaux pour le Vietnam both which, as we saw in Chaps. 2 and 3, chartered ships to rescue people at sea. But although the member of parliament, Harry van den Bergh (PvDA), following the French and German models, tried to raise money to buy a ship and his ‘comité’ collected around five million Guilders, the initiative appears to have stalled: we can

35  See for example NL-HaNA, Justitie / IND beleid 1956–1985, 2.09.5027, inv.nr. 2420, Letter to a Vietnamese in Netherlands who is seeking for family reunion, attachment dated February 26, 1982. 36  For Germany see Chap. 3 in this volume; also Julia Kleinschmidt, ‘Eine humanitäre Ausnahmeleistung. Die Aufnahme der Boatpeople als migrationspolitische Zäsur,’ in UnSichtbar. Vietnamesisch-Deutsche Wirklichkeiten, ed. Bengü Kocatürk-Schuster et  al. (Köln: edition DOMiD, 2017), 50–59.

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find no archive or press material that tells a story about a Dutch ship with that humanitarian mission.37 Beyond this activist, even novelty, initiative, broadly two types of voluntary organisation became energised and involved in the plight of the Vietnamese. First were those on the political left which had been active over the Vietnam war, and here the Stichting Comité Hulpverlening Zuid-­ Oost-­Azië (South-East Asia Committee) was particularly prominent. This was a student organisation comparable with the communist West German Vietnam Hilfskomitee (Vietnamese Aid Committee) and had long opposed the war and supported victory for the North Vietnamese by sending money and medical equipment.38 Second, and working in parallel, were the more mainstream and established refugee organisations which were active on the ground in the camps and borders of Vietnam’s neighbouring states and now sought to mobilise their domestic supporters. Just as the arrival of Chilean refugees had unsettled ideas over who constituted a Cold War refugee, the anti-Communist Vietnamese refugees did not fit comfortably with the worldviews of the anti-war left-wing activists. Up to this point they had largely been involved in the refugee’s integration programmes and had begun working to extend the new Left government’s politics of the mid-1970s. In common with their Scandinavian fellow-travellers, Dutch activists had increasingly been mobilised via the emerging discourse of human rights to extend their gaze beyond those who could not strictly be classified as refugees or ‘vluchteling’ under the Geneva Convention, and to think about how to adapt national refugee policy in the face of increasing humanitarian disasters across the world. It was from this context, for example, that the University of Amsterdam organised an in-depth course exploring which vulnerable persons should be entitled to which residence status, and from this workers began to debate a new refugee law. The course was not confined to law and social work students but included those with a politics background as well as refugee activists.39 Through engaging with such courses of study in 37  This is not to argue that dn Bergh’s refugee activism was similarly short-lived. In fact he was involved in refugee politics into his retirement. NL-HaNA, Justitie / IND beleid 1956–1985, 2.09.5027, inv.nr. 2420, Nota Ministerie de Justitie, Directie Vreemdelingenzaken to Ms. Staatsskretaris, January 24, 1979. 38  Michael Vössing, Humanitäre Hilfe und Interessenpolitik, 381. 39  NL-HaNA, Vluchtelingenwerk, 2.19.152, inv.nr. 8, this course was held in Amsterdam in 1972, those courses and discussions were also held in later years NL-HaNA, Stichting voor Vluchteling-Studenten UAF, 2.19.155, inv.nr. 93–94.

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tandem with their grassroots experience, individuals became increasingly expert and specialised in their work with refugees: refugee reception and resettlement was moving away from being a voluntary-based activity to something more professionalised. It was this emerging professionalism, alongside a growing awareness of the atrocities the mostly Southern Vietnamese—and in fact often ethnic Chinese—faced during their flight, which helped to turn the tide of opinion. As the Vietnamese began arriving in the Netherlands, refugee support workers began to develop new discourses of sympathy towards their clients. These were based less around political solidarity and now centred more around an awareness over the long-term personal and psychological consequences of persecution and flight. And as we see below, this shift was accompanied by the expansion, intensification and increasing institutionalisation of specialised social, medical and psychological care for refugees. In turn the increase in expertise around refugee care and the professionalisation of refugee reception and resettlement support roles brought with them changes in representations of refugees. Up to this point, as we have seen, in public Dutch discourse, these had been centred on the heroic image of the male freedom fighter. But as the numbers of Vietnamese arrivals increased, both activists and employees of the state authorities noticed during (medical) examinations and the formal resettlement programme that men were often as traumatised by the process of flight and rescue as women and children, who were also arriving in significant numbers for the first time. While usefully opening up a space in which the long-term consequences of refugeedom could be acknowledged and provided for, this process had less useful consequences too. Representations of the ‘boat people’ helped to shape an emerging humanitarian discourse which depicted the figure of ‘the refugee’ as passive victim and vulnerable in the Dutch society.40 This discourse of need and vulnerability, which was largely confined to invited refugees, became entangled with the media spectacle which often accompanied their physical arrival on Dutch soil.41 The stories and the pictures documenting refugee arrivals at Dutch airports are nowadays  Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 1–5.  For the role of media in Dutch refugee history see Marlou Schrover and Tycho Walaardt, ‘The influence of the media on politics and practices: Hungarian refugee resettlement in the Netherlands in 1956,’ Journal of Migration History 3, no. 1 (2017): 22–53; Olaf Beuchling, Vom Bootsflüchtling zum Bundesbürger. Migration, Integration und schulischer Erfolg in einer vietnamesischen Exilgemeinschaft (Münster: Waxmann 2003). 40 41

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­ reserved in the Dutch press archives. These fragments give us a glimpse p of how the invited refugees were characterised and understood by Dutch society. Set against the backdrop of a sterile airport arrival lounge, newspaper pictures often show them arriving tired, exhausted and emaciated, being welcomed and cared for by ‘friendly female supporters’ wearing the tidy aprons of humanitarian organisations like the Red Cross.42 The photos message was clear: the Netherlands was a generous moral leader, giving succour to the world’s vulnerable and unfortunate. Nothing in this first sight recalled the role of the Netherlands as a former coloniser and the global power imbalances this generated, instead the archives show us pictures of a new form of dominance of the white Western industrialised world via a visual celebration of humanitarian aid. Behind these carefully constructed images of grateful refugee/beneficent volunteer, the reality was rather messier. As we will see below, the physical condition of the Vietnamese on arrival was in fact alarming, with a large number suffering from gastrointestinal disorders, which outlines their disastrous health status.43 Another expression of the fact that humanitarian and human rights engagement changed in the 1970s, as well as the legal structures which determined refugee entry to the Netherlands, came in the reorganisation in the landscape of Dutch refugee organisations. The Dutch Refugee Council (VVN) was founded in 1979, uniting and emerging from the pre-­ existing work of the UAF and Amnesty International; now it acted as umbrella organisation for smaller groups and regional units. And it was to be the newly established VNN, in cooperation with the Ministry for Culture, Recreation and Social Work, which was charged with managing the Dutch Vietnamese ‘bootsmensen’ resettlement programme in seventeen regions across the Netherlands.44As part of this work the VVN ran thirty-five reception centres for the new arrivals as well as managing their resettlement across seventy local authority areas.45 Although nominally a new organisation, the pre-existing expertise of UAF and Amnesty, in no small part developed via their work with Chilean refugees, ensured that VVN could draw on a pool of experienced workers and volunteers and models of local integration as it rolled out its Vietnamese resettlement 42  See http://www.anparchief.nl/search/79?q_advanced=&q_date=&q_mm=Schiphol+ vluchtelingen&q_viewmode=text. 43  NL-HaNA, DG Volksgezondheid, 2.15.65, inv.nr. 1162 Medisch team Vietnameze Bootsvluchtelingen, November 8, 1979, 1. 44  NL-HaNA, Vluchtelingenwerk, 2.19.152, inv.nr. 1037–1040. 45  NL-HaNA, Vluchtelingenwerk, 2.19.152, inv.nr. 1072.

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programme. With help from the Associatie van Vietnamese Vluchtelingen in Nederland, the VVN hosted the Vietnamese arrivals for about six to nine months in reception centres. These tended to be a mix of old hotels, boarding schools, monasteries and hospitals rented by the Ministry for Culture, Recreation and Social Work. Each centre was run by a lead social worker who coordinated the refugees’ language and integration courses and legal assistance, and who, normally with the aid of an on-site translator, acted as a first point of contact for individual consultations.46 We should be clear that this level of dedicated, and necessary support was only available to the incoming Vietnamese owing to their status as invited refugees. By contrast, neither language or integration courses were offered to asylum seekers.47 After some months in a reception centre and following about four hundred hours of intensive language tuition, the Vietnamese could expect to begin to be resettled in a local authority area. Mirroring wider expectations in Dutch civic life, individual local authorities and local people, as well as the VVN, were expected to be closely engaged in the task of helping the Vietnamese to start their new life.48 The model used here was one of ‘sponsorship’, in which Dutch families were asked to act as their ‘hosts’. We can see how this operated if we turn our attention to the small town of Ubbergen.49 This was one of the seventy municipalities that were the destination for separate groups of fifty to sixty Vietnamese. Local newspapers were one of the vectors by which local families were asked to get involved, carrying as they did articles explaining to the public what it meant to become a ‘host family’. Activities that the families were meant to cover ranged from helping their adopted family with their shopping until they became familiar with doing it themselves, to guiding them ‘through the tangle of Dutch regularities and customs’.50 In the event not enough volunteers in Ubbergen stepped forward to match  NL-HaNA, Vluchtelingenwerk, 2.19.152, inv.nr. 1072,  Karin de Vries, Integration at the Border: The Dutch Act on Integration Abroad and International Immigration Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing Oxford, 2013), 28. 48  See e.g. De Almare,Vluchteling wordt geen ‘eigendom.’ April 17, 1980. 49   NL-HaNA, Vluchtelingenwerk, 2.19.152, inv.nr. 1040 Bussum, Callandsoog, Dordrecht, Eindhoven, Goedereede, ‘s-Gravenzande, Heemskerk, Hoek van Holland, Itteren, Maastricht, Middelharnis, Noordwijk, Oud Gastel, Schagerbrug, Ubbergen, Utrecht, Wijk aan Zee. 50  NL-HaNA, Vluchtelingenwerk, 2.19.152, inv.nr. 1040, Article ‘Vluchtelingen half December in de Refter. Gemeente Ubbergen moet groene licht geven’, o.D. ‘Dit betekent in de praktijk deze mensen helpen bij het boodschappen doen en hen wat weg-wijs maken in de wir-war van Nederlandse regels en gewoonten’. 46 47

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each arriving Vietnamese family with a Dutch family. Instead, a group of around fifteen people, a number which included a VVN paid worker and a translator, was formed to carry out this resettlement work. Between them this group provided support to traumatised parents and their children, ongoing language provision, orientation in the local area and leisure activities. This group came together every month to give itself a working structure and to distribute between themselves the reception and daily work with the migrants. These local groups were vital to the success of the resettlement programme. Even if the VVN had rapidly expanded its capacity and activities to lead and coordinate the reception and resettlement of the Vietnamese, it is obvious that without such grassroots engagement from the public, it would not have been able to manage to cover all the work involved in the resettlement process. At the same time, on a broader level, within VVN itself, there continued to be leftist critiques of the national asylum system. This became expressed in tensions over its engagement with the government resettlement programme, which saw it extending support services to invited refugees, while excluding individual asylum seekers from them. In 1982, the VVN handed over the responsibility for the resettlement back to the state, and with the handover refugee support workers in charge of the Vietnamese programme went to work for the government.51 This might have removed tensions within VVN itself, but did not remove the stark difference in Dutch treatment between the invited and individual refugees, which began from the moment of arrival and continued to be expressed as individuals from both groups sought to build lives for themselves in a new country.

Refugees, Health Care and Gender Specific Persecution Moving on now from the generalities of the Dutch resettlement programme, which in many ways—except in its far more generous levels of resourcing—mirrored the British situation, the arrival of the Vietnamese in the Netherlands marked a new direction in refugee care and reception. From the time when those fleeing Vietnam were picked up in the South China Sea, both humanitarian organisations and the media emphasised the dangerous on-board sanitary situation and the rescuees’ poor medical  NL-HaNA, Vluchtelingenwerk, 2.19.152, inv.nr. 1072.

51

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condition. It is perhaps no surprise then that even before their arrival, the Dutch authorities paid special attention to the question of specialised medical care for the arrivals. Here it drew on the expertise of the Centre for Survivors of the National Socialism, that had been founded in 1974, which, in reflection of the widening of the scope of its activities, was later named Centrum voor Gezondheitszoorg voor Vluchtelingen (Centre for Health Care for Refugees) in The Hague.52 This connection suggests a number of interesting conclusions, especially when compared to the German discourse on the Vietnamese experience of flight. Within the Netherlands, public debates on refugees’ vulnerability, state violence and persecution had been particularly shaped by the experiences of survivors of the German camps under National Socialism. It was only in the early 1970s, in cooperation with international experts from Israel, Scandinavia and North America, who were often Shoah survivors themselves, that the view began to gain ground in the Netherlands that the experience of persecution, torture and camp imprisonment caused specific but ambiguous suffering—what today is has become termed as post-traumatic stress disorder. To meet the needs of such survivors, activists argued, it would be necessary to provide dedicated health care and pensions.53 By the mid-1970s the arrival of Chilean ­refugees, many of whom were torture survivors and who were largely received sympathetically by the Dutch public, had further reinforced the image of dictatorships as a primary loci of human rights violations. Chilean dissidents were the first international fugitives to benefit from this new insight that state violence, imprisonment and persecution often caused psychological and psychosomatic suffering. The health status of migrants had long occupied the politics of immigration in the USA, Canada or Great Britain, where migrants were seen as

52  France, from the 1990s had an established practice of recognising refugees on the grounds of poor health rather than their reason for flight. See Estelle d’Halluin, Les épreuves de l’asile. Associations et réfugiés face à la politique du soupçon, (Paris: EHES, 2012); more generally Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma. An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. Rachel Gomme, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), esp. part four: The Politics of Proof, 219–274. For the general depiction of refugees as helpless creatures see Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee. 53  Jolande Withuis, Erkenning. Van oorlogstrauma naar klaagcultuur (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2002), 72–98.

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potential vectors of infection.54 In contrast in the Netherlands the arrival of the Vietnamese rather raised the issue of the refugees‘ wellbeing. This focus did not simply stem from the new medicalised understandings of trauma but also from a wider parallel trend towards self-improvement which saw the growing normalisation of counselling and other talking therapies across mainstream Dutch society.55 Providing medical care for the incoming Vietnamese also flagged up the wider needs for medical supervision of other arriving asylum seekers: the VVN revealed that in 1979 there were roughly five hundred asylum seekers across the country who were in need of attention but who had to date received nothing. At the same time the Ministry of Public Health estimated that there would potentially be seven- to eight hundred refugees needing a medical examination each year. This demand, it felt, would require something more than ad hoc arrangements: ‘for the coming years permanent care will be required from central government … there is an incentive to establish a permanent central medical reception team for refugees’.56 Hence, with the arrival of the Vietnamese we see these strands coming together. A specialised medical team was established by the Ministry of Health in anticipation of the arrival of the first quota refugees in August 1979, which was tasked with examining the Vietnamese on their entry to the Netherlands. The VVN saw this as a victory for refugee organisations’ growing demands for specialised medical care for refugees, noting that ‘now everybody is convinced of the necessity that… refugees not only need social and financial but also medical reception’.57 This dedicated 54  Krista Maglen, The English System: Quarantine, Immigration and the Making of a Port Sanitary Zone (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Becky Taylor, ‘Immigration, Statecraft and Public Health: The 1920 Aliens Order, Medical Examinations and the Limitations of the State in England,’ Social History of Medicine 29, no. 3, (2016): 512–533; Barbara Lüthi, ‘Invading Bodies’: Medizin und Immigration in den USA (1880–1920) (Frankfurt.a.M./ New York: Campus Verlag, 2009). 55  Maik Tändler, Das therapeutische Jahrzehnt. Der Psychoboom in den siebziger Jahren, (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016), 58; Harry Oosterhuis, ‘Mental Health as Civic Virtue: Psychological Definitions of Citizenship in the Netherlands, 1900–1985’, in Engineering Society. The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies, 1880–1980, ed. Kerstin Brückweh et al, (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2012), 159–178. 56  Ministerie van Volksgezondheid en Milieuhygiene, November 8, 1979, Medisch team Vietnameze Bootsvluchtelingen, S. 1., in: HnA, Directoraat-generaal Volksgezondheid Inv. 1162. 57  ‘blijkt onder druk van de toevloed van Vietnamezen nu iedereen overtuigt van de noodzaak de vluchtelingen niet alleen maatschappelijk en financieel, maar ook medisch op te vangen,’ Vluchtelingenwerk, 2.19.152 nr. 282, memo o.D.

