Respect to S.E. Asian refugees like him vs. SHAMLESS ones that just

[theking]

..take w/ zero contribution to society when they are able to but rather just be a LAZY SOB, greedy and selfish:

Vietnamese refugee went from 7-Eleven cashier to resettling thousands



Two days before the end of the Vietnam War, Le Xuan Khoa boarded a plane with his family to start a new life in the United States.

He'd had a comfortable life in South Vietnam. He was the vice president of the University of Saigon and had served as the country's deputy minister of culture and education.

But as the North Vietnamese came closer to claiming victory, he knew he had to leave.

Given his high-ranking positions, he was certain that if he stayed, he would have been sent to a re-education camp where he would have been subject to grueling hours of labor, poor health care and insufficient food. Many people died in these camps, including some of his former colleagues, he said.

Khoa was 47 when he stepped foot in Washington, D.C., where he settled with his wife and four children.

He landed his first job in America as a cashier at a 7-Eleven, a far cry from his positions in Vietnam.

“Before coming to the U.S., I told my children, ‘Don’t be surprised if I have to start with menial jobs in the West because we need to adjust to a new life in the U.S., and we have to start very low in order to come up later,'” he told NBC Asian America.

Khoa was one of 123,000 Vietnamese refugees who came to the United States after the fall of Saigon in 1975. The year marked the beginning of the mass migration of Southeast Asian refugees following the end of conflicts the U.S. had been involved in in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

The Southeast Asian American refugee community this year is observing its 45th anniversary in the United States, where they remain the largest group the country has resettled since then.

When Southeast Asians began arriving in the United States, they were met with hostility and racism.

“The general sentiment of Americans was that they didn’t want Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. because of this very long and unpopular war,” said Sam Vong, curator of Asian Pacific American History at the Smithsonian Institute and former assistant professor of Asian American history at the University of Texas, Austin.

According to the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), a civil rights group, refugees were viewed as voluntary migrants,and were expected to quickly become economically self-sufficient and independent. Many were resettled in impoverished neighborhoods and were surrounded by gang violence, racial tension and poor schools.

This experience was common for many refugees, but it wasn't the case for everyone, Vong said.

Khoa described adjusting to his new life with no complaints. He and his family were assigned a sponsor who gave them a place to live for a year, and his stint at 7-Eleven only lasted for a couple of months.

He eventually began working at SEARAC in 1979 – which was called the Indochina Refugee Action Center at the time – as a consultant before becoming its first Southeast Asian director.

The organization, established by American professionals, aimed to help the U.S. government design refugee policies and programs because it had limited experience in resettling Southeast Asians, according to SEARAC.

Creating a unified refugee resettlement program
When Southeast Asian refugees began arriving in the U.S. in 1975, the country's resettlement process was conducted ad hoc by the State Department and voluntary organizations.

And without an understanding of their problems and needs, many were considered a burden to American society, Khoa said.

So he focused on shifting the narrative around Southeast Asians from hostility to support by redefining the community as political refugees rather than economic migrants. He worked with Congress and the media to educate the public about why they fled their countries and why the U.S. should receive them, according to SEARAC.

Eric Tang, author of "Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto," noted that refugees suffered trauma from war and from the experience of living in refugee camps.

Cambodian refugees, the majority of whom began arriving in the U.S. in the early 1980s, had come out of a genocide that claimed some 2 million victims, Vong said. He added that many Cambodian and Laotian refugees had also been displaced multiple times from their home countries.

“You can’t just expect refugees to just pick up their lives and start rebuilding their communities right after three months,” he said. “It takes some time to find a job, to get adjusted to their new environment, to relocate family members. And that requires both social support, financial assistance, and any other kind of community resources to help people get back on their feet.”

A historic moment came in 1980 with the passage of the Refugee Act, a bipartisan bill Khoa helped draft that formalized the country's resettlement procedures. It established a goal of helping refugees achieve economic self sufficiency within three years, Vong said. The act also raised the ceiling for annual refugee admissions from 17,400 to 50,000 from 1980 to 1982.

SEARAC in March commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Refugee Act and credited it for the resettlement of more than 1.1 million Southeast Asian Americans in the United States.

Quyen Dinh, executive director of SEARAC and the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who arrived in 1980, credited Khoa for the America she and more than 1 million other Southeast Asian refugees have experienced, where refugees see their families grow by having children and sponsoring other family members through family reunification.

“It was his leadership that led to the formation of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, streamlining the resettlement of not just Southeast Asians but all refugees since the 1980s,” she said in an email. Khoa retired as SEARAC's president in 1996, but remained an adviser to the organization.

“Decades later, his legacy lives on in our organization's mission to build and mobilize this, and the next, generations of advocates so that those most impacted by inequity in our communities are the ones calling for change,” Dinh said.

[theking]

Reminds me of Seng Yang, who helped resettle thousands of Hmong refugees. He died last year at 64 in St. Paul, RIP:

[DuMa]

Thanks for the share....

My folks walked a similar line.  From refugee camp of malaysia to hotlanta with a sponsor that got us going but all them chicken and burgers in the fridge got my dad moving along fast.  He wash dishes just to save up to get his first car.  Drove the family around and was very proud.  Cops pulled him over and with no lick of the english language was able to talked to the policeman and he lets him go.  Violation?  Driving without a driver license.  In Vietnam, you buy and drive.  No such thing as a driver license was my dad's stance.   

My aunt was another angel.  My dad would leave us for a year just to see what was out in the west side.  He landed in Narleans.  We moved there.  He did the same thing and for a few years while growing up, I did not get to see my dad.  He was building himself up a life in the OC to bring the family to california.

From what I remembered, my aunt would helped out these new Americans with housing in her own home.  I grew up with so many aunts and uncles that I never knew I had.  They weren't.  Just strangers that my aunt would help them to get them started with their new life in America.  She did not stop there.  Her last helped were in the year 2000.  After church, she was driving home and saw a viet lady, pregnant and crying and at a corner of a street and she had with her just a suitcase.  She took this lady in like a stray pet.  I grew up with her, watched her got herself a nail tech license while my aunt was babysitting her child.  She did well that she was able to sponsored her husband from vietnam.  He too became a nail tech.  They bought a store together.  Bought a house and moved out.  They came up fast too.  My aunt passed away and I moved away and we all lost touch.

But yeah, angels, helping a refugee family to come up, if I ever get that opportunity, I'll help support them, doing so in honor of my aunt.