Processing made possible by a grant from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC).
The people from the Indochinese countries of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam constitute one of the largest groups of refugees ever to settle in the United States.1 One of the major waves of immigration to the United States took place in 1975, after the American withdrawal from Vietnam. This prompted the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government by communist North Vietnam, as well as the defeat of the American-supported government in Laos by the communist Pathet Lao regime. Yet the violence associated with these two actions paled in comparison with the carnage that soon engulfed Cambodia.
On April 17th, 1975 the Khmer Rouge, a communist guerrilla group led by Pol Pot, took control of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. During his rule, at least 1.7 million Cambodians died of starvation, torture, or execution, representing approximately 21% of the Cambodian population at the time.2 Survivors of what was later dubbed the Killing Fields were forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. The infamous Khmer Rouge operated a campaign based on terror and constant fear to keep their victims in line. By 1979, Cambodia's communist neighbor Vietnam had had enough of the brutality and invaded Cambodia, allowing hundreds of thousands of refugees to escape to neighboring Thailand.
Refugees fled in great numbers from the communist regimes that took control of Southeast Asia. Many risked their lives and fled on overcrowded, unstable boats, which constantly faced the threat of being boarded and capsized by Thai Pirates. The refugees were received in neighboring countries and placed in "first asylum camps", many of which were located in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The refugees, however, saw the disease-plagued camps as prisons. Visitors to the camps reported entire families confined to cubicles, not much larger then the size of a closet, in temperatures ranging from freezing to 100 degrees.
As public outcry for the refugees reached the United States, President Jimmy Carter called for a program to resettle 14,000 refugees in the United States every month. Soon after, the Indochinese Resource Action Center was established to assist in the domestic resettlement of the refugees and to put an end to the widespread suffering in Cambodia. More importantly, the formation of IRAC brought together government and private agencies, social service workers, and refugees themselves to develop and implement effective resettlement solutions.
In its first year of operation the staff of IRAC conducted extensive field research within the refugee community, which it used to produce a number of information reports and statistical updates, as well as a directory of national resettlement organizations and programs. Sometime later a "working group" emerged from IRAC's staff, and expanded to include representatives from voluntary agencies and private sector organizations, as well as federal, state, and local governments. The group worked to design and implement strategies around major areas of need, which included data collection and analysis, information dissemination, cultural orientation, training and technical assistance for practitioners, and Indochinese involvement in resettlement policy planning. In December of 1979, a national meeting of Indochinese resettlement practitioners and community representatives reviewed the working groups implementation plans and advocated support for emerging refugee self-help organizations, soon to be called Mutual Assistance Associations (MAA).
In 1982, IRAC was restructured to reflect the final initiative put forward by the working group, which called for Indochinese involvement in planning policies. A predominantly Asian-American board of directors replaced the Anglo-American board, and Le Xuan Khoa was selected as IRAC's first chief executive of Asian descent.
In June 1986, IRAC organized the first national Indochinese Community Leadership Convention on the campus of Georgetown University. Over 300 participants met for three days to address both domestic and international refugee policies and programs, and formulate plans of action for specific issues. Among the many achievements stemming from this convention was the passage of the Hatfield-Atkins Indochinese Refugee Assistance Protection Act of 1987. After its adoption, Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield commented:
The voluntary agencies and advocates such as the Indochinese Resource Action Center played a critical role in the consideration and passage of this historic bill. Special credit, of course, goes to the Indochinese-Americans who helped bring this issue to the attention of their members of Congress. They spoke for refugees in the camps at a critical juncture in the Indochinese Refugee Program.3
By 1997, the Southeast Asian refugee crisis had passed, and the board refocused its efforts on domestic issues and community empowerment. The following year, Ka Ying Yang took over as chief executive, and voiced her sense of SEARAC's new mission, stating, "Let's march into the 21st century joined by a sense of spirit for community empowerment, economic independence, political activism and social consciousness."4 Originally created during a crisis situation to stimulate cooperation among a diverse collection of public and private agencies, SEARAC has established itself as a voice of authority for the interests and needs of Southeast Asians across the United States.
The papers of the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center, formerly the Indochinese Resource Action Center, document the struggle of Indochinese refugees throughout the world, with specific emphasis on their own self-empowerment. Serving as a clearinghouse for refugee and resettlement information, Series III of this collection provides background information on hundreds of Mutual Assistance Associations as well as government agencies on the federal, state, and local level. For historians studying the refugee crisis of the late 1980s, the correspondence located in Series IV provides primary source material documenting the plight of the Indochinese refugees. The public reaction to the crisis is illustrated in Series V through the tens of thousands of American citizens who signed petitions to the government voicing their opposition to the policy of forced repatriation of refugees. Series II contains a resource bank of hundreds of people across the United States who volunteered their technical assistance to recently resettled refugees. The assistance they provided ranged anywhere from financial planning to animal husbandry. Finally, this collection documents the shift of IRAC's mission of bringing Indochinese refugees to the United States, to SEARAC's mission of building strong Asian American communities. This information is located in the office files of IRAC and SEARAC in Series I and VI respectively, and includes board meeting packets, correspondence, activity reports, by-laws, and newspaper clippings.