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Central Medical Team for refugees, the Centrum Gezondheidszorg Vluchtelingen (CGV)—comprising one physician, two nurses and one secretary—was meant to concentrate its work on in-depth examinations of each refugee as they arrived. This could only be guaranteed during the entry of quota refugees as they landed in state-organised transportations at defined times; asylum seekers arriving individually and unexpectedly were largely beyond its purview. Nevertheless, in 1984 the CGV suggested that it had had contact, provided counselling or had examined four thousand of the roughly ten thousand refugees who had come to the Netherlands over the previous ten years.58 This meant that above and beyond the 5700 Vietnamese arrivals, it has also had significant dealings with Chileans and some individual asylum seekers and refugees. The work of the VVN did not occur in isolation, but was rather part of an international move towards recognising the existence and traumatic impact of gendered violence. From the UNHCR campaign on this theme from 1975 to 1985 and its influential report, ‘Between Rejection and Political Persecution’, on the situation of the Vietnamese boat people, Amnesty International noted that ‘hundreds of women were raped, abducted and murdered by pirates’.59 What had begun a few years earlier with the intention of documenting the torture of Latin Americans, by the end of the 1970s was becoming a steadily more organised and professionalised movement of NGO workers and medical experts which spanned the globe. Within the Netherlands, for quota refugees arriving from the UNHCR camps in south-east Asia, comprehensive documentation of the impact on an individual of violence and trauma was facilitated by the fact that they were all being channelled through the CGV and that there was a personal dossier on each and every arrival. For medical workers and other professionals, the realisation that, after leaving the country, escape itself could be a violent, or for some a traumatic break in life, led to a different kind of attention being paid to the newcomers in the Netherlands than before. The physicians of the Health Care of the Netherlands termed it the ‘second traumatisation’.60 58   Ministerie van Welzijn, Volksgezondheid en Cultuur (ed.), Jaarverslag: Centrum Gezondheidszorg Vluchtelingen 1982–1983, s’Gravenhage, July 1985, 4. 59  Amnesty International, Sektion der Bundesrepublik, Deutschland Frauen im Blickpunkt: Zwischen Auflehnung und politischer Verfolgung (Bonn, 1991) 121. 60  Jan Cornelies van Es: ‘Vluchtelingen als patiënt,’ Medisch Contact, no. 12, March 25 (1983), 327.

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The resettlement of the Vietnamese revealed the growing professionalisation of refugee-focussed work in Dutch society in fields beyond general medical care. Here exploring the VVN’s ‘Women’s Work’ section, its priorities and its cooperation with government agencies during the 1980s is particularly revealing. Paying attention to the growing awareness of women’s specific experiences of persecution, flight and resettlement allows us to historicise not only women’s experiences of refugeedom but also the attitudes and actions of those working with refugees. In May 1982 Marijke Meijer of the VVN wrote to Michiel Scheltema, State Secretary for Justice, in preparation for a conference on ‘sexual violence’. Here she drew attention to a disjuncture between formal asylum applications, in which very few refugee women mentioned when they had been subjected to rape and sexualised violence, and her own interactions with them, where in informal settings and conversations they cited it as a decisive reason behind their flight. Attached to her letter was a statement by psychiatrist Stien Wolters of the CGV, in which she described how, in contrast to her own dealings with them, the Ethiopian and Turkish Christian women whom she frequently treated reported only very limited or no gynaecological problems when they were confronted with a male caseworker, doctor or interpreter. This reticence had significant implications for the ultimate fate of asylum seekers: Wolters cited the case of two Christian women from Turkey who had recently been deported, neither of whom had reported to the Dutch authorities the repeated rapes they had experienced at the hands of Muslim men. In her letter Wolters argued that had the authorities understood the gender-specific circumstances of the women’s flight, this would have clearly changed the evidence in the asylum proceedings in their favour. This, Meijer declared to the Minister, ‘is an invisible problem that is worth making visible’.61 In fact, the problem was more visible than Meijer implied. From the early 1970s those working with refugees had begun to realise that women were making up a significant number of refugees to the Netherlands, and, as a number of reports from individual Chili-Komitees (Chile Committees) and local refugee groups demonstrated, their experiences of persecution and exile were often highly gendered.62 By 1979, with growing numbers 61  NL-HaNA, SZW / Emancipation policy, 2.15.53, inv.nr. 742, Research by C.E.J. de Neef and S.J. de Ruiter. Letter, May 14, 1982. 62  Corrie van Eijl, ‘Migranten in Nederland, 1948–2000. Een kwantitatieve analyse van sekseverschillen,’ in Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 6, no. 2 (2009), 3–33.

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of arrivals from Eritrea/Ethiopia and of Christians from the Turkish-Iraqi border, it was becoming clear that women were frequently the target of sexualised violence as a strategy of repression, terror and war. In the case of Christian women, abduction and forced marriage into Muslim families were also cited as reasons for the flight of a whole family. In personal testimonies, the issue of the loss of honour and reputation—of the women subjected to the violence, and of their families—was a frequent motif. Refugee workers heard this expressed in the Vietnamese proverb, ‘A stranger has eaten out of his bowl of rice and he could not prevent it. Now the bowl is dirty’.63 And as early as 1979, the country’s major newspapers had been reporting on the rape of Vietnamese women at sea by pirates. Eyewitness accounts emerging from the Malaysian island of Pulau Bidong in particular, had made it plain that women in the boats had routinely experienced sexualised violence before they made landfall, and then, after arrival, in the camps themselves. In contrast to the other two groups investigated, for women leaving Vietnam by boat, sexualised violence was not so much an expression of state persecution or private violence for the Vietnamese women. Instead, their experiences revealed a further level of danger for women as refugees: not only the target of gendered violence at the hands of state agents, women were also at risk during the act of flight itself, and within the supposed safety of a refugee camp.64 Despite the rhetoric of her letter, Meijer’s intention was less to imply that no one had been aware of the gendered violence experienced by women and more to assert that it needed acknowledging via governmental action and resources. Meijer therefore suggested that the first step should be a two-year audit of asylum procedures in which women were involved, their experiences of violence and the living situation of women in their country of origin. Her aim here was to examine the circumstances of their flight and arrival, and whether they had been granted asylum on the grounds of sexualised violence. While we can attribute the increasing attention being paid to gender-­ based experiences to the professionalisation of refugee organisations and the influence of the women’s movement in both international and Dutch 63  NL-HaNA, SZW / Emancipatiebeleid, 2.15.53, inv.nr.742. Quote from the preliminary report, main part 7. 64  . T. Schroeder-Dao, ‘Study of Rape Victims Among the Refugees on Pulau Bidong Island: An Experience in Counselling Women Refugee’ Boat People (n.p: 1982).

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society by the 1980s, it is also useful to think about the role played by particular individuals in pushing this agenda. Marijke Meijer belonged to the VVN leadership circle and was also a key mover behind the creation of its Women’s Section. Moreover, the VVN’s extensive archive holdings reveal her to having been central to international networking efforts within the UNHCR and cognate refugee organisations across Europe. Her extensive network of political and other contacts made her one of the most influential Dutch activists of the period and one of VVN’s most effective staff members. It was typical of her working method to push (pilot) studies, such as her proposed one of gender violence, over a defined period of time. In this particular case the Ministry of Justice agreed that the issue of gender-specific violence experienced by refugee women was not only a matter for the VVN and civil society, but also required government attention. Thus, the Ministry of Justice’s Asylum Affairs Department along with the Ministry of Social Affairs’ Emancipation Secretariat commissioned the VVN to conduct a pilot study on the topic—a study which was also expected to be accessible to a wider audience.65 Consequently, we can embed the developments taking place in the arena of refugee support within the gender-based developments occurring in wider Dutch society by the 1980s. This investigation into refugee women’s experiences of sexual violence was embedded in a more general campaign to raise awareness of sexualised violence within the Dutch society. It was an ambitious initiative, one that aimed to educate society and professionals over the range of therapeutic interventions available to survivors of violence and to strengthen support for affected women, it was above all intended to provide care for victims of violence.66 It was coordinated by the State Secretariat for Emancipation, which was staffed by the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). Parallel to the awareness raising campaign, and as part of the 1984 ‘Law to combat sexual violence against women and girls’, refugee women were also to receive better care and access to treatment for the consequences of violence. In this legislation we can see the coming together of three different strands in late 65  NL-HaNA, Justice / IND policy 1956–1985, 2.09.5027, inv.nr. 742. August 6, 1983, Research by C.E.J.de Neef and S.J. de Ruiter. Letter, September 20, 1983 and internal document 66  Vgl. Marijke Nazeer and Renée Römkens, ‘Overheidsbeleid inzake geweld tegen vrouwen in relaties: van gezondheids- tot veiligheidsprobleem,’ in: Vrouwenhulpverlening 1975–2000: Beweging in en rond de gezondheidszorg, ed. Janneke Mens-Verhulst and Berteke Waaldijk (Houten: Bohn Stafleu van Loghum, 2008), 68.

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twentieth-­century Dutch society: emancipatory ideas of the New Left which had been embodied in Uyl’s government, regarding more flexible gender roles for women and men; ideas surrounding the protection of minorities; and a deeply rooted Dutch view of the state as a provider state.

Conclusion The Dutch reception of the almost six thousand people in the course of the humanitarian crisis in the South China Sea affected the country’s refugee policy on a number of levels. On the one hand, after the much smaller number of refugees from Hungary in 1956, from Uganda in 1972 and from Chile after 1973, it became finally clear that refugees no longer had to be individually politically persecuted in the sense defined by the 1951 Convention to be seen by the Dutch government and public to be worthy of the label ‘refugee’. Following from this, opening its borders to significant numbers of Vietnamese signalled that Dutch society and its government were committed to establishing a new humanitarian regime, one which understood the interconnected nature of the modern world and the ethical case for accepting refugees from across the globe. This moved the Netherlands away from a model that had emerged since the Second World War, whereby particular interest groups, such as churches, lobbied on behalf of refugees with whom they felt a direct connection, towards one which accepted the humanitarian claims of the vulnerable across the world. The category of the ‘invited’ refugee simultaneously aimed to signal the Netherlands’ ethical engagement with the world, while directly limiting the number of refugees for which it would become responsible. Its national Vietnamese resettlement programme consequently positioned the Dutch as humanitarian actors on the world stage, allowing them to demonstrate a break with their colonial past. Cold War politics, and a desire to publicly align themselves with their NATO allies, may have provided some initial impetus for the Netherlands’ engagement in the UNHCR resettlement programme, but this rapidly gave way to more domestic preoccupations. Second, the arrival of the Vietnamese in the Netherlands firmly established the newly created VVN, as the country’s leading refugee organisation, a process which enabled it to further professionalise itself. In particular, it was able to build on the experiences its progenitor organisations had built up with their work with Chilean refugees to develop expertise around refugee counselling, care and resettlement. In the process, despite the reliance on grassroots volunteers, work with refugees moved

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further away from its voluntary roots and towards a model of increasing professionalisation. These areas of responsibility even corresponded to a neo-liberal tendency in the welfare state and were often marked by conflicts. Nevertheless, despite cooperation with the state authorities in specific areas, the VVN did not lose its role as a critic of government policy, continually advocating for all refugees seeking protection in the Netherlands, and finally disassociating itself almost completely from the final phases of the Vietnamese resettlement programme. We see this professionalisation, and the growing presence of professional expertise in two key areas of the Vietnamese resettlement programme: medical care and gender-based advocacy. As we have seen for the other chapters in this book, the media impressions of the terrible unhygienic and inhuman conditions on the boats and in the camps were omnipresent for the Dutch population. The pictures and stories of widowers and single children after the dangerous sea crossings unmistakably contributed to establishing and perpetuating the image of the traumatised refugee in the minds of the public. As other authors have pointed out, these wretched images shaped the characteristic icon of the refugee over the next decades. It combined with a more generic human rights-­motivated and psycho-scientific discourse on human vulnerability, characteristic of the 1970s, to feed into new, more medicalised approaches to the reception and care, not only of the Vietnamese arrivals, but of asylum seekers more generally. The scale of this change and the role of the Vietnamese in this should not be underestimated: such an intensive preoccupation with flight as a traumatic experience in international discourses between North American and Scandinavian doctors and psychologists would hardly have been conceivable without them. These same years also witnessed an increased understanding over the gendered nature of refugeedom, the role of sexualised violence in precipitating flight, but also in women’s experiences of flight and ‘refuge’. Once again, although emerging from grassroots experiences of refugee workers and the gradual gains of feminism more generally, by the end of the twentieth century, the rise of gender practitioners in the field of refugee support signalled the rapid professionalisation of a new field of expertise. And finally, the entry of the Vietnamese to the Netherlands should not be mistaken for signalling a more general national welcome for those seeking asylum there. The admission of the almost six thousand people was only ever seen as an exception, a one-off response to a particular international crisis. The construction of the category of uitgenodigden refugee,

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with an annual quota determined by the state, remains a far better barometer of Dutch intentions over migration and refugee policy. Numbering in their hundreds each year, these ‘invited’ refugees would only ever represent a token engagement with the ever-growing numbers of refugees globally. Given the shift over the last quarter of the twentieth century as the Netherlands became an increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, invited refugees quickly disappeared into Dutch towns and cities, even as migration and integration were to remain deeply contested parts of Dutch life. Despite their initial visibility, and the prominence of the ‘boat people’ in the media, the Vietnamese in reality never constituted a large immigrant group. Their good Dutch language skills—often the result of the intensive tuition they received on arrival—ensured there was hardly any public debate about them after the years of their admission in the early 1980s, and so today they tend to be among the invisible migrants.

CHAPTER 6

Israel: Asylum Without Refugee Status: Israel’s Reception of Vietnamese Exiles Shira Havkin

In June 1977, an Israeli freight ship en route to Taiwan crossed paths with a boat in distress carrying sixty-six Vietnamese people and took them on board. A few days later, newly-elected Israeli prime minister Menahem Begin announced in his inaugural speech that, as ‘we all remember the boats loaded with Jewish refugees’, the rescuees would be ‘given haven and refuge’ in Israel.1 This was the first time that the Israeli state had opened its doors to grant asylum to non-Jewish refugees, but it was not the last. This first ‘humanitarian gesture’ was followed by two others, so that by the end of 1979 300 displaced Vietnamese, formerly living in several camps in south-east Asia, had been welcomed to Israel. This chapter retraces Israel’s symbolic reception of Vietnamese exiles. The event, which has garnered scant interest among scholars, reveals that  All translations from Hebrew are the author’s own. Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1977 (all Knesset protocols used in this chapter are in Hebrew. Their translation is my own). 1

S. Havkin (*) CERI/Sciences-Po, Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Taylor et al. (eds.), When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983, Palgrave Studies in Migration History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64224-2_6

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its ‘gesture’ enabled the Israeli state to grant asylum to a small number of people while circumventing the formalisation of their refugee status. This in a country historically established as a ‘refuge state without refugees’.2 This chapter has a special status in this book for two main reasons: first, for the obvious reason that Israel is not part of Europe, neither geographically nor politically; and second, unlike the other countries covered, it did not take part in the UNHCR’s formal resettlement programme. Let us consider the significance of both these factors, as the reasons that made the Israeli resettlement initiative exceptional also make it interesting historically. It shows us how Begin’s initiative might be used to underscore the historically intimate relationship between Israel and Europe, while also presenting the international community with an image of the country as both ‘Western’ and European. And this was done, not through opening its borders to thousands of refugees, as was the case for the European countries involved in the UNHCR programme, but rather through the entry of a few hundred individuals. In that sense, the Israeli symbolic ‘humanitarian gesture’ reveals some of the implicit dynamics of asylum practices and especially how, when constructed as an exceptional gesture, asylum may work to consolidate the exclusionary national order. Over the past decade, much has been written on humanitarian government and the treatment of migrants and refugees.3 Miriam Ticktin, in her work on humanitarian logics and the politics of care, distinguishes between ‘human rights’, as a paradigm largely grounded in law that gives access to rights, and ‘humanitarianism’, which has more to do with moral obligation and is therefore distributed according to rather arbitrary criteria of compassion.4 Despite this theoretical distinction, in the cases studied by Ticktin and others, in practice human rights and humanitarianism are largely intertwined. In the Israeli context, however, the humanitarian 2  Shira Havkin, “Une terre d’asile sans réfugiés: une sociohistoire du dispositif d’asile israélien” [A Refuge-state without Refugees: A Social History of the Israeli Asylum System], PhD dissertation, Sciences-Po Paris, 2017 [Karthala forthcoming]. 3  Miriam Ticktin Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Mariella Pandolfi, “Laboratory of Intervention: The Humanitarian Governance of the Postcommunist Balkan Territories,” in Postcolonial Disorders, ed. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 157–186. 4  Miriam Ticktin, “Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 1 (2006): 33–49.

