50 years after the Vietnam War, is the U.S. still a refuge?

Memories that won’t stay buried

While pursuing my cultural heritage and preservation work across different media, I’ve often struggled with what our elders often insist: Some memories belong buried in the past. I respect the desire to spare the next generation from inheriting their pain. Yet I also recognize how unprocessed trauma refuses to remain contained — it seeps through generations, manifesting in ways we don’t always recognize.

Refuge After War was my attempt to document our collective memory before it faded. I wanted us to extract lessons from our community’s experience that might serve others facing similar journeys.

In 2021 and 2022, as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban and millions faced displacement, those lessons suddenly felt urgent rather than historical. Many in our Vietnamese American community recognized the parallels and stepped forward. We remembered the half-million souls lost as they fled Southeast Asia before orderly departure programs were finally implemented. We didn’t want Afghan refugees to suffer the same fate.

For a moment, it seemed the echoes between these refugee crises might catalyze meaningful policy change and sustained community support. I saw Vietnamese Americans showing up at airports, offering temporary housing, donating necessities and advocating for more humane immigration policies. 

In a rare and encouraging moment, the U.S. State Department took notice. In late 2022, officials representing the Biden administration traveled to Seattle to meet with our mutual aid coalition, Viets for Afghans, and learn from our volunteers before implementing the most significant change to refugee policy in decades: permanently allowing private citizens to sponsor refugees from around the world. For a brief time, it felt like our collective memory was helping shape something better.

The U.S. government decimated this program this year, with changes coming almost daily since President Donald Trump re-entered the White House. Federal policy updates show just how rapidly the landscape is shifting, eroding what was once a promising model for community-driven resettlement.

The tide recedes

Now, as we mark 50 years since the fall of Saigon, our already fragile refugee resettlement system is breaking down further. Funding has been halted to refugee resettlement agencies and programs, including Welcome Corps, the organization we partnered with to welcome refugees in 2021 and that had just become permanent at the beginning of 2023. Humanitarian parole programs are on hold for people seeking refuge from violence in countries across South America and the war in Ukraine. Refugee admissions are paused as the world awaits the Trump administration’s response to a federal judge’s order to resume those programs.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCC) — the very organization that sponsored my family’s resettlement decades ago — recently announced it will no longer support refugee resettlement programs due to the federal government’s latest actions. Institutions that once embodied America’s commitment to providing refuge are stepping back just when that commitment is most needed and we reckon with the worst displacement crisis since World War II. 

USCC’s decision isn’t happening in isolation. It reflects the U.S.’s broader retreat from refugee protection that has accelerated under the Trump administration in its weeks back in power. Resources have dwindled. Legal pathways have narrowed. The rhetoric has hardened. The small gains we celebrated two years ago have been systematically dismantled and deemed “wasteful.” 

Why does it seem that our Vietnamese community has been silent on these issues? It’s not for lack of understanding the stakes. Some of us find ourselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of concerning policies being implemented across multiple fronts. Each day brings new developments that challenge our sense of belonging and security in America. The psychological toll of constantly defending one’s humanity is exhausting. When everything feels urgent, it becomes difficult to sustain focus on any single issue, even one so central to our community’s origin story.

The luxury of forgetting

There’s a particular cruelty in how refugee crises function in the American consciousness. They capture brief moments of intense attention before fading from view, regardless of whether the underlying circumstances have improved. Four years after the U.S. left Kabul, Afghanistan has largely disappeared from headlines despite ongoing humanitarian concerns. The same pattern played out with Syria, Myanmar, and countless other displacement crises before them.

This luxury of forgetting is not afforded to those actually living through forced migration. For them, the crisis doesn’t end when media attention shifts elsewhere. The journey continues — through temporary accommodations, through bureaucratic labyrinths, through the slow process of rebuilding a sense of home and identity in unfamiliar surroundings.

As Vietnamese Americans, many of us know this reality intimately. Our families didn’t simply arrive and immediately thrive. We faced decades of adjustment, discrimination and gradual integration. We played what I previously called “the long game” — rebuilding communities, becoming self-sufficient, and learning to advocate for policy change to make our families whole.

A community at a crossroads

The 50th anniversary places our community at a decisive moment. Do we treat our refugee experience as a completed chapter in history, something to commemorate and leave in the past? Or do we recognize it as an ongoing responsibility to ensure others receive the opportunities for safety and renewal that allowed us to survive?

The uncomfortable truth is that our Vietnamese American community has become less vocal just when our voice is most needed. Some have embraced narratives that separate “good immigrants” from those deemed less deserving. Others have become so focused on their individual advancement that they’ve forgotten the collective action that made their opportunities possible. Many have simply grown tired of fighting battles they thought were already won.

I understand this exhaustion. The constant questioning of our value and worth in American society takes a toll. Each policy change that restricts immigration or refugee resettlement feels like a personal rejection — a suggestion that perhaps our families would not be welcome if they arrived today.

Finding our voice again

Yet I believe we must find ways to speak up again, even amid this fatigue. Not because every Vietnamese American bears personal responsibility for current refugee policy, but because our lived experience offers crucial perspective in these debates. We know firsthand that refugee resettlement is not merely a humanitarian gesture but an investment that enriches American society over generations.

When the U.S. government announces it will no longer support refugee resettlement — the very program that brought my family and countless others to safety — it’s not just abandoning its historical commitment. It’s discarding the evidence of that commitment’s success: the contributions Vietnamese Americans have made to this country over five decades.

The 50th-anniversary commemorations will feature many celebrations of Vietnamese American achievement. These stories deserve telling. But they remain incomplete if separated from the policies and community support that made them possible — and from the recognition that today’s refugees deserve similar opportunities.

This is precisely why the re-airing of Refuge After War matters now. The series doesn’t just celebrate achievement — it documents the struggle, the uncertainty and the collective action that made survival possible. It shows what happened when our community found its voice and used it effectively. Through their intimate personal narratives and historical context, I hope these five brief episodes remind viewers that refugee resettlement isn’t abstract policy — it’s about real lives, real families and real possibilities for renewal. 

All five episodes of Refuge After War will air on Cascade PBS at 7 p.m. Saturday, April 26. 

Thanh Tan, the director of Refuge After War, is an independent filmmaker, storyteller and curator in Seattle. She is directing her first feature documentary, Che’s Last Stand, and curating two community exhibits. We Were Soldiers, Too, featuring portraits of South Vietnamese veterans by Pulitzer Prize-winner Marcus Yam, is on view at Friends of Little Saigon Creative through June 10. On June 5, she begins a two-month residency at ARTS at King Street Station, presenting a multimedia experience that reimagines the music of the Republic of Vietnam (1954–1975).