This chronological series contains the office files of the Indochinese Resource Action Center from its inception in 1979 to its name change to the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center in 1992. For thirteen years IRAC operated as a resource center for the Indochinese community and a clearinghouse of refugee information. Some of the many reports IRAC kept for this purpose are located in this series, including
The remaining material documents the daily activities of IRAC through office correspondence (1979-1992), as well as a variety of conference and meeting packets, such as those for the Economic Refugee Conference (1984), the Domestic Resettlement Planning Project (1979), and a conference on the Problems of Indochinese Refugee Children (1979). IRAC also worked closely with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Region IV of the Department of Health and Human Services, to organize technical assistance training workshops. The workshops, which took place in 1985 in Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, taught regional Mutual Assistance Associations how to help recently resettled refugees help themselves. This occurred primarily through personal and business financial planning, as well as educating the refugees in farming, husbandry, or any other skill they would need to prosper in their particular region. The meetings are documented in this series by training manuals, registration forms, and evaluations.
In response to the needs of Indochinese refugee groups whose talents did not mesh with existing job opportunities, IRAC developed a computerized resource bank of volunteer consultants who provided assistance to refugees in a variety of activities including farming, husbandry, and business and financial management. This series is comprised of several hundred response sheets returned to IRAC for inclusion in the database. The response sheets provided detailed descriptions of the volunteers' qualifications, as well as the regions in which they were willing to work. The series is arranged alphabetically by the state or region where the consultants lived, as per its original order.
Mutual Assistance Associations emerge from within ethnic communities, are controlled by ethnic leadership, and respond to the needs of their own ethnic constituency. There is a great deal of diversity among MAAs; some are strictly voluntary groups, which provide emergency services to recent immigrants, others have full time employees and are concerned with long-term community development. Their annual budgets range from a few thousand dollars to several million. Series III is comprised of an alphabetical file of newsletters, reports, and correspondence from numerous Mutual Assistance Associations. Similar material from government agencies, which provided a majority of their funding, is also included. A list of these associations and agencies, along with their corresponding acronym, is located in Appendix One.
The correspondence in Series IV is written entirely in Vietnamese and comes from a variety of refugee detention centers in Hong Kong. The letters, which are directed to the United States government, are presumably requests for refugee status and resettlement in the United States. Some of the correspondence is addressed directly to President George Bush. Although not all of the letters are dated, evidence suggests that they were all written between 1988 and 1990. Letters originating from the Whitehead Detention Center in Hong Kong remain a discrete portion of the series, as per its original order.
The petitions in Series V attest to the public outcry throughout the world in response to England, Switzerland, and Sweden's support for the forced repatriation of Southeast Asian refugees. The petitions were circulated by a variety of organizations, for use by IRAC at an International Conference on Indochinese Refugees in Geneva, Switzerland. The petition drive was in response to a preparatory meeting held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where participating nations agreed to enact a region-wide screening process and repatriation policy, which would discourage the outflow of refugees from Vietnam by no longer granting asylum seekers refugee status. All of the petitions call for a more humane solution to the crisis and call for the United States to categorically oppose forced repatriation. The petitions are dated 1989-1990, and are arranged alphabetically according to the title of the petition.
Series VI contains the chronological office files of the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center from 1992 to 1999. Reports SEARAC kept to assist refugees and influence public policy are located in this series, including
The remaining material documents the daily activities of SEARAC through office correspondence, board meeting packets, annual reports, fundraising files, and financial statistics. In 1998 SEARAC sponsored a major event called the "Thank You America Celebration" which gave thousands of Indochinese refugees the opportunity to show their appreciation for their resettlement in the United States. The celebration is documented in this series by an assortment of flyers and correspondence.
In addition to the material found in Series VI, some reports were kept in VHS and audiocassette formats. These include
The correspondence of Series IV is written entirely in Vietnamese and most letters are undated. The only apparent distinction among them was the original location from which the letters were sent. Although they all originated from various refugee camps in Hong Kong, nearly half were sent from the Whitehead Detention Center. Since the Whitehead letters were separated from the rest of the correspondence in their original order, they remain a discrete portion of the processed collection and provide the only organization in series four. As of 2002, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania is actively seeking a Vietnamese translator to provide a detailed description of this series.
The collection is open for research.
The collection was donated by the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center in several accessions between April 1998 and April 2000.
Accession numbers: M98-03, M99-17, M99-25, M00-06
Cite as: [Indicate series, box and folder # here], Southeast Asian Resource Action Center Papers (Collection 3021), The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
The Norman V. Lourie Papers (MSS 158), provide information on many of the same organizations found in Series III of this collection, including the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Services, The Center for Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement, The Department of Health and Human Services, The Indochinese Mutual Assistance Association, The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, The Refugee Policy Group, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the Indochinese Resource Action Center to name just a few.