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framework of exception and compassion does not appear to be as entangled with a refugees’ rights paradigm grounded in law. This for the simple reason that, even today, there is hardly any legal protection of non-Jewish refugees in Israel and asylum procedures were only beginning to be formally regulated from the beginning of the early twenty-first century. Given this legal vacuum, the ‘humanitarian gesture’ made towards the Vietnamese in 1979 stands as an exceptional moment, one outside normal state practice. Many authors emphasise that humanitarian economies of control are not neutral; rather, they map closely onto the moral agendas and concerns of those applying them, and are thus inevitably intertwined with politics, ideology and historical consciousness.5 This understanding underpinned Sarah Willen’s analysis of Israel’s 2007 reception of 500 refugees from Darfur. Willen argued that the Israeli humanitarian reception of Darfuri was based on a mobilisation of the problematic idea of the ‘kinship of genocide’, that is, on an empathy driven by the understanding of the situation in Darfur as analogous to the Holocaust that destroyed European Jewry. For Willen, the treatment of refugees drawing on an analogy rooted in a ‘founding trauma’ was a double-edged sword: while potentially leading to compassion and action, such a use of an exceptionalist humanitarian logic encapsulated a potential violence.6 Similarly, the role of the memory of the Holocaust framed the Vietnamese reception programme, while also revealing the ambiguity of historical legacies. Although Israeli decision-­ makers emphasised how the humanitarian reception drew on Israel’s heritage, thus consolidating the state’s moral and political legitimacy, that same legacy was also invoked to exempt Israel from any wider responsibility towards non-Jewish refugees. Thus, the reception of Vietnamese refugees, though presented as a symbolic act revealing and reaffirming Israel’s moral and historic sensibility regarding refugees, did not pave the way to Israeli participation in the UNHCR’s resettlement programme nor its Orderly Departure Programme in the years to follow.

5  Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries”; Fassin, Humanitarian Reason; Ticktin, Casualties of Care; Pandolfi, “Laboratory of Intervention”. 6  Sarah S.  Willen, “Darfur through a Shoah Lens: Sudanese Asylum Seekers, Unruly Biopolitical Dramas, and the Politics of Humanitarian Compassion in Israel”, in A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities, ed. Byron J.  Good, Michael M.  J. Fischer and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 505–521.

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Traditionally exempted from contributing to resettlement efforts known as ‘burden sharing’ on the grounds it had absorbed over half a million Jewish migrants from Europe after the Second World War, the Israeli reception of a few hundred displaced Vietnamese was presented, by the government and especially Prime Minister Begin, as a gesture. This gesture was intended to position Israel, politically and morally, as part of the international relief effort and thereby of ‘the West’, as well as to emphasise its special sensitivity to the plight of refugees drawing on its heritage. Yet, the exceptional arrangements through which reception was granted to the Vietnamese did not challenge Israel’s wider resistance to accepting and integrating non-Jewish refugees and migrants. On the contrary: granting refuge to the few while avoiding formalising any official asylum policy for the many reflected long-standing tensions around asylum in Israel. In the absence of an asylum policy, Vietnamese arrivals were dealt with via the state’s existing policies and institutions charged with managing the integration and ‘absorption’ (klita) of Jewish migrants (olim). While, on one level, Vietnamese newcomers were warmly welcomed by Israel and embraced as ‘foreign-olim’, this chapter reveals how official declarations of welcome were often dissolved through micro decisions of street-level and intermediary agents as well as through everyday practices of othering which ultimately constrained their integration. Consequently, not only did the reception of 367 displaced Vietnamese remain an exception to the general policy of refusing asylum to non-Jews, but the gesture was itself very limited. As we shall see, despite the discourse of welcome and historical affinity most of the Vietnamese who arrived in Israel between 1977 and 1979, and especially those with access to greater resources in terms of class, education or network, left the country within a few years for Europe, Canada or the United States.

The National Context: A Refuge State Without Refugees Israel’s historical attitude towards refugees has been profoundly ambivalent. The establishment of the State of Israel is intimately entangled in the history of two of the biggest populations of refugees of its time: Jews who immigrated to Israel and Palestinians forced to leave its territory during the 1948 war. Paradoxically, the centrality of these two groups to the state’s foundation prevented the creation of a social and juridical category

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of refugee within Israeli law. Even though the State of Israel was officially established as a safe haven for Jews at a time when they were considered the world’s largest refugee community, more than sixty-five years later, Israel still has no law regulating the asylum procedure and is yet to legally enshrine a refugee status per se.7 The first part of this chapter unpicks this prima facie paradox and offers a brief account of the complex and ambivalent relations between Israel and the concept of the ‘refugee’. In a state established three years after the end of the Second World War, the reception of Jewish refugees and stateless persons, presented in fact as Israel’s raison d’état, played a crucial role in building Israel’s moral and political legitimacy at both the domestic and the international levels. We see it expressed via, for example, the United Nations’ General Assembly vote on resolution 181 (ii) of 1947 (Partition of Palestine), which legitimised the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.8 With more than a quarter of a million Holocaust survivors languishing in Displaced Persons camps in Europe, a Jewish state appeared to the international community as a solution for this major international refugee problem. At the domestic level, the Israeli Declaration of Independence, issued six months after the historic General Assembly vote, had also inextricably linked the Israeli state’s legitimacy to such concepts. The Declaration emphasised, along with the historic attachment of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland, a causal relationship between the ‘catastrophe that recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe’, and the need to build a national home for the Jewish people, with open doors to all Jews from around the world.9 In this it was successful: between 1945 and the late 1960s, about half a million Jewish migrants left Europe to settle in Israel, including more than 130,000 Holocaust survivors who came directly from Displaced Person camps, making the State of Israel a land of immigration and refuge. Nevertheless, even these Jewish migrants were not received as refugees by the State of Israel. Moreover, the very logic whereby receiving Jewish refugees bolstered 7  After 2001, a regulation promulgated by the Ministry of Interior Affairs governed the asylum procedure, yet, less than 0.01% of asylum seekers were granted asylum and even these few did not receive the status of ‘refugee’ as such since no such status exists in Israel’s public administration. 8  UN General Assembly, Resolution 181 (Partition Plan), November 29, 1947. 9  Israeli Declaration of Independence, The Official Journal, May 14, 1948, Art. 6.

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state legitimacy made it politically and ideologically impossible to consider them ‘asylum seekers’. Israeli involvement in the drafting of the Geneva Conventions is often presented as a golden age of Israeli commitment to refugee protection. The chasm between this perceived past and today is often invoked by academics, activists and politicians to criticise the contemporary lack of protection for refugees, articulated as a betrayal of national heritage. It is true that recent studies have emphasised the significant role of Israel in the Refugee Convention’s drafting and the ‘Israeli roots’ of some of its articles, as well as, more generally, the role of Jewish and Israeli networks in shaping the modern refugee regime.10 Even so, Israeli commitment to international law regarding the protection of refugees is open to interrogation. Rotem Giladi’s deconstruction of the ‘golden age’ of Israel’s engagement on refugee rights analyses the debate preceding Israeli ratification of the 1951 Refugee Convention to illustrate the Israeli establishment’s lack of interest in, and passive resistance to, ratifying the Convention. The words of the Legal Counsel of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informing the attorney general of the decision to ratify the Convention, some three years after its first signature, are revealing: ‘After discussions and consultations […], we concluded that the Convention should be ratified despite its limited practical relevance to us’.11 How can it be that the Convention has such limited practical relevance in a state established precisely as a safe haven for refugees? The answer is that, paradoxically, the definition of the state as a land of asylum made the Refugee Convention unnecessary and redundant in the Jewish state. Since the state was established as a homeland for Jewish refugees, such refugees lost that status as soon as they arrived in Israel and therefore no longer required the protections provided by international institutions and conventions. Thus, 10  See Gilad Ben-Nun, “The Israeli Roots of Article 3 and Article 6 of the 1951 Refugee Convention,” Journal of Refugee Studies 27, no. 1 (2012): 101–125, and Gilad Ben-Nun, “The British–Jewish Roots of Non-Refoulement and its True Meaning for the Drafters of the 1951 Refugee Convention,” Journal of Refugee Studies 28, no. 1 (2015): 93–117. Ben-Nun quotes the Israeli Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Refugee Convention in a letter to the foreign minister, saying that the president of the Commission ‘expressed his regret that I would not be among the first signers [because of Shabbat], particularly because I represented, in his view, not only a government, but also morally the refugee as such’ (Robinson Final Plenipotentiary Report, quoted by Ben-Nun, “The Israeli Roots,” 113). 11  Rotem Giladi, “A ‘Historical Commitment’? Identity and Ideology in Israel’s Attitude to the Refugee Convention 1951/4”, The International History Review 37, no. 4 (2015): 754. Emphasis added.

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­ istorically, Israeli asylum policy did not examine asylum claims or recogh nised refugees; it rather instantly transformed Jewish refugees into olim— those who have risen to reach the Promised Land—thereby turning their arrival into a return. Here the concept of olim is central. The 1950 Law of Return states that ‘every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh’, thus opening the right to any Jew across the world to come and live in Israel. The terms used to designate their entry into Israel and their reception are revealing: Jewish immigration to Israel is termed alyia (lit. ascension or elevation), a concept invoking a spiritual teleology whereby settlement in Israel is part of the destiny of the Jewish people to return to the Promised Land. Jewish migrants and refugees thus become olim, and their reception is considered as klita (absorption). We therefore need to understand how Jewish immigration and its reception—alyia and klita—act as central pillars of Israeli state-building. However, while Israeli history is undeniably unique, the ‘indigenisation’ of settlers is not; rather, it is a fundamental characteristic of ‘settler colonial societies’, an analytical framework that became central in research regarding Israeli-Palestinian dynamics in recent years.12 In Israel, as in other settler colonial states, newcomers were considered pioneers and founders of the new society that would be theirs, and their movement was not considered as a departure abroad. In the Israeli context, it was rather seen as a ‘return home’. In this respect, as Lorenzo Veracini points out, their movement is understood in an antinomical way to that of refugees, whose classic definition underlines the aspect of forced displacement.13 The Law of Return (1950) together with the Israeli Citizenship Law (1952), adopted two years later, place olim as the main figure of the Israeli citizenship regime. In the former, olim were the first category of population entitled to citizenship. The temporal and structural priority of the Law of Return over the Citizenship Law thus reveals the legal ground of the ethno-national project to establish a home for the Jewish people in the land of Israel. In this respect, despite the attempts to formulate the legal 12  Nahla Abdo et Nira Yuval-davis, “Palestine, Israel, and the Sionist Settler Project”, in Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class, ed. Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis (London: Sage, 1995), 291–392; Elia Zureik, Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit (London: Routledge, 2016); Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History (New York: Verso, 2016). 13  Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 4.

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relation between the state and its citizens on a non-discriminatory ground, these two laws established a differential citizenship regime, distinguishing between Jews’ and non-Jews’ entitlement to citizenship and, above all, constituting Israel not as a state that belongs to an Israeli nation that would bring together all Israeli citizens, but as a state that belongs to the Jewish nation alone. This legal situation, explicitly formalised and consolidated through the 2018 Nationality Bill, was extensively theorised by scholars using different terms to characterise this regime—from ‘ethnic democracy’ and ‘ethnocracy’ to, more recently, simply a ‘racial citizenship regime’.14 The history of the non-construction of a refugee category therefore indirectly reveals the central category of belonging: the ethno-national— racialising—category of the Jewish citizen. The reception, integration and absorption of Jewish refugees as olim, and therefore as citizens and members of the nation, from the state’s inception was a fundamental element of the Israeli citizenship regime. By contrast, while the reception, protection and integration of Jewish refugees were among the main missions of the early State of Israel, no institutional channel has ever been established to receive non-Jews in the country, either as migrants or as refugees. The invisibilisation and the denial of the possibility of seeking asylum in Israel to non-Jews remained relatively unchallenged during Israel’s early years. This was revealed in 1955, when UNHCR suggested that Israel welcome fourteen refugees from Shanghai as part of one of its ‘burden sharing’ programmes.15 The response of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs was revealing, as it argued that Israel had already welcomed thousands of Jewish refugees evacuated from Shanghai by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) between 1949 and 1950. And since Israel’s participation in resolving the global refugee ‘crisis’ had far exceeded its proportional share in the international effort, it should be exempt from any obligation concerning non-Jewish refugees. The implication of UNHCR’s acceptance of this 14  Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People: 2018; Sammy Smooha, ‘Minority Status in an Ethnic Democracy: The Status of the Arab Minority in Israel’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 13, no. 3 (1990), 389–413; As’ad Ghanem, Nadim N.  Rouhana and Oren Yiftachel, “Questioning Ethnic Democracy: A Response to Sammy Smooha”, Israel Studies 3, no. 2 (1998): 253–267; Lana Tatour, “Managing Surplus Population”, Conference The Military Regime, 50  Years Later, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, January 18, 2017; Ronit Lentin, Traces of Racial Exception (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 15  Giladi, “A ‘Historical Commitment’”.

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response represented its endorsement of the Israel’s exceptionalist exemption from formal obligations in terms of financial contributions to UNHCR or resettlement efforts known as ‘burden sharing’, justified by Israel’s particular role in the absorption of Jewish refugees. Yet, the main population of non-Jewish refugees that Israel had to contend with in its early years was not the few refugees from Shanghai that UNHCR sought to resettle in Israel but the 760,000 Palestinians exiled from the territory during the 1948 war, often through forced deportation and, in other cases, through ‘voluntary’ departure before or during the fighting.16 Palestinian refugees who crossed the newly established borders in an attempt to return were considered a security, political, demographic and criminal threat, and were treated not as refugees but as mistanenim (infiltrators or intruders), and were the subject of Israel’s ‘war against infiltration’.17 Thus, the Arab and Palestinian ‘infiltrators’ were not only excluded from the category of refugees; they were constructed as ‘objective enemies’, criminalised and deemed legitimate targets for killing.18 While Jewish refugees were considered olim and Palestinian refugees mistanenim, the treatment of refugees who were neither Jews nor Palestinians has remained, since the 1950s, a grey area. Though Israel had signed and ratified the Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, it established no Israeli statute integrating their principles into domestic law. Poorly regulated in contrast to these two domains of active state intervention, the treatment of ‘other’ refugees was historically constructed as a non-phenomenon and consequently invisibilised. The unforeseen encounter between an Israeli freight ship and a ship carrying sixty-six Vietnamese exiles was the very first time this question was openly raised.

16  Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine studies, 1992); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 17  Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 18  Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; Alina Korn, “From Refugees to Infiltrators: Constructing Political Crime in Israel in the 1950s,” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 31, no. 1 (2003): 1–22; Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Criminalizing Pain and the Political Work of Suffering: The Case of Palestinian ‘Infiltrators,’” Borderlands 14, no. 1 (2015): 1–28.

