New Americans

Posted By Blackfive

Looks like the Bush Administration is doing the right thing about the Hmong Laotian refugees. Paul R. sent this LA Times article (most of it is here since LA Times required a logon):

Loyalty to U.S. Finally Paying Off for Hmong
Nearly three decades after they last fought communists in their native Laos, refugees at a Thai camp are to get American citizenship.
By David Lamb, Times Staff Writer

SARABURI, Thailand — The reward for helping the Americans during the Vietnam War took 29 years to materialize, but for the 15,000 Laotian Hmong in this sun-baked refugee camp, it was a payout beyond their wildest dreams: U.S. citizenship.

"I can't believe we'll be Americans," said Sui Yang, 60, who fought with CIA-backed Hmong guerrillas against the communist Pathet Lao in the mountains of Laos. "We heard rumors for years this was going to happen, but they were always only rumors. Most of us gave up hoping. I thought we were going nowhere."

Yang, a soldier in America's "secret" war in Laos in the 1960s and '70s, rolled up his trousers to show scars from deep bullet wounds. He spoke of U.S. choppers that supplied his guerrilla band in the jungles, and of downed U.S. pilots the Hmong rescued. He remembered his shock when the U.S. abandoned Indochina in 1975, and when Laos fell to the communists...

..."I would be killed for sure if I went back to Laos," Heroula Leng, 60, said. "All us old soldiers would."

Among the groups influential in persuading the Bush administration to take the Hmong is Refugees International. Its president emeritus, Lionel Rosenblatt, was one of the young Turks at the State Department who helped evacuate 130,000 Vietnamese from Saigon in April 1975, ignoring original U.S. plans to bring along only a handful of Vietnamese with the 6,000 departing Americans.

Rosenblatt flew into Saigon as the city was falling to North Vietnam's army. He and his colleagues pilfered a consular stamp and, working on their own through the nights in a bowling alley — the only place they could find that had electricity — issued thousands of exit visas to Vietnamese who had been allies but were not on the U.S. Embassy's list of people who might be killed in a communist takeover.

"The Hmong have a unique record in association with the United States," Rosenblatt said in his Washington office recently. "They fought with us, and they paid the highest price.

"They're deserving as the last human element in terms of us taking care of our allies. If the Hmong were good enough to fight and die for us, they have to be good enough to resettle."
<...>
Unless the Department of Homeland Security rejects her application, Yeng Thao, 60, soon will have the opportunity to test the limits of that dream. From behind her pushcart, from which she sells tapioca and coconut-milk desserts for the equivalent of 5 cents a dish, she glanced across the camp: To her right, a line of shacks with corrugated tin roofs stretched down an unpaved road; to her left, in a large shed, friends were packing herbs and locally made handicrafts for export to the United States.

"I don't know much about America, except Wisconsin is cold and California is not cold," she said. "If the communists were gone, my choice would be to go back to Laos and be a farmer again. But for the children, the best thing is to get the education and opportunities in America. So for their future, we will go."

That's what it's all about - building a better future for your children. Welcome home.

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New Americans

Looks like the Bush Administration is doing the right thing about the Hmong Laotian refugees. Paul R. sent this LA Times article (most of it is here since LA Times required a logon):

Loyalty to U.S. Finally Paying Off for Hmong
Nearly three decades after they last fought communists in their native Laos, refugees at a Thai camp are to get American citizenship.
By David Lamb, Times Staff Writer

SARABURI, Thailand — The reward for helping the Americans during the Vietnam War took 29 years to materialize, but for the 15,000 Laotian Hmong in this sun-baked refugee camp, it was a payout beyond their wildest dreams: U.S. citizenship.

"I can't believe we'll be Americans," said Sui Yang, 60, who fought with CIA-backed Hmong guerrillas against the communist Pathet Lao in the mountains of Laos. "We heard rumors for years this was going to happen, but they were always only rumors. Most of us gave up hoping. I thought we were going nowhere."

Yang, a soldier in America's "secret" war in Laos in the 1960s and '70s, rolled up his trousers to show scars from deep bullet wounds. He spoke of U.S. choppers that supplied his guerrilla band in the jungles, and of downed U.S. pilots the Hmong rescued. He remembered his shock when the U.S. abandoned Indochina in 1975, and when Laos fell to the communists...

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