In Seattle, Vietnamese-Americans are looking to line up 75 families from their community to host 75 arriving Afghan families.
People who arrived in the U.S. after the Vietnam War see similarities in the plight of Afghans today - Vietnamese-Americans who came to the U.S. as refugees more than 40 years ago and their children are mobilizing to help Afghans with whom they feel a kinship at the chaotic end of another lengthy war in Asia. Vietnamese-Americans who came to the U.S. as refugees more than 40 years ago and their children are mobilizing to help Afghans with whom they feel a kinship at the chaotic end of another lengthy war in Asia.
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One group in Seattle is aiming to find 75 Vietnamese-American families to host arriving Afghan families. The president of an Ohio auto-parts company said he wants to hire newly arrived refugees. Others are organizing to provide housing and cash donations.
Participants said they see the loosely organized effort as a way to pay forward the help Americans offered them and their families decades ago.
“The situation in Afghanistan, it reminded Vietnamese refugees that many people helped them come here,” said Nam Loc Nguyen, a former refugee who evacuated Saigon in 1975.
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In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, there were multiple evacuation efforts, including last-minute flights after the fall of Saigon in 1975 that some Vietnamese-Americans said reminds them of the recent situation in Kabul.
By 1979, a separate effort was launched under the auspices of the United Nations that ultimately led to the resettlement in the U.S. of more than 450,000 Vietnamese refugees.
Currently, thousands of Afghans who worked directly with the U.S. government during the war are being resettled under the government’s Special Immigrant Visa program. They will be treated as refugees and granted legal residency and will be eligible for citizenship. Meanwhile, they are eligible to receive government assistance, including housing and healthcare for several months. They can legally work almost immediately.
Others, including many who worked with American aid groups, media outlets and other nongovernmental agencies, also have been evacuated and may ultimately be resettled in the U.S. The Biden administration has said as many as 50,000 Afghans will be allowed to come to the U.S. without a visa, given permission to enter the country on humanitarian grounds.
Mr. Nguyen, ( Nam Lộc) who spent 41 years working on refugee resettlement with Catholic Charities in Los Angeles, said he sent out calls for help starting the night Kabul fell to the Taliban. Via email lists and Vietnamese news websites, he encouraged former refugees to do whatever they could to help the tens of thousands of Afghans expected to be resettled in the coming weeks and months.
“I cried as I looked at the last flight out of the Kabul airport,” said the 77-year-old Mr. Nguyen, the only member of his immediate family who left Vietnam. “Memories of the last helicopter that left Saigon 46 years ago rushed back.”
Among those who responded to Mr. Nguyen’s pleas was Daklak Cao Do, president of Advanced Engineering Solutions Inc., a maker of auto and aerospace parts outside Dayton, Ohio. Mr. Do, 64, said he has offered to hire as many as 15 newly arrived Afghans and help sponsor their families.
“I saw the people who fell off the airplane and who were running after the airplane. It’s just what happened to my family,” said Mr. Do. Five years after the 1975 evacuation, Mr. Do fled Vietnam by boat along with his older brother and a 12-year-old nephew.
Mr. Do said he and his family ultimately went to Ohio, where a cousin had resettled. There they were sponsored by an American family who helped them find a place to live and helped him enroll in a community college and land a job at a local Bob Evans restaurant. He went on to earn a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Dayton.
In Seattle, Thanh Tan, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who fled by boat in 1978, was watching the unfolding chaos in Kabul two weeks ago when a friend started a text group with a simple message: “We have to do something.”
The filmmaker and journalist said she and her friends decided to try to find 75 Vietnamese-American families to sponsor the same number of Afghan refugee families. Ms. Tan said their group, called the Viets4Afghans project, received dozens of