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The Symbolic Gesture of Reception In June 1977, Meir Tadmor, captain of the Israeli cargo ship Yuvali, while sailing near the Japanese coast bound for Taiwan, noticed a lifeboat sending out distress signals. The captain decided to change course to assist those aboard, a decision that would ultimately cost him his job at The Ofer Brothers conglomerate, which judged his costly change of route as professional misconduct and fired him upon his return.19 On board the lifeboat were sixty-six Vietnamese men, women and children who had left Vietnam on a small fishing boat and who were, by this point, in some danger. Several days had passed since they had run out of food and water, and other vessels they had encountered along the way had ignored their distress signals.20 Captain Tadmor welcomed them aboard before heading to nearby ports to drop them off, but Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan all refused to allow them to disembark.21 The captain contacted the Israeli authorities which, at first, declared it was ‘impractical’ and ‘there was no way’ Israel would take responsibility for the Vietnamese passengers.22 A few days later, however, Israeli prime minister Menahem Begin declared that Israel would offer them asylum.23 Following Begin’s declaration, the passengers were allowed to disembark in Taiwan to board a plane directly to Tel Aviv. If we consider this story from a territorial perspective, we notice that the reception of the Vietnamese passengers took place in two phases: their interception at sea and their transportation to Israel. The interception at sea was characterised by the contingency of the event: the improbable crossing of paths between the remnants of a Vietnamese fishing boat and an Israeli cargo ship in the South China Sea. This unlikely encounter opened an interesting space, in which merchant vessels found themselves 19  Yehuda Levinger, “Hakabarnit sheneesa lo avel: lo heeleti bedimioni sheashalem ko rabot” [The wronged captain: ‘I never imagined I would pay such a price’], Srugim, May 10, 2018. The Ofer Brothers is one of the most powerful family conglomerates in Israel, owning not only a shipping company, but also real estate, Israel Chemicals, the Haifa oil refinery, the Mizrachi Tefachot bank and the franchise on one of the main television channels. 20  Shimon Rappaport, “66 Plitey vietnam shenizlou metvia al yedei onia israelit mechapsim moledet” [66 Vietnamese refugees saved by an Israeli ship seeking a homeland], Maariv, June 12, 1977, 6. 21  Shimon Rappaport, “Shum medina lo rotza liklot haplitim shehetzila yuvali” [No country is willing to receive the refugees saved by the Yuvali], Maariv, June 17, 1977, 4. 22  Rappaport, “No country”. 23  Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1977.

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subverting the usual binary logic of borders. In terms of sovereignty, the Israeli ship existed as a liminal and ambiguous space. Although located thousands of miles away from its physical borders, the ship operated as a kind of mobile Israeli enclave, affiliated to the state and under its responsibility, yet autonomous, almost self-sufficient and subject to the authority of its captain, who in turn was subject to that of the private company employing him. The sea that extends beyond domestic waters is an exceptional space, a potential escape from the meticulous modern grid of sovereignty and law, seemingly existing as free and anarchic spaces—that of pirates—defying the principles of territoriality and state sovereignty.24 However, modern sovereignty does not tolerate no man’s lands, and the incorporation of the high seas into a legal regime is one of the stories of the nineteenth century.25 The inclusion of the high seas in emerging international law rested on two main elements: conventions establishing an international maritime code and their application through the formalisation of the relation between maritime vehicles and their flag state, which bears responsibility for their acts.26 Thus, in assisting the Vietnamese boat, Captain Tadmor was simply complying with the most fundamental of obligations under maritime law—that of rescuing a vessel in distress.27 But in in this case, international law reintroduced national order: by taking the 24  Hakim Bey, T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism Brooklyn: Autonomedia (1991); Janice E.  Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 25  With the Paris Declaration on Maritime Law in 1856, SOLAS—the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea first signed in 1912, and the establishment of the International Maritime Organisation by the United Nations in 1948. 26  Vessels must display the national flag of the state where they are registered and are subject to the Maritime Code through their affiliation to the authority of the state. On this extension of international law to the high seas, see Samuel Hayat and Camille PaloqueBerges, “Transgressions pirates,” Tracés no. 26 (2014): 7–19; Sévane Garibian, “Hostes humani generis : les pirates vus par le droit,” Critique no. 733–734 (2011): 470–479; Itamar Mann, Humanity at Sea: Maritime Migration and the Foundations of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 42–43. 27  However, this obligation has not always been respected by Israeli ships: in 1982, the case of an illegal traveller found on board the cargo ship Moran and abandoned on a boat near the coast of Mozambique was discovered and reported by a journalist as the ‘illegal traveller case’. The captain and two of the sailors were brought to trial and charged with wounding the traveller and abandoning him in a dangerous boat. Yet, the court declared that “it is not possible to determine that the captain’s actions were deliberately offensive to the nigger”. Lital Levin, “Hayom lifney 26 shana: ktav ishoum neged rav-chovel shehifkir afrikayi bayam”

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refugees on board, Captain Tadmor facilitated their extrication from the anomie of maritime space by integrating them into a space linked to a country located on the other side of the world thus rendered responsible for their fate. The first intermediate phase in the history of Israeli Vietnamese reception then occurred, not in a space commonly conceived of as national territory, but the liminal space of the ship. The fact that the incident took place on a boat near the Japanese coast and not on the Israeli border in fact served to diffuse the normal tension between national sovereignty and the right of asylum. The playing out of this event in a zone of exception, in which decisions taken by the Israeli authorities were not likely to form a rule, allowed the Vietnamese to be accepted as refugees without challenging the more general absence of the category of refugee within Israeli law. And so, as we shall now see, the second phase of their reception, their active transfer to Israel, needs to be seen as a new event, connected to the first yet distinct. This second event was the result of a decision by the newly elected prime minister Begin—a decision presented as highly symbolic.

A Symbolic Reception: Memories Haunting the Jewish People Menahem Begin, leader of the right-wing party Likud, whose election in 1977 ended three decades of government by the Mapai party, spoke of the Vietnamese refugees in his inaugural speech: My first act tomorrow as Prime Minister will be to announce that the Vietnamese refugees will receive asylum in our country. We all remember the boats loaded with Jewish refugees in the 1930s, sailing from sea to sea, asking to be welcomed, and being refused. Today there is a Jewish state. And we have not forgotten. We will act according to human principles. And we will bring those unfortunate beings, those refugees who were saved from dying at sea by our ship, to Israel. They will be given haven and refuge.28

[On this day, 26 years ago: A captain is accused of abandoning an African at sea], Haaretz, June 26, 2011. 28  Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1977.

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Following Begin’s statement, Arie L. Eliav, a parliamentarian from the opposition party, stood up to greet him: ‘As captain of a ship that illegally transported Jewish refugees to Israel, I salute this decision!’ Parliamentary debates on the subject reveal how the treatment of the Vietnamese who came to Israel was built on parallels drawn with Jewish refugees. In particular we see how discourses surrounding Israel’s Vietnamese ‘boat people’ echoed those of the post-war Jewish refugee boats seeking a safe harbour. Thus, through a reactivation of a powerful national imaginary, Israel’s ‘humanitarian gesture’ was understood as the action of a people who, having experienced persecution and exodus, had a moral duty to act, and who in doing so were also able to affirm the legitimacy of the Zionist project. A year after the reception of Israel’s first Vietnamese refugees, the plight of those on board the Hai Hong reached international attention, and the analogy between Vietnamese and Jewish refugees reappeared. In October 1978, the Hai Hong vessel transporting 2500 Vietnamese was denied permission to enter Malaysia until the refugees on board were granted resettlement in a third country. In response a plenary session of the Israeli Knesset was dedicated to ‘the problem of Vietnamese refugees in the heart of the sea’. On this occasion, a Knesset member stated: We hear the cry of distress from the boats and I, a Holocaust survivor who found refuge and who is now a parliamentarian in the Knesset of Israel, wish to convey this cry and I call upon you to join me in becoming a loudspeaker for these unfortunate refugees. We are a small country that is still courageously fighting for its existence. Our resources are limited and barely sufficient for ourselves. But we've already taken in refugees. It was even the first act taken by the government under our Prime Minister Menahem Begin, being a refugee himself. We cannot solve the global refugee problem, but we have moral strength and we must convey this message to the world.29

Following the Knesset debates, in January 1979 the government decided to accept another group directly from the camps in south-east Asia, and a few weeks later 104 Vietnamese refugees, mostly ethnic Chinese, were brought to Israel from Manila.30  Dov Shilanski, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, November 15, 1978.  Daniel Bloch, “Hamemshala hechlita lehatir knisatam shel 100 plitim mivietnam” [The government has accepted 100 refugees from Vietnam], Davar, January 8, 1979, p. 1; Dan Arkin, “‘Yesh lanou bait hadash’—amar beatouna dover haplitim lifneyi hamra’atam la’aretz” 29 30

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The same images were evoked by the Knesset again a few months later, as the UNHCR worked to build momentum for its Geneva conference: Memories are haunting the Jewish people. We remember boats carrying our refugees, wandering the seven seas, and the world’s harbours were locked. Their hearts were locked and their gates were locked. We remember the last letter sent from Struma to a relative in Israel, while the boat was docked in Constantinople’s harbour. It said: ‘We need your help to get to our final destination’. And they did. Their final destination was the deep sea.31

After this Knesset discussion, the Israeli government initiated its third and last ‘humanitarian gesture’.32 Thus, on 23 October, the third, and largest, group was brought to Israel—197 people, mostly ethnic Kinh— from various camps across south-east Asia.33 To understand the symbolic framing of the reception of Vietnamese migrants, we can usefully examine the images of refugee boats in the (Jewish) Israeli national archive and at their role in the Zionist mythology. First, as is made evident in all the chapters in this book, the image of boats carrying refugees is symbolically powerful even beyond the Israeli national context. In a recent book on international maritime immigration, Itamar Mann quotes Paul Weis, UNHCR’s first Legal Adviser, who in 1954 compared the status of refugee with that of ‘a vessel on the open sea, not sailing under any flag’.34 As Mann argues, the nightmarish image of the flagless vessel carrying refugees in vain search of safe haven is particularly strong because of its immediacy: it directly embodies the symbolic figure of the refugee as the one who has no place on earth and is condemned to unrelenting wandering. But beyond this general symbolism, the Israeli national archive is full of stories of boats carrying refugees: boats of Jewish refugees fleeing Europe and seeking a safe harbour in vain; boats that were prevented from legally entering Palestine because of the control of Jewish migration imposed by [“We have a new home”—says the refugees spokesperson while in Athens before attending their flight to Israel], Maariv, January 24, 1979, p. 1. 31  Gideon Hausner, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1979. 32  Davar Foreign affairs correspondent, “Israel maskima liklot od 200 vietnamim” [Israel agrees to accept another 200 Vietnamese], Davar, July 2, 1979, p. 2. 33  Davar editorial, “200 Plitim mivietnam yavo’ou bashavoua haba” [200 refugees from Vietnam will be arriving next week], Davar, 16 October 1979, p. 3. 34  Mann, Humanity at Sea, 21; Paul Weis, “The International Protection of Refugees,” American Journal of International Law 48, no. 2 (1954): 193–221.

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the British government from 1934 until the declaration of the independence in 1948. The names of many of these ships appear in the Knesset discussions of the time: a German ship, the Saint Louis, mentioned in a letter from Begin to US president Carter, whose passengers fleeing Nazi Germany had to return to mainland Europe after having been refused by Cuba, the United States, Canada and Britain in what has been called the ‘voyage of the damned’35; Struma and Mefkura, sunk by Soviet torpedoes; ships stopped by British forces off the coast of Palestine and their passengers sent to camps in Cyprus; ships including the Ulua, whose captain Arie Eliav would write its story and later become the Knesset member who leapt to his feet to commend Begin’s decision.36 Perhaps the most resonant story, etched in Israeli collective memory and evoked in many speeches, was that of the Exodus, ‘the ship that launched a nation’.37 This ship, which left Sète in France carrying Jewish refugees bound for Palestine, renamed itself Exodus 1947 once on the high seas, and replaced its Panamanian flag with a flag bearing the Star of David, the flag of a future state. Although it was refused leave to land in Palestine and its passengers were returned to displaced persons camps in Germany, the Exodus serves to stand as the embodiment of Zionist resistance to the exclusion of refugees from the national order of things and celebrates Jews’ transition from exodus to sovereignty.38 The addition and gathering of the different stories of boats carrying Jewish refugees into one national story drew a direct line from the Holocaust to the establishment of the State of Israel, thereby reaffirming the legitimacy of the Zionist project to establish a national home for the Jewish people in historic Palestine. And so the deployment of images of Jewish refugee ships in relation to the Vietnamese arrivals reactivated what Sarah Willen has called the ‘founding trauma’ of the Holocaust which was entrenched in the national collective memory. They thus prepared the ground for a mobilisation of a political emotion of empathy, albeit a mobilisation which might act as a double-edged sword, as empathy is 35  In this letter Begin wrote: ‘We never have forgotten the boat with 900 Jews, which left Germany in the last weeks before the Second World War […] travelling from harbor to harbor, from country to country, crying out for refuge. They were refused […] Therefore it was natural […] to give those people a haven in the land of Israel.’ 36  Arie L. Eliav, The Voyage of the Ulua (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969). 37  Ruth Gruber, Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (New York: Union Square Press, 2007). 38  Mann, Humanity at Sea.

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typically distributed according to arbitrary criteria.39 Further, we see how the specific symbolic power of the images of Jewish refugee boats encapsulated the national foundation story and thus reaffirmed the legitimacy of the state. In that sense, the Israeli gesture towards the Vietnamese refugees, as it was shaped through these symbolically charged images from the Israeli national archive, could justify the reception of these ‘brothers in misery’, while at the same time situate the act as an exception proving a rule of a national order that structurally excluded non-Jews. Thus, the reception of the Vietnamese was built on a specific configuration of a humanitarian logic, which cast the ‘boat people’ as legitimate recipients of empathy and compassion, and a national logic that sustained a racialised citizenship regime. Adapting Ben Herzog, this specific entanglement could be called a Zionist humanitarianism.40

A Gesture Embedded in Geopolitical and Domestic (Symbolic) Imperatives The Zionist humanitarian framework appeared, in Knesset discussions about the Vietnamese reception, as best reflecting Israel’s special sensitivity to the refugee question. As a Knesset member summarised: Especially us, because we have also been refugees—some of us in our own lifetime, while others carry the memory of their ancestors—we must be especially sensitive to the suffering of all refugees, to see it as a humanitarian problem and not let ourselves be influenced by other countries who take into account other elements—be they political, ideological, economical— when they face the refugees problem.41

Here the humanitarian perspective was presented as antonymic to political, ideological or economic approaches to refugeedom while at the same  Willen, “Darfur through”.  Ben Herzog, “Between Nationalism and Humanitarianism: the Glocal Discourse on Refugees”, Nations and Nationalism 15, no. 2 (2009): 185–205. Herzog analyses Israel’s reception of refugees as based on a ‘glocal humanitarian discourse’, adapting and translating global conceptions into national and local themes. He uses the concept ‘Zionist humanitarianism’ to show how the humanitarian logic appears as already intertwined with a heterogeneous set of national ‘symbolic frameworks’, yet he does not consider the role of Zionism in shaping the reception. 41  Tamar Eshel, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1979. 39 40

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time being seen as complementary to and intertwined with Jewish ethics and historical legacy. Yet in other cases, the humanitarian perspective was understood as being also compatible with a political position which placed Israel among other ‘citizens of the Western world’. Thus, in describing the humanitarian crisis on the Hai Hong ship, parliamentarian Akiva Nof argued that Israel had three reasons to act: firstly, through a general humanitarian obligation which was incumbent on all human beings witnessing suffering; secondly, through a commitment to Jewish ethics and the historic legacy for Jews who had suffered similar persecution; and, finally, a geopolitical imperative, which understood Israelis as citizens of the Western free world who also needed to defend it against Cold War communism.42 Geopolitical and domestic imperatives clearly played an important role in shaping and justifying the reception of the Vietnamese refugees. However, unlike elsewhere, where their reception through the resettlement programme was a political issue discussed by policymakers and administrative agents, in the case of Israel, since the reception was constructed as a symbolic exceptional gesture, the political stakes also remained symbolic and embedded in specific and personal conjunctions of interests, imperatives and events. The reception of the Vietnamese refugees was primarily a decision of newly elected prime minister Menahem Begin. From a political perspective, Begin’s decision to grant asylum to the first group of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ rescued by an Israeli cargo ship was an exceptional political opportunity. This decision played a role in building his legitimacy both in Israel and abroad, a legitimacy that was especially fragile. Begin’s election, which ended three decades of government by the Mapai party—the only governing party Israel had ever known—was a surprise that destabilised the domestic arena and Israel’s foreign relations. The decision to begin his term in office with the symbolic act of welcoming a group of Vietnamese refugees played in favour of Begin on both levels. At the domestic level, this act was greeted even by the opposition, as illustrated by the former ship’s captain rising to his feet to commend Begin during his inaugural speech. This gesture was not only deeply consensual; it was also a way to

 Akiva Nof, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, November 15, 1978.

42

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reassure the opposition by signalling the engagement of this right-wing leader with humanitarian issues.43 At the international level, Begin’s gesture also played well on the international stage, and particularly with the United States. The American government led by Jimmy Carter had considered Begin’s election bad news, suspicious of a politician who defended the ‘Greater Israel’. Indeed, a few weeks after his election, when Begin was received at the White House Carter invoked the question of Palestinian refugees, considered the major obstacle for peace with neighbouring countries. Begin replied by telling the story of the Vietnamese refugees warmly welcomed by the State of Israel and concluded that if there were some disagreements between the Israeli and the US governments, ‘the commitment to a sustainable peace unites us’.44 Begin thus presented the reception of the Vietnamese refugees as proof of Israel’s commitment to peace and human rights, and of its willingness to participate in global efforts and to integrate into the international community. It also allowed Begin, a fervent anti-Communist, to highlight Israeli alignment with the United States in the context of the Cold War. In that sense, Begin’s humanitarian gesture was embedded not only in the national political context but also in his own personal trajectory. It echoed his fierce anti-communism, which was itself intimately related to his own history: arrested by the NKVD (Soviet political police) in Lithuania during the Second World War, Begin had been accused of cooperation with ‘British imperialism’ and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment and forced labour in a work camp, a decisive episode in his political career.45 But even more than that, the references to the memory of the Holocaust— soon to become among the main characteristic of Begins’ political line— also resonated with his own personal history. As head of a Polish branch of the Betar revisionist Zionist movement in 1939, Begin had tried to 43  This appears clearly in the description of Begin’s first day in the prime minister office: Yehusha Bitzur, “Bemisrad rosh hamemshala houavar hashilton beseder mofti: kefi shehevtiach lakneset hetchil menachem begin et kehounato betipul beflitey Vietnam” [The transmission of mandate to the new prime minister went particularly well: as he declared, the first action of Menachem Begin as prime minister will be to accept the Vietnamese refugees], Maariv, June 22, 1977, 17. 44  Nahum Barnea, “Al harega haze chalam begin” [The moment Begin was dreaming of], Davar, July 20, 1977, 3. 45  Menachem Begin, White Nights: A Story of a Prisoner in Russia (New York: Harper & Row, 1979 [1957]).

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­ rganise the smuggling of a group of Jewish refugees via Romania to o Palestine.46 While unsuccessful, it was another defining moment in his political life. In this sense, Begin’s declarations about Jews fleeing Europe and turned back by countries indifferent to their tragic fate linked not only generally to the collective national narrative but also more directly to his individual story of persecution.

Between the Moral Symbolic Gesture and Political Action I know the difficulties a small country like ours has in taking in such a public. This is why I specify—it is not absorption for good, but a temporary asylum […] More than that, if someone wants to argue that, for pragmatic reasons, we can’t take in 2,500 people, so be it: we shall absorb 100. We shall absorb 75. But we should set an example. We should be Or Lagoyim [light to the nations] on this issue.47

With these words, parliamentarian Akiva Nof, having initially proposed that Israel offer safe haven to the Hai Hong passengers, changed position: instead of the initial offer to receive the passengers of the overcrowded vessel who had been denied permission to enter Indonesia and Malaysia until resettlement solutions in third countries had been found, he ultimately put to the vote a much-restricted proposal concerning an Israeli symbolic gesture. By the time the Knesset commission met to discuss this proposal, not only had the Hai Hong passengers already found safe haven, but Prime Minister Begin had also already initiated the reception of the second group of 104 refugees, who arrived in Israel on January 24, 1979. The Knesset commission therefore only praised Begin’s decision, presenting it as particularly generous: The commission commends the government’s decision to receive refugees from Vietnam that no other country was willing to take. The commission 46  Many parliamentarians emphasise how Begin’s positions are related to his personal trajectory, a fact that shows his integrity and gives him more legitimacy. For example: Dov Shilanski, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1979. 47  Literally, ‘light to the nations’, a biblical term originally from the Prophet Isaiah, evoking its role in offering spiritual and moral guidance for the entire world. Akiva Nof, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, November 15, 1978.

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considers that this humanitarian act proves once again that Israel should set an example to other richer and more developed countries that didn’t show any generosity and didn’t receive the displaced Vietnamese.48

Proposed Israeli participation in the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees was brought back to the Knesset in June 1979, after UNHCR invited Israel to participate in the Geneva conference. Once again, the Knesset discussion emphasised the humanitarian and moral obligations and Israel’s special affinity with the issue. Yet the chamber cast doubt on the utility of the international conference. This time, among references to images of Jewish refugee ships, the speakers invoked another episode from the national archive—the international conferences discussing the fate of Jewish refugees before or during the Second World War. Thus, for instance, parliamentarian Uri Avnery said that when he climbs the podium, ‘Three hideous names marked in iron in the story of our people echo in my mind: Évian, Struma and Exodus’. Thus, Avnery modified the beginning of the narrative that commonly went from the Struma, sunk by Soviet torpedoes, to the Exodus, ‘the boat that launched a nation’, by prefixing these with the 1938 Évian conference, which met to discuss the problem of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution by Nazi Germany. As Avnery recalled, Évian ultimately ended in failure as almost none of the participating countries agreed to accept Jews: ‘And the result? Empty words and papers. A few thousand were saved, thousands out of millions. And European Jewry sunk to the bottom of the sea.’49 Begin himself was no less dismissive of the UNHCR’s proposed efforts. During the same discussion, he presented the letter he had written to forty-nine world leaders and to the UNHCR High Commissioner Poul Hartling, in which he asserted that the conference in Geneva would ‘be in vain’. He suggested that Geneva would bear as little fruit as the conferences in Évian and Bermuda which had failed to ‘save any of the one-and-­ a-half million children that were massacred’ in the Holocaust.50 Bypassing the idea of a conference, he, supported by a statement produced by the Knesset, instead called on the leaders of all countries to simply inform the High Commissioner of the number of refugees they were willing to take,  Protocol of the Knesset Commission for Internal affairs, January 31, 1979.  Protocol of the ninth Knesset June 20, 1979. 50  Tova Zimouki, “Begin kore lemedinot haolam liklot et plitey Vietnam” [Begin calls upon all countries of the world to receive Vietnamese refugees], Davar, June 19, 1979, 1. 48 49

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according to their size and capacities.51 A week later, the Israeli government announced that it would receive a further 200 Vietnamese, in line with the number suggested by the High Commissioner.52 This was Israel’s third and last humanitarian gesture towards the Vietnamese refugees. Thus, although some Knesset members suggested that Israel should accept more substantial numbers of the Vietnamese, the weight of feeling in Knesset discussions emphasised the symbolism rather than the substance of Israel’s offer. This was based on its heritage as a nation that bore and encapsulated the story of persecution, exodus and asylum.53 Accordingly, Israel’s actual response to the crisis remained at the scale of the symbolic. Even so, this was enough, as Begin and other Knesset members emphasised, to demonstrate how Israel ‘set an example’ to the world as an Or Lagoyim (light to the nations). From this symbolic perspective, the Israeli gesture of accepting 200 Vietnamese arrivals was sufficient proof of Israel’s moral probity. As the Israeli parliamentarian Dov Shilanski put it: I do not want to give numbers for how many should we absorb. I do know that we will not solve the problem, regardless of whether we take a thousand more or a thousand less. Our role and duty is to warn the whole world and to say: there were Jewish refugees in Germany, in Poland, in Russia, during the Second World War. And the world was silent. Until Europe’s soil was flooded with the blood of millions of Europe’s sons.54

Here the references to the Jewish historical legacy appeared almost detached from any concrete political action, measurable in numbers. The memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust were instead invoked in such a way as to position Israel as the nation which stood for all victims of persecution, exodus and exile and which served as a moral beacon against future human tragedies. This understanding of Israel also simultaneously positioned it at the margin of and morally above the political arena of the Geneva conference. Israel’s claiming of the role of global  Protocol of the ninth Knesset June 20, 1979.  Davar Foreign affairs correspondent, “Israel maskima”; Yosef Waksman, “Shvaitz ueshvedia hodiou al haskamatan le‘tochnit begin’ veykletu plitim vietnamim” [Switzerland and Sweden declared they agree to the ‘Begin programme’ and will accept Vietnamese refugees], Maariv, June 22, 1979, 2. 53  Tamar Eshel, Uri Avnery, Akiva Nof and Gideon Hausner all spoke in favour of receiving significant numbers of refugees. Protocol of the ninth Knesset June 20, 1979. 54  Dov Shilanski, Protocol of the ninth Knesset June 20, 1979. 51 52

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moral guardian allowed it to sidestep the international political arena where the destiny of the Vietnamese refugees was discussed and instead to raise the parallel—and redundant—request of Begin that individual nations accept Vietnamese refugees. This was presented as flowing naturally from Israel’s own history so that its experience could work to position it as not only part of the international effort, but somehow even its leader, showing the way to others. Thus, a newspaper headline during the build up to the Geneva conference—‘Switzerland and Sweden agree to “Begin’s programme” and will accept Vietnamese refugees’—presented the Israeli letter to world leaders as the core of the international resettlement initiative.55 In this context, the position of ‘setting an example’ seems to have more to do with imparting a moral lesson than with taking an exemplary concrete political action. The moral lesson was ultimately supposed not only to position Israel as a moral beacon, but also to oppose international criticism about Israel and especially about its policy towards Palestinians. In July 1979, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation called of Israel to be barred from the Geneva conference, given its responsibility for the expulsion of 1.7 million Palestinians from their homeland.56 And if Israel kept at arm’s length from the UNHCR’s international resettlement effort, it was in no small part underpinned by the historical tension between Israel and UN which went right back to the UN’s 1948 General Assembly Resolution 194 confirming the Palestinian right to return. From this point the Israeli government’s default position had been one of mistrust towards the UN, which it saw as inherently biased towards it.57 Here the words of parliamentarian Yehuda Ben-Meir are especially revealing: This is an opportunity to show the hypocrisy of the compassion that we often hear in UN institutions and other places toward Palestinian refugees, who are not sailing on makeshift boats, but who have been living in their [Arab] brothers’ countries for over thirty-one years. Yet, out of pure hypocrisy, there are still countries that try to attack us every day and blame us for the Palestinian refugee problem, for which we are supposedly responsible, or that we are supposed to solve. Yet these same countries that speak up [on  Waksman, “Shvaitz ueshvedia”.  Davar editorial, “Hamaarav yklot 250,000 vietnamim” [The West will receive 250,000 Vietnamese], Davar, July 20, 1979, p. 3. 57  The Israeli position towards the UN is revealed in the expression ‘Um-Shmum’, coined by Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion, where ‘um’ is the Hebrew acronymic pronunciation for ‘UN’ and the Shmum signifies ‘dismissal, contempt or irony’. 55 56

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the Palestinian issue] stand aside and do not say a single word when, before their eyes, dozens of thousands of refugees are in danger.58

This reference to ‘the Palestinian refugee problem’, coupled with the erasure of Israeli responsibility for it, once again revealed the violence encapsulated in the ‘Zionist humanitarian’ logic. Not only did the exceptional gesture towards a small group of Vietnamese refugees demonstrate the violence inherent to the humanitarian logic—the one that went with exception and compassion distributed according to arbitrary criteria—but it also encapsulated the violence embedded within the consolidation of the national order, historically built on the exclusion and erasure of Palestinian refugees. In a state established as a safe haven but only for Jews, the symbolic reception of 367 Vietnamese refugees did not challenge the absence of asylum and migration policies for non-Jews.

Practices of Reception: Foreign olim When the second group of Vietnamese was brought to Israel in January 1979, the minister came to greet them in person, saying: ‘Welcome to the Holy Land, to the land of Israel. Everything has been done to ensure that you can be welcomed and absorbed here and that you can build a happy and productive life in this country.’59 Television reportage documented the reception of the third and final group of Vietnamese, who arrived to Israel in October 1979. The images show them getting off the plane greeted by a crowd waving Vietnamese and Israeli plastic flags. The camera stopped on the Vietnamese in this crowd, those who arrived to Israel a year earlier and were now holding signboards in Hebrew and Vietnamese saying, ‘welcome to Israel, our second home’ and ‘Israel saved our lives’. A small ceremony was organised in the airport arrivals hall, where an official of the minister of Alyia and Klita (Jewish Immigration and Absorption) greeted them in Hebrew, wishing the newcomers an easy and speedy integration. The next images showed the Vietnamese refugees arriving in the southern town Sderot, where a delegation of schoolchildren welcomed them with signboards and flags. The newcomers were given roses and plastic Israeli flags and brought to their new temporary homes: fully  Protocol of the ninth Knesset June 20, 1979.  Rachel Primur, “Chiuchim, yad hama oukarka betoucha” [Smiles, a warm hand, and safe land], Maariv, January 25, 1979, 3. 58 59

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f­urnished apartments in the ‘absorption centre’. Another scene depicted them in a classroom alongside a singer with an accordion playing a song for Hanukah, the Jewish holiday. Apparently intimidated by the apathy of his captive audience, he is shown asking them, in Hebrew: ‘Do you want a song in English? In Japanese?’ before starting to play another melody.60 If we take a closer look at the symbolic and material practices and tools through which the Vietnamese refugees were treated from the moment they arrived to Israel, we can see how they were not considered as a new category of population deserving specific treatment, but rather as a kind of olim.61 ‘We welcome you with joy, as we have welcomed our brothers, the sons of Israel, that made alyia’, said the director of the absorption centre.62 As with all the olim, their arrival was organised by the Ministry of Alyia and Klita, which also provided housing upon arrival and the financial assistance for newcomers known as sal-klita (absorption basket).63 They were enroled in an ulpan—an intensive Hebrew school, also established to facilitate the integration of Jewish migrants—and assisted in finding jobs and long-term housing. Despite the apparently comprehensive package of support offered to them, the Vietnamese newcomers have also encountered discrimination and exclusion. The ‘absorption centres’ they were sent to were in working-­ class cities highly affected by unemployment and poverty. After, and in some cases even during, their short Hebrew-language training, the jobs they were offered were mainly blue-collar ones: in petrol extraction in Sinai, in the car industry and in hotels.64 Where they were directed to 60  Associated Press archive images, UPITN Vietnamese boat people arrive in Israel, October 26, 1979; archive images used in: Duki Dror, The Journey of Van Nguyen, 2005. 61  Yosef Waksman, “Haolim mivietnam hitpaalou mehagmalim” [The olim from Vietnam were excited to see camels], Maariv, March 2, 1979, 3; Meir Hareuveni, “‘Haalyia harishona’ shel nimlatey Vietnam mesayaat beklitat plitey ‘haalyia hashnyia’” [The ‘first alyia’ of Vietnamese refugees helps in the absorption of refugees from the ‘second alyia’, Maariv, January 25, 1979, 3; Meshulam Ed, “‘Haaolim’ mivietnam mitaklemim beofakim” [The ‘olim’ from Vietnam integrate in Ofakin town], Davar, July 1, 1977, 20. 62  Shlomo Givon, “‘Atem retzouyim kan’, neemar laplitim bekabalat hapanim hachagigit baayara ofakim” [‘You are welcome here’, the refugees were told in a reception in Ofakin town], Maariv, June 27, 1977, 3. 63  In some of the cases, this included some financial contributions from the UNHCR. 64  Meshulam Ed, “Lekehiliyat plitey vietnam beofakim nosaf vietnami-zabar; metziym likro lo ofek” [A new Israeli-born member joins the Vietnamese refugees community in Ofakim; he will be named Ofek], Davar, September 5, 1977, 6; Yizhak Ben-Horin, “Pliteyi vietnam beisrael houzherou vehoukou ki ‘avdou maher midayi’” [The Vietnamese refugees in Israel

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training, the occupations were dictated according to state officials’ ideas of what was appropriate: they were trained as drivers, mechanics and nurses.65 Thus, the housing and the employment opportunities which were open to them assigned them by default to a lower-class position within the Israeli society. Yet, those mechanisms were not new, nor specific to the Vietnamese case: the ‘absorption’ of Jewish olim was also far from being homogeneous and allowed similar structural discrimination of Mizrahi Jews—those coming from Arab countries—compared with European Ashkenazi olim.66 Yet, the exclusionary practices directed at the Vietnamese newcomers went beyond these traditional forms of structural discrimination: the Vietnamese were not olim, and no one has forgotten this difference. Their inclusion remained an exception, therefore fundamentally different from the reception of the Jewish olim. They were olim by grace—second-rank olim, foreign-olim. The main consequences of the decision to accept Vietnamese refugees as an ‘exception’ was how this ensured that the decision—and therefore the Vietnamese themselves—could never be incorporated into state administrative routines. Other chapters in this book show how the reception of Vietnamese refugees through a nation’s standard asylum procedures was common in some countries and that in other countries the discretionary nature of a government’s decision to receive a certain number of refugees was subsequently mitigated through their absorption into the country’s existing asylum administration. In Israel, as there was neither a specific asylum process nor a dedicated refugee administration, the reception of the Vietnamese took place in a legal and administrative void. Thus, the Vietnamese who received asylum as a humanitarian gesture were never granted refugee status. They did not apply for asylum in Israel and their cases were never examined, simply because an asylum procedure did not exist in Israel at the time. Once they arrived in Israel, the administrative procedures for their treatment had to be invented. Thus, following the official top-down decision to welcome them, the material form of the ‘generous gesture’ of reception was shaped by were threatened and beaten because they were ‘working too fast’], Maariv, November 21, 1979, 16. 65  Phone interview with Zvi Zeidner, the former director of the Absorption Centre in Afula, October 30, 2019. 66  Yehouda Shenhav and Yossi Yonah, Racism in Israel (Tel Aviv: Van Leer Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008).

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street-level and mid-level bureaucrats on the one hand, and by the Israeli public and citizens’ reactions to the newcomers on the other. At the administrative level, in the absence of a refugee- or an asylum seeker–specific administration—comparable to France’s OFPRA—the ministry that took over the effective treatment of the Vietnamese was the Ministry of Alyia and Klita, tasked with the encouragement and integration/absorption of Jewish immigration. The discourse and practices of the agents of this ministry reveal the ambivalence of the exceptional welcome of non-Jewish immigrants. Although, as we have seen, the ministry organised the ceremonial receptions when each group of Vietnamese arrived, and seemed to work hard to help orientate the Vietnamese on arrival, there was another side to the story, with some of the Absorption Office workers expressing a different opinion. In an interview years later, when he was asked about this mission, Azriel Waldman, the director of the Absorption Office, said: ‘Welcoming Jews was our duty; welcoming Vietnamese refugees was a gesture, an act of grace.’67 The words of the director of the Absorption Services Department, Aharon Amit, were even more explicit: ‘There was no desire to make their stay here sustainable; we wanted to allow them to survive, but not for them to settle here permanently and become part of the landscape.’68 Many authors focusing on the implementation of policy argue that it needs to be seen as a complex process of adaptation and adjustment that interacts with, models and transforms political decision-making.69 Here implementation is understood an integral part of public action, going beyond the voluntarism of the actors and revealing the action in its materiality, through the ways actors appropriate, reject, resist and modify policy. In the case of the administrative practices of agents of the Absorption Office, it seems that these street- and mid-level bureaucrats used their relative autonomy to restore order—both an administrative order and a national one. ‘The status of the Vietnamese will be almost identical to that of olim’, explained the Director of the Absorption Centre that received

 Yossi Klein, “Beayiat haplitim” [The refugee problem], Haaretz, October 9, 2005.  Klein, “Beayiat haplitim” 69  Michael Lipsky, Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (New York: Russell Sage foundation, 1980); Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick le Galès, Sociologie de l’action publique (Paris: Armand Colin, 2007); Michael James Hill and Peter L. Hupe, Implementing Public Policy: An Introduction to the Study of Operational Governance (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014 [2002]). 67 68

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them.70 But what was ‘almost identical’? As the Director went on to explain: ‘We had norms and rules about the reception of olim, but for the Vietnamese, we didn’t have rules to follow. A lot depended on me and on my staff, we had to think outside of the box’.71 As there were no formal procedures or bureaucratic routines regulating their actions, in many cases absorption administration officials, as well as those from other offices, did not treat the Vietnamese as new members of the community, but rather as strangers. Thus, once the official reception ceremonies ended, the new arrivals quickly encountered problems. First, contrary to the formal pronouncements, the Vietnamese did not receive Israeli citizenship upon arrival, only tourist visas and work permits.72 In 1983, six years after the arrival of the first group of boat people, a press article revealed their anger and disappointment: ‘It took more than five years before we got permanent residency’, complained Tran Quang Hoa.73 The person in charge at the Absorption Office was not surprised and explained that as the Vietnamese arrived in Israel as non-Jewish migrants, they could therefore only ask for permanent residency after three years.74 Other Vietnamese interviewed for this article complained that they may have received housing and loans, but their rights had never been clearly defined. Phong, a former pilot trained by the Americans, said that he was given a scholarship to study engineering but had quit after four months. ‘Every month I was supposed to receive the allowance and every month there was a problem’, until, on one occasion, when he went to ask for his scholarship, the agent handling his file calculated how much money Israel would spend on him during his three years of studies. ‘That day I left the university. I felt abandoned’, he told the journalist.75 Such interactions and micro-decisions of street- and mid-level agents normalised, or routinised, to use Weber’s concept, the exceptional decision to integrate and absorb a group on non-Jewish

70  David Shalev, “Havietnamim bayim leafula” [The Vietnamese arrive to Afula], Davar, January 25, 1979, 3. 71  Phone interview with Zvi Zeidner, October 30, 2019. 72  Primur, “Chiuchim, yad hama”. 73  Gini Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina hanishkachim” [The forgotten boat people], Davar, August 5, 1983, 21. 74  Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina”. 75  Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina”.

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migrants by interpreting it according to the common sense of the dominant ideology: the exclusion of non-Jews.76 The story of Dr Tran Quang Hoa, a surgeon who was on the boat whose passengers were rescued by the Israeli cargo Yuvali at 1977, reveals the gap between the purported reception and the actual conduct in practice. In a recent press article, the daughter of the Israeli captain, who was a teenager at the time, recalled how Dr Quang Hoa treated her, upon the request of her father, when she was sick during the journey. She described that Quang Hoa reacted with gratitude: ‘You restored my security and my dignity’, he said to her father, ‘as you let me, a bare-foot Vietnamese refugee without any document, take care of your sick daughter’.77 Fluent both in English and French, Quang Hoa became the spokesperson of the passengers in their contacts with Israeli administrative structures. He was present at the arrival of the two subsequent groups in 1979 and greeted the newcomers: ‘You escaped the barbaric Communist regime. You are not arriving in a foreign land. Here you will find a friendly land whose inhabitants will receive you with open hearts.’78 Yet, in an interview in 1983, when asked about discrimination, he said with irony: ‘If you don’t consider the rights issue and the bureaucracy problems then you can say that the Israelis don’t discriminate.’79 In another interview the same year, he complained about the discretionary treatment: We came here as refugees and since then, we have been temporary residents. In this situation, we risk being fired overnight, for there has been no policy in our regard for almost five years. Eighty refugees have already left to settle elsewhere. In order to leave, they had to pay under the table to get a visa.80

He himself left for the United States after publicly stating that he was severing his ties with the Ministry of Absorption. In response to this 76  Routinisation is a translation of Veralltäglichung, meaning to ‘reduce charisma to an everyday matter’, a concept developed by Max Weber in order to describe the transformation of the genuinely extraordinary charismatic rule into everyday forms. Max Weber, Economy and society, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2019 [1921]). 77  Levinger, Levinger, “Hakabarnit sheneesa”. 78  Dan Arkin and Akiva Yinov, “‘Haplitim hachadashim’ mivietnam yilmedou ivrit baayara sderot likrat klitatam beisrael” [The ‘new refugees’ from Vietnam will learn Hebrew in Sderot so that they can be integrated in Israel, Maariv, October 24, 1979, 6. 79  Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina”. 80  Klein, “Beayiat haplitim”.

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criticism, the Head of the Absorption Services Department replied simply: ‘He has the right to be discouraged.’81 In other words, the exceptional reception of Vietnamese refugees consisted of extending, exceptionally, the limits of the category of olim—normally reserved exclusively for Jews—to include a small number of Vietnamese. While most literature regarding the state of exception focuses on cases where the exception allowed the exclusion of certain populations or zones from the protections provided by law, in this case the exception was used not to exclude but to include those who would otherwise have been excluded.82 Yet, this inclusion was established in a way as to ensure that it did not set a precedent for other groups. Instead, it reaffirmed the Zionist national logic whereby the only refugees Israel should receive and absorb were Jewish olim. The Vietnamese inclusion, in that it took place in the anomalous space of the suspension of the law, remained fundamentally different from the reception of the Jewish olim. If their inclusion granted them rights, they remained excluded from the ‘right to have rights’, according to Arendt’s formula, and the rights they were granted, however generous, remained a sign of unexpected generosity—a favour dependent on the nation’s good will and therefore arbitrary.83

Compassion and Othering The public reaction to the arrival of the Vietnamese refugees reflected another type of ambivalence. The daily press of the time reported the warm and enthusiastic reaction of ordinary Israelis, who went out of their way to greet the new comers and send them gifts. In one press article, the director of the Absorption Centre was described as having to ask the public to stop sending clothes and gifts, and showed the journalist only some of the welcome letters and invitations the newly arrived refugees had received: A letter from Kibbutz Ein-Gev inviting the Vietnamese to visit and eat in the fish restaurant. A magician from the Southern town Ashkelon offering a free  Klein, “Beayiat haplitim”.  Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). For a theorisation of this type of situations in a very different context: Dotan Leshem, “Embedding Agamben’s Critique of Foucault: The Theological and Pastoral Origins of Governmentality”, Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 3 (2015): 93–113. 83  Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarism. 81 82

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show. A table-tennis trainer from South Galilee inviting those who play tennis to join his team. A thirteen-year-old from Herzlyia who would like to contact Vietnamese girls her age …84

He also detailed the numerous job offers the Vietnamese had received: a pastry chef from Ramat-Gan, a garage manager from Safed and a manager of a big car factory in the north—all were willing to integrate Vietnamese workers.85 The reputation of Vietnamese as ‘good workers’ certainly played a role in the willingness of many to integrate them into the job market.86 Yet the same press articles revealed the exoticisation of the newcomers and emphasised what was perceived as a radical cultural difference of these migrants who ‘had difficulties eating rice with a fork’.87 Afula’s Absorption Centre director described the specific problems he encountered: ‘they were not like regular olim, there were language problems, mentality gaps, they were not used to our food, to our weather’.88 One can of course question these statements: were the Jewish migrants, at that time mostly from the Soviet Union, more familiar with the Hebrew language, the local food or the Israeli weather? Yet from the director’s perspective, the Vietnamese newcomers needed a special (paternalistic) treatment: ‘The other olim could manage on their own, but for the Vietnamese we were like their mother and father’. He described, for instance, how he had organised a guided tour to the market to familiarise them with Israeli products and have launched a food and cooking class ‘to teach them to buy and eat seasonal fruits and vegetables and to buy cheap products’.89 But the othering of the Vietnamese newcomers was not only on a cultural level, it had also to do with their racialisation. The press articles of the time insist on their ‘slender eyes’, their ‘slim silhouettes’ and their ‘funny’

84  Yizhak Ben-Horin, “Havietnamim beafula hitkashu leechol orez bemazlegot” [The Vietnamese in Afula had difficulties eating rice with a fork”, Maariv, February 7, 1979, 17. 85  Ben-Horin, “Havietnamim beafula”; Ed, “‘Haaolim’ mivietnam”; Ezra Yinov, “Anashim mikol hasderot helbishou pliteyi vietnam baayara hadromit” [The people in the southern town of Sderot offer clothes and welcome the Vietnamese refugees], Maariv, November 5, 1979, 6. 86  Uri Avnery, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1977. 87  Ben-Horin, “Havietnamim beafula”. 88  Phone interview with Zvi Zeidner, October 30, 2019. 89  Ben-Horin, “Havietnamim beafula”.

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pronunciation.90 And newspapers described hundreds of citizens descending on the Absorption Centre to ‘see the Vietnamese’, children climbing the fence when not allowed in.91 In the Israeli ethno-space, the Vietnamese were racially marked in a way that essentialised their difference. The near-­ total absence of south-east Asians in Israel in the 1970s made the Vietnamese a very visible minority, one who could in no way blend in with their surroundings. While the Israeli press emphasised the cultural differences and the racialised otherness of the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese themselves also described a feeling of strangeness and unfamiliarity. Yet, the explanations they provided of this strangeness were very different. Thus, the medical doctor Tran Quang Hoa articulated the unfamiliarity through the lack of (colonial) history: ‘We know the French and the Americans because they are present in our country. I’m not saying that we like them, but at least we know them’.92 In the same interview, he said that it might have been easier for Vietnamese refugees in countries where there were stronger Vietnamese communities: ‘Of course we are free to keep our traditions in Israel, but it’s hard when there are so few of us. Sometimes you need people around to remind you your traditions’.93 The tiny size of the Vietnamese community, the essentialisation of its difference and the racial othering all undoubtedly played a role in many of the Vietnamese refugees leaving the country in the subsequent years. The author and linguist Sabine Huynh, living in Israel, conducted perhaps the only research about the Vietnamese community, which in 2007 she estimated to consist of between thirty and thirty-five Vietnamese families or roughly 150–170 people, including Israeli spouses.94 These numbers meant that more than half of the original community had left the country. Most of those remaining had arrived with the last group, which was also the less well off, thus insinuating their decision to stay in Israel was less a vindication of later resettlement efforts and more the result of

90   Yinov, “Anashim mikol hasderot”; Ed“‘Haaolim’ mivietnam”; Ben-Horin, “Havietnamim beafula”. 91  Ed, “‘Haaolim’ mivietnam”; Givon, “Atem retzouyim kan” 92  Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina hanishkachim”. 93  Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina hanishkachim”. 94  Sabine Huynh, “The Vietnamese community in Israel: A profile”, non-published article written during a postdoctoral research in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007. She reached a total of 147 informants through a combination of interviews and questionnaires.

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opportunities related to socio-economic status.95 Huynh’s study revealed a working-class community, one whose members, including in the second generation, were mainly employed in the food preparation and catering industries—often ‘Chinese’ restaurants—where they found an ‘ethnic niche’. Others, mostly first generation, were employed in classically gendered working-class roles, most commonly with men in factories and women as hotel chambermaids.96 Yet social and economic discrimination and racism did not appear in state officials’ understanding of the high rates of Vietnamese who left Israel. Instead, it was mainly articulated as a natural result of their ‘difference’: Nothing here was like they were used to. They are used to a slow pace, here everything is fast, it’s a country of explosions. So they came here, they stayed for a while, they gained some weight, and they continued their journey. I am not angry, I understand them.97

Yet the Israel that the Vietnamese entered in 1979 has not remained static. And so the racialisation of its Vietnamese community changed from the 1990s alongside the transformation of Israel’s immigration policy and the opening of the market to labour migration. This saw the arrival of migrants from China, Thailand and the Philippines, who were actively recruited to occupy the lower tiers of the labour market.98 In the process, this growing presence of other south-east Asian racialised migrants transformed the Vietnamese experience. No longer automatically positioned as ‘boat people’ or ‘refugees’, their experience of othering increasingly took the form of being mistaken for migrant workers. Some have described the strategies they have adopted to differentiate themselves from East Asian migrant workers, strategies that often play through the intersection between race and class. Thus, a Vietnamese man who arrived in Israel when he was three years old described how:

 Huynh, “The Vietnamese community”.  Huynh, “The Vietnamese community”. 97  Phone interview with Zvi Zeidner, October 30, 2019. 98  These migrants, designated in Israel as ‘foreign workers’, were originally recruited to replace Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who commuted daily and who worked in the lower tiers of the Israeli labour market until the late 1990s. See Adriana Kemp, and Rebecca Raijman, Ovdim vezarim [Migrants and Workers: The Political Economy of Labour Migration in Israel], Tel Aviv: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2008). 95 96

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If I walk in the street in Tel Aviv, people will still see the difference. But if I sit in a coffee shop, people will see that I’m different from the Chinese worker who rides a bike wearing pants covered with paint from construction work.99

Conclusion A newspaper article about the integration of the Vietnamese refugees published in 2005 opened with Hadas Huan, a young woman who arrived in Israel from Vietnam in 1979 aged five, being asked: ‘What is still Chinese about you?’ This question made little sense to her: having lived most of her life in Israel not much in her was ‘Chinese’. Yet while she may even have felt ‘Israeli’, her looks—her racially marked otherness—ensured people persistently marked her as a foreigner, as ‘Chinese’.100 Hadas, as the owner and manager of a Chinese restaurant in Tel Aviv, in 2015 was taken to labour court by her employee, an Eritrean asylum seeker. He complained about the owners’ violation of workers’ rights, violations that are extremely common, and one might say characteristic of, the work conditions to which African asylum seekers are subjected. The Eritrean employee proved he wasn’t paid for overtime, did not receive holiday revenue or sick pay and his employer paid no pension contributions or severance and unemployment compensation after he stopped working at the restaurant.101 The court accepted many of the charges and calculated due compensation. One of the disagreements brought to court was about the context of the termination of the employee’s contract. The employer argued that the termination occurred after they could not provide a valid work permit. The employee’s version, accepted by the court, was that he provided the only permit that he could have, a three-month conditional release visa, the only document the Israeli administration provides for the vast majority of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers. Hadas Huan did not do anything special: like many Israeli employers, she used to her advantage a system that not only avoids giving rights to asylum seekers and refugees, but also maintains them in increasingly 99  Eyal Levi, “Pliteyi vietnam dorshim: ‘im koltim az kmo shekaltou otanou’” [Vietnamese refugees claim: if the country is to integrate refugees, it should be done similarly to the way we were integrated], Maariv, September 8, 2015. 100  Klein, “Beayiat haplitim”. 101  Regional Labour Court of Tel Aviv—Jaffa, 18281-03-15, gebreiwot Iyob against Hadas Huan, November 19, 2017.

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precarious situations. Thus, she argued that, since the conditional release document he provided explicitly stated that ‘this document is not a working permit’, she could not know that it was legal to employ him. Yet, it is precisely this document that commonly serves as a work permit for asylum seekers, as the court reaffirmed. Thus, while on one level this story is banal and only shows the irony of the reversal of situations, on a more general level it reveals the transformation of the Israeli treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. The way Hadas, as an employer, used to her advantage legal ambiguities that maintain employed asylum seekers in precarious positions, reveals how across four decades (limited) forms of reception and integration of non-Jewish refugees were replaced by policies of illegalisation and deterrence. After 2009, Israel re-established a repressive asylum system based on its Anti-Infiltration Law of 1954, which had originally targeted Palestinian refugees who crossed Israeli borders in an attempt to return. In this new iteration it was Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers, who, having crossed the Israeli-Egyptian border, were now labelled as mistanenim (infiltrators). In this context, it is useful to revisit the Vietnamese experience, the first case in which asylum was granted by the Israeli state to non-Jews. For Begin’s words in his inaugural speech, announcing that his first act as prime minister would be to give asylum to a group of Vietnamese refugees saved by an Israeli cargo ship, are often cited as an example of when Israel held to its commitments regarding refugee rights as well as to its Jewish heritage. Yet, a closer analysis of the story of Israel’s reception of the Vietnamese refugees rather highlights the consistencies of an Israeli (non) asylum policy and, in particular, its resistance to formalise a legal refugee category in a country historically established as a ‘refuge state without refugees’. The 367 Vietnamese men and women who arrived to Israel between 1977 and 1979 may have found refuge in the Jewish state, but they did not receive refugee status. Nor did they benefit from the standard protections granted to refugees as subjects of rights according to law and international conventions. Instead, their reception, constructed as a ‘gesture’, was framed as an exceptional act of generosity initiated by a people that had suffered exile and persecution. This narrative was consequently embedded in a ‘Zionist humanitarian’ logic, intimately intertwined with Israeli politics, ideology and historical consciousness. Thus, the reception of a small group of Vietnamese migrants—justified through the analogy made between their persecution and exile and that of Jewish

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refugees—served to consolidate a national order that structurally excluded non-Jews. In that sense, the story of the Israeli reception of Vietnamese migrants reveals the paradox of a historical legacy. While Israel emphasised that its humanitarian reception drew upon its heritage and enabled it to claim itself as a moral example to the rest of the world, this reception remained an exception. It neither paved the way to establishing a refugee category for non-Jews nor to Israeli participation in the UNHCR’s resettlement efforts. Thus, the State of Israel ultimately never signed up for the Orderly Departure Programme; in fact, the option was never even discussed by the Israeli parliament. The story of the 367 Vietnamese who were granted refuge as a ‘humanitarian gesture’ by the Jewish state was due to remain a unique anecdote at the margins of the national narrative that would otherwise reject non-Jewish migrants and refugees.

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Index

A Agt, Dries van, 154 Ahier, Jeanne, 54–56 Airlifts, 38 Akoka, Karen, ix, 17, 21, 23, 30, 40, 101 Albrecht, Ernst, 91–92, 97 Aliens Act (Netherlands), 154, 162 Aliens Acts (UK), 111 Alyia (immigration to Israel), 183 See also Olim (immigrants on alyia) Amit, Aharon, 202 Amnesty International, 150, 152, 170 Anti-communism, 58–60, 66, 150, 194 Anti-immigration policies/feelings in France, 33, 62 in Israel, 184–185, 202–211 in Netherlands, 154 in UK, 26, 38, 40, 115–116, 119–120, 154 in West Germany, 86

Anti-Infiltration Law (1954, Israel), 210 Anti-totalitarianism, 37, 65–70 Arendt, Hannah, 14, 205 Argentinean refugees, 89 Aron, Raymond, 64 Ashkenazi Jews, 201 Assimilation, see Integration of boat people Associatie van Vietnamese Vluchtelingen in Nederland, 166 Association of Metropolitan Authorities (UK), 128 Association of Southeast Asian Nations, 11 Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act (1993, UK), 55 Asylum regimes disruption of, 19–21 (see also France) in Europe, 18–20 at international level, 13–16 at national level, 15–18

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Taylor et al. (eds.), When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983, Palgrave Studies in Migration History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64224-2

227

228 

INDEX

Aussiedler, see Ethnic Germans Australia, 4, 12 Automobile industry, 61 Avnery, Uri, 196 B Basdevent, Pierre, 52–53 Begin, Menachem inaugural speech of, 32, 188, 210 on UNHCR, 196–197 personal history of, 194–195 political decisions of, 180, 186, 193 Belgium, 161 Ben-Meir, Yehuda, 198 Bergh, Harry van den, 162 Berlinghoff, Marcel, ix, 17, 41 Beucler, Jean Jacques, 58 Boat people and conditions at sea, 8–10 discrimination of (see Discrimination/racism) as docile right-wing labour force, 26, 33, 40, 42, 43, 59–63 employment/unemployment among, 133–137 exclusion of, 134–136, 200–202, 204 integration of (see Integration of boat people) labels used for (see Labels) occupations of, 43–45, 135–137 reception/resettlement of (see Reception/resettlement of boat people) rescues of (see Sea rescues) selection criteria for, 21, 49–50, 57, 96–97 sexual violence against female, 170–172

See also France; Israel; Netherlands; United Kingdom (UK); West Germany Boats for Vietnam initiatives, see Bergh, Harry van; Comité un bateaux pour le Vietnam; Deutsches Notärzte-Komittee—Ein Schiff für Vietnam (German Committee of Emergency Doctors—A Ship for Vietnam) Böll, Heinrich, 101 Bordet, Delphine, 51 Brauman, Rony, 68 British Council for Aid to Refugees (BCAR), 24, 112, 115, 122–124 British Nationality Act (1981, UK), 118 Burma (Myanmar), 58–59 C Cambodia, 8, 159 Cambodian refugees, 29, 71, 160 See also Boat people Canada, 4, 12 Cap Anamur (ship), 12, 37, 101–103 Car factories, 61 Carter, Jimmy, 194 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 66, 69 Centre for Survivors of the National Socialism, 168 Centrum voor Gezondheitszoorg voor Vluchtelingen (CGV, Centre for Health Care for Refugees), 168, 170 Chilean refugees, 27, 89, 90, 112, 149, 150, 155, 168, 174 China, 8 Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA, Christian Democratic Appeal), 154

 INDEX 

Citizenship regime in Israel, 183–184, 202–204 and rights, 14 CNE (National Assistance Committee), 49, 58 Cold War and domestic affairs, 29–30 in general, 28 and response to refugee crisis; in France, 57–60; in Israel, 193–195; in the West, 15, 18, 28–29; in West Germany, 88–90 Colonial legacies in France, 30, 56–58 in general, 7–8, 28–30 in Israel, 183–184 in UK, 30, 113–117 Comité National d’Entraide (CNE, National Assistance Committee), 49, 58 Comité un bateaux pour le Vietnam, 12, 64, 101, 162 Condominas, Georges, 71 Contingent refugees (Kontingentflüchtlinge), 23 Contract workers (Vertragsarbeiter), 106 Council houses, 128–130 Culture of welcome (Willkommenskultur), 80 Cypriot refugees, 113 Czech refugees, 112 D Daily Mail (UK newspaper), 38, 115 Davidson, John-Paul, 9 Denmark, 161 Deutsches Notärzte-Komittee—Ein Schiff für Vietnam (German Committee of Emergency

229

Doctors—A Ship for Vietnam), 37, 101, 162 Die Zeit (newspaper), 93, 94, 98 Discrimination/racism of/against boat people; in Israel, 200–211; in UK, 42, 119–120, 135–136; in West Germany, 106–108 See also Exclusion of boat people; Othering Displaced Persons (DPs), 30, 151–153 Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde), 68 Dongen, Frans van, 145 Dönhoff, Marion, 93–94, 98 Dublin II Regulation, 19 Duong family, 158 Dupoiza, Michel, 56 Dutch Federation of Refugee Care (Nederlands Federatie voor Vluchtelingenhulp), 153 Dutch Refugee Council-VVN (Vereniging Vluchtelingenwerk Nederlands), 165, 174–175 E Eastern Treaties (Ostverträge), 100 East German refugees, 87, 99 East Germany, 100, 106–107 Ecumenical Refugee Help Organisation (Stichting oecumenische hulp, kerken en vluchtelingen), 153, 158 Eliav, Arie L., 189 Emigration tax, 98 Eritrean refugees, 209–210 Ethiopian refugees, 150, 171–172 Ethnic Chinese, 8, 10, 70–71, 97, 119 Ethnic Germans, 22, 87–89, 97–99, 104 Europe, 3–7, 12, 32–33

230 

INDEX

European refugee crisis (2015), 2–3 Évian conference (1938), 196 Exclusion of boat people, 134–136, 200–202, 204 Exit tax, 98 Exodus (ship), 191, 196 F Family reunification, 85, 97, 110, 148, 161, 162 Federal Agency for the Recognition for Foreign Refugees, 95 Federal Law on Admittance of Humanitarian Refugees (Gesetz über Maßnahmen für im Rahmen humanitärer Hilfsaktionen aufgenommene Flüchtlinge), 104 Fondation Maréchal Delattre de Tassigny, 58 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), 116 Foreigners Law (1965, Germany), 95 Foreignness, 39, 127 Foundation for Refugee Students– University Assistance Fund, (Stichting voor Vluchteling-­ Studenten–Universitair Asiel Fonds), 152–153 France anti-immigration decree of July 1974, 33, 62 asylum regime of, 19, 22–23 boat people in; administrative procedures surrounding, 49–50; as docile right-wing labour force, 26, 33, 40, 42, 43, 59–63; in general, 16–17, 22–23, 77; individual refugee applications of, 50–56; integration of, 39–40, 42–44; naturalisation of, 62–63;

occupations of, 43–44; public/ political discourse on, 25–26; public support for, 12, 36–38, 63–70; reception policy for, 47; reduction in professional and social status of, 43; screening procedure for, 52–53; selection criteria for, 21, 49–50, 57; state support for, 33–36, 48–51; transportation of, 49–50 and Cold War, 29 imperial interest in Asia, 7 labour migrants in, 26, 32–33, 40, 60 migration regime of, 39 refugee status in, 22–23, 55–56, 76–77 response to refugee crisis; and Cold War/anti-communism, 57–60; demographic considerations for, 26, 33, 40, 42, 43; and intellectual politics, 63–70; and post-colonial legacies, 30, 56–58; and prestige, 31 Frankfurt, 96 Freedom without Borders (Liberté sans frontières), 69 French intellectuals, 36–38, 63–67 French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless (OPFRA), see Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides (OFPRA) G Gastarbeiter (guest workers), see Labour migrants Geneva conference (1979), 5–6, 11–12, 116–118, 161, 196 Geneva Convention classification of refugees under, 52, 150, 154

 INDEX 

exclusions under, 55–56 Israel and, 181–183 Germany refugee status in, 23 See also East Germany; West Germany Gesetz über Maßnahmen für im Rahmen humanitärer Hilfsaktionen aufgenommene Flüchtlinge (Federal Law on Admittance of Humanitarian Refugees), 104 Giladi, Rotem, 182 Giscard d’Estaing, Valery, 37, 47, 64 Glucksmann, André, 64, 101 Great Britain, see United Kingdom (UK) Guest workers (Gastarbeiter), see Labour migrants The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn), 65 Guyana, 44 H Hadas Huan, 209–210 Hai Hong (ship), 63, 91–92, 97, 189, 193 Hamburg, 94, 105–106 Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung (newspaper), 92 Hartling, Poul, 11, 117, 118, 141, 161, 196 Hasselmann, Wilfried, 97 Haus Nazareth (reception centre, W. Germany), 103 Havkin, Shira, ix, 18, 20 Herzog, Ben, 192 Hmong people, 8, 44, 57, 63 Holocaust memory, 178–179, 188–192, 197

231

Hong Kong, 10, 16, 30, 114–116 Humanitarianism, 36–38, 63–70, 149–150, 154–155, 178–179 See also Zionist humanitarianism Humanitarian rescue initiatives, see Boats for Vietnam initiatives Human rights, 36–38, 63–70, 91, 150–151, 178–179 Hungarian refugees, 89, 112, 122, 174 Huynh, Sabine, 207–208 I Illiteracy, 119 Immigration Act (1971, UK), 33, 112 India, 94 Individual refugee application, 50–56 Indochinese, see Boat people; Cambodian refugees; Laotian refugees Indonesia, 12 Innenministerkonferenz (Interior Minister’s Council), 96 Integration of boat people and foreignness, 39, 127 in France, 39–40, 42–44 in general, 45–46 in Israel, 38–39, 45–46, 205–209 in Netherlands, 40–41, 44–45 in UK, 39–40, 132–140 in West Germany, 41–42 Intellectuals, French, 36–38, 63–67 Interior Minister’s Council (Innenministerkonferenz), 96 International Refugee Organisation (IRO), 152, 184 International Rescue Committee (IRC), 69 Invited refugees, 155, 161, 174, 175

232 

INDEX

Israel anti-immigration policies/feelings in, 184–185, 202–211 asylum regime of; in general, 18, 20, 22, 24–25; national context of, 180–185; for non-Jews, 180–181, 185; re-establishment of repressive, 209–210 boat people in; citizenship of, 202–204; in general, 12, 24–25, 210; integration of, 38–39, 45–46, 199–202, 205–209; labels for, 18; media coverage of reception of, 199–200; occupations of, 45, 208; public discourse on, 27; public support for, 205–207; racism towards, 206–209; reception of, 185–190, 195–197; sea rescue of, 186–188; state support for, 33–35, 201–205 citizenship regime in, 183–184, 202–204 colonial legacies in, 183–184 establishment of, 181 and Geneva Convention, 181–183 labour migrants in, 208–209 lack of refugee status in, 181, 201, 210 Palestinian refugees, 184–185, 194, 197–199 as refugee nation, 181–183 refugees in; from Eritrea, 209–210; and Holocaust memory, 178–179; Jewish, 181–183; from Sudan, 179, 210; work permits for, 209–210 response to refugee crisis of; in general, 177–178, 192–193; and Holocaust memory,

188–192, 197; and Israeli legitimacy, 32, 180; and prestige, 31, 192–199; proposed restrictions to, 195; symbolic scale of, 196–198 sea rescues by, 186–188 as settler colonial society, 183 and UN, 197–199 and UNHCR, 145–176, 179, 184–185, 195–197 Israeli Citizenship Law (1952, Israel), 183 J Jay Yao Ye-Chin, 133 Jestaedt, Rudolf, 102 Jewish refugees, 111, 181–183 See also Ashkenazi Jews; Mizrahi Jews Jewish refugee ships, 190–192 Jewish Social Organisation, 153 Joffe, Josef, 92–93 Joint Committee for Refugees from Vietnam (JCRV), 16, 124, 133 Jones, Peter, 132 Juliana, Queen of the Netherlands, 152 K Kensington Barracks (reception centre, UK), 115, 123, 131 Kenyan Asain refugees, 113 Khmer Rouge, 8, 55, 71, 159 Khoun Naka, 50 Klaauw, Christoph Albert van der, 146 Kleinschmidt, Julia, ix–x, 27 Klita (absorption), 183 Kohl, Helmut, 86

 INDEX 

Kontingentflüchtlinge (contingent refugees), 23 Kouchner, Bernard, 63, 68, 70–71 L Labels for boat people; in Europe, 16; in Israel, 18; in Netherlands, 18; in UK, 16, 115, 118; in West Germany, 17, 31, 98 Labour migrants in France, 26, 32–33, 40, 60 in Israel, 208–209 in Netherlands, 32–33, 40, 147–148 and recession, 32–33 in West Germany, 17, 32–33, 82–85, 88 Lager Friedland, 99 Laos, 8 Laotian refugees, 71 See also Boat people Law of Return (1950, Israel), 182–183 League of Nations, 14 Le Monde (French newspaper), 47 Lenoir, Rémi, 47 Liberté sans frontières (Freedom without Borders), 69 L’île de Lumière (ship), 37, 64, 93 Lower Saxony, 91–92, 99, 104–105 M Maghrebian labour migrants, 26, 33, 40, 60 Malaysia, 10–11 Mann, Itamar, 190 Maritime laws, 9, 20, 187

233

Massat, Jacqueline, 74 Masse, Jean-Pierre, 70, 71 Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), 68 Médecins Sans Frontières, 37, 68, 69, 150 Media coverage of reception of boat people, 199–200 of Vietnamese refugee crisis, 38–39, 90–91, 113–115 Mefkura (ship), 191 Meijer, Marijke, 171–173 Meslin, Karine, 62 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (France), 49 Ministry of Health (France), 49 Ministry of Labour (France), 49 Ministry of Social Action (France), 49 Mitterrand, François, 69 Mizrahi Jews, 201 Mom Tiev, 50 Moroccan labour migrants, 147–148 Moyn, Samuel, 91 Multiculturalism, 110–111, 120–121, 137–140, 142–143 Myanmar (Burma), 58–59 N National Assistance Committee (CNE, Comité National d’Entraide), 49, 58 National Endowment for Democracy (NED), 69 Nationality Bill (2018, Israel), 184 Nederlands Federatie voor Vluchtelingenhulp (Dutch Federation of Refugee Care), 153

234 

INDEX

Netherlands anti-immigration feelings in, 154 asylum regime of; and Cold War dissidents, 148–149; and experiences of persecution and flight, 149–150; in general, 22, 24–25, 106, 152–154, 175–176; and humanitarianism, 149–150, 154–155, 159–161; and human rights, 150–151; influence of boat people on, 174 boat people in; criteria for acceptance, 21; in general, 17–18, 24–25; integration of, 40–41, 44–45; as invited refugees, 155, 161; labels for, 18, 165; medical care for, 167–170; professionalisation of care for, 163–164, 174–175; public/political discourse on, 27, 163–165; public support for, 162–163; reception/ resettlement of, 165–167; and sexual violence against, 171–172; sponsorship scheme for, 166–167; state support for, 35; volunteers assisting, 162–163, 166–167 and Cold War, 57 interest in Cambodia, 158–160 labour migrants in, 32–33, 40, 147–148 migration to; from former colonies, 147; of labour migrants, 147–148 minority policy of, 41 refugee organisations in, 152–153, 164–166 refugees in; from Cambodia, 160; from Chile, 149, 150, 155, 168, 174; DPs, 151–153; from

Ethiopia, 150, 171–172; from Hungary, 174; invited, 155, 174, 175; from Poland, 155; public consciousness of, 150–152; public discourse on, 32; Turkish Christian, 149, 150, 155, 171–172; from Uganda, 174; volunteers assisting, 150–152 refugee status in, 161–162 response to refugee crisis; in general, 145, 155–162; and prestige, 31 and Vietnam War, 156–157 Neudeck, Christel, 37, 100 Neudeck, Rupert, 37, 100–102 NGOs, and reception/resettlement of boat people, 96, 100–103, 121–127, 131–132 Nof, Akiva, 193, 195 Non-governmental organizations, see NGOs, and reception/ resettlement of boat people O Occupations of boat people, 43–45, 135–137 Ockenden Venture (UK), 124, 126 Ofer Brothers conglomerate, 186 Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides (OFPRA) asylum applications lodged with, 71–76 and fraud, 72–76 in general, 22, 23, 49, 50 institutional culture of, 54–56 legitimacy of, 53–54 loss of autonomy of, 50–56 screening procedures of, 52–53 Oil crisis (1973), 19, 32

 INDEX 

Olim (immigrants on alyia) boat people as, 200, 202, 204–205 concept of, 183, 184 Orderly Departure Programme (ODP, of UNHCR), 1, 12, 24, 96, 109, 110, 118, 141 Ostverträge (Eastern Treaties), 100 Othering, 206–207 P Palau Bindong, 93 Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), 198 Palestinian refugees, 184–185, 194 Paris, 44 People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), 173 Persecution, concept of, 14 Philippines, 12 Phong (former pilot), 203–204 Poland, 100 Poles, 112 Polish refugees, 155 Polish Resettlement Act (1947, UK), 112 Post-traumatic stress disorder, 168 Potsdam Agreement, 22 Pottier, Robert, 71 Prestige and Israel’s response to refugee crisis, 31, 192–199 and West’s response to refugee crisis, 30–31, 116–118 Professionalisation, of care for refugees, 163–164, 174–175 Pronk, Jan, 150–151 Psychological/psychosomatic suffering, 168 Pulau Bidong, 9, 172

235

R Racial citizenship regime, 184, 192 Racial stereotyping, 61–63 Racism, see Discrimination/racism Rape, see Sexual violence, against women Reception centres/camps/hostels in general, 49–51, 103–104, 106, 121–127, 165–166 Haus Nazareth, 103 Kensington Barracks, 115, 123, 131 Sonnenblumenhaus, 107 Sopley (UK), 124 Thorney Island, 124 Reception/resettlement of boat people in Australia, 4, 12 in Canada, 4, 12 in Europe, 3–7, 12 in Hong Kong, 10, 16, 30, 115–116 in Malaysia, 10–11 and NGOs, 96, 100–103, 121–127, 131–132 in Singapore, 10 in Thailand, 10–11 in USA, 4, 11–12, 59–60 and volunteers, 125–127, 131–132, 141–142, 162–163, 166–167 See also France; Israel; Netherlands; United Kingdom (UK); West Germany Recession, 32–33, 130–131 Red Cross, 100–102 Refugee applications, individual, 50–56 Refugee Convention (1951), 11, 13–16, 19, 112, 152, 182, 185 Refugee crises in Europe (2015), 2–3 See also Vietnamese refugee crisis (1978-1979)

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INDEX

Refugeehood definition of, 13, 14 (see also Refugees) roots of, 13–14 Refugees gendered idea of, 27, 173–174 and humanitarianism, 36–38, 63–70, 149–150, 154–155, 178–179 (see also Boat people; Refugeehood) and human rights, 36–38, 63–70, 91, 150–151, 178–179 invited, 155, 174, 175 prima facie, 11, 20, 21 sexual violence against female, 173–174 Refugee status as defined by Geneva Convention, 52, 55–56, 150, 154 as defined by Refugee Convention, 11 and Dublin II Regulation, 19 in France, 22–23, 55–56, 76–77 in general, 21 in Germany, 23 in Israel (lack of), 181, 201, 210 in Netherlands, 161–162 Reichsfluchtsteuer (Reich flight tax), 98 Relief Committee of Czech Refugees, 153 Repatriation programmes, 33, 61 Responses to refugee crisis and anti tiers-mondism, 65–70 and anti-totalitarianism, 65–70 Roachbank (ship), 116, 124 Rohingya (of Burma), 58–59 Rosset, Gilles, 53–54

S Sainteny, Jean, 58, 63 Saint Louis (ship), 191 Sans-frontiérisme, 37, 67 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 64 Save the Children Fund (SCF), 122, 124, 126 Scheltema, Michiel, 171 Sea, and territoriality, 186–188 Sea rescues active, 36–37, 64 by British ships, 113–115 disruption national asylum regimes, 20–21 in general, 7–10 by humanitarian vessels (see Boats for Vietnam initiatives) by Israeli ship, 186–188 Selection criteria, for boat people, 21, 49–50, 57, 96–97 Sephardic Jews, 94 Settler colonial societies, 183 Sexual violence, against women, 173–174 Shanghai, 184 Shilanski, Dov, 197 Sibonga (ship), 115–116, 124 Singapore, 10 Sonnenblumenhaus (reception centre, W. Germany), 107 Sopley (reception camp, UK), 124 South-East Asia Committee (Stichting Comité Hulpverlening Zuid-Oost-­ Azië), 163 Soviet Union, 100 Spivak, Gayatri, 140 Stichting Comité Hulpverlening Zuid-Oost-Azië (South-East Asia Committee), 163

 INDEX 

Stichting oecumenische hulp, kerken en vluchtelingen (Ecumenical Refugee Help Organisation), 153, 158 Stichting voor Vluchteling-Studenten– Universitair Asiel Fonds (Foundation for Refugee Students–University Assistance Fund, or UAF), 152–153 Stoel, Max van der, 158 Struma (ship), 191, 196 Sudanese refugees, 179, 210 Syrian refugees, 79–80 T Tadmor, Meir, 186, 188 Taylor, Becky, x, 16, 33, 40, 42 Territoriality, 186–188 Thailand, 8, 10–11 Thatcher, Margaret and credit for Geneva Conference, 11, 15 mention of, 21 response to refugee crisis; anti-­ immigration position of, 115–116, 141; and prestige, 116–118 Third-Worldism (tiers-­ mondisme), 65–70 Thorney Island (reception centre; UK), 124 Ticktin, Miriam, 178–179 Tiers-mondisme (Third-­ Worldism), 65–70 Times Literary Supplement (UK periodical), 66 Tran Quang Hoa, 203–205, 207 Traverso, Enzo, 66 Turkish Christian refugees, 149, 150, 155, 171–172 Turkish labour migrants, 17, 147–148 Turk-problem (Türkenproblem), 84

237

U UAF (Stichting voor Vluchteling-­ Studenten–Universitair Asiel Fonds), 152–153 Ugandan Asian refugees, 113, 122, 124, 128, 174 Ulua (ship), 191 UNHCR, see United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) United Kingdom (UK) anti-immigration policies/feelings in, 26, 38, 40, 115–116, 119–120, 154 asylum regime of, 19, 22–24, 110–112 boat people in; composition of, 118–119; and council houses, 128–130; criteria for acceptance, 21; and dispersal policies, 25–26, 127–132, 141–142; employment among, 135–137; funding for, 127–130; in general, 5, 16, 23–24; illiteracy among, 119; integration of, 39–40, 132–140; isolation of, 134–136; labels for, 16, 115, 118; language tuition for, 129–131; movements of, 137–138; and NGOs, 121–127, 131–132; public support for, 37–38; racism against, 42, 119–120, 135–136; reception/ resettlement of, 109, 114–115, 121–127; self-organisation of, 138–140; state support for, 32–35; unemployment among, 133–134 connections with south-east Asia, 113–114 economic recession in, 130–131 migration policies of, 32–34, 118

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INDEX

United Kingdom (UK) (cont.) multiculturalism in, 110–111, 120–121, 137–140, 142–143 Poles in, 112 refugees in; from Chile, 112; from Cyprus, 113; from Czechoslovakia, 112; in general, 112–113; from Hungary, 112, 122; from Kenya, 113; limited state support for, 110; from Uganda, 113, 122, 124, 128 relationship with Hong Kong, 30 response to refugee crisis; and post-colonial legacies, 30, 113–117; and prestige, 31, 116–118 United Nations and Israel, 197–199 See also United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) criticising USA’s mass resettlement programmes, 59–60 establishment of, 14 in general, 28–29 influence of, 154 international resettlement programme of; boat people in, 11–13 (see also Geneva conference (1979)); as disruptive factor, 20–21; in general, 3–6 and Israel, 145–176, 179, 184–185, 195–197 Orderly Departure Programme of, 1, 12, 24, 96, 109, 110, 118, 141 United States (USA) intervention in Vietnam, 7, 156–157

reception/resettlement of boat people in, 4, 11–12, 59–60 support of the Khmer Rouge, 8 Uyl, Joop den, 150 V Veracini, Lorenzo, 183 Vereniging Vluchtelingenwerk Nederlands (VVN—Dutch Refugee Council), 22, 25, 35 Vertragsarbeiter (contract workers), 106 Vertriebene (expellees), see Ethnic Germans Vietnam Cambodian refugees in, 160 ethnic Chinese population of, 8, 10, 70–71, 97, 119 independence struggle of, 7 invasion of Cambodia by, 8 policies implemented by new government of, 7–8 Vietnamese Aid Committee (Vietnam Hilfskomitee), 163 Vietnamese refugee crisis (1978-1979) in general, 1–2 historical context of, 7–8 media coverage of, 38–39, 90–91, 113–115 preoccupation with, 28 repurposing of, 2–5 scale of, 10–11 Vietnamese refugees, see Boat people Vietnam Hilfskomitee (Vietnamese Aid Committee), 163 Vietnam War, 156–157 Vogel, Hans-Jochen, 86 Volunteers, 125–127, 131–132, 141–142, 150–152, 162–163, 166–167

 INDEX 

VVN—Dutch Refugee Council (Vereniging Vluchtelingenwerk Nederlands), 22, 25, 35, 165, 174–175 W Waldheim, Kurt, 117 Waldman, Azriel, 202 Waver, Ralph, 156–157 Weil, Patrick, 61 Weis, Paul, 190 Wellpark (ship), 113–115 West Germany anti-immigration policies/ feelings in, 86 asylum regime of, 22, 23, 82–85, 94–97, 169 boat people in; in general, 5, 17, 23, 79–80, 88; integration of, 41–42, 44–45, 104–106, 108; labels for, 17, 31, 98; as model refugees, 108; privileged status of, 103–104; public/political discourse on, 26, 89–91; public support for, 36–37, 91–95, 100–103; quota-levels for, 96–97; racism against, 106–108; resettlement programme for, 102–104; selection criteria for, 21, 96–97; state support for, 34–36, 91–92, 102–104 and Cold War, 29 federal states of; independence of, 92; support for boat people in, 91–92, 94–97

239

labour migrants in, 17, 32–33, 82–85, 88 migration regime of, 40–42, 82 refugees in; from Argentine, 89; from Chile, 89, 90; from East Germany, 87, 99; ethnic German, 22, 87–89, 97–99, 104; from Hungary, 89; from Syria, 79–80 response to refugee crisis; and Cold War, 88–90; and ethnic Germans, 97–99; and forced deportation of Jews, 97–98; international aspects of, 100–103; and prestige, 30–31, 57 Whitelaw, William, 118 Willen, Sarah, 178–179, 191 Willkommenskultur (culture of welcome), 80 Wolters, Stien, 171 Women, sexual violence against, 173–174 Women’s Royal Voluntary Service (WRVS), 125–126 Work permits, 209–210 Y Yuvali (ship), 186, 204 Z Zionist humanitarianism, 191–192, 199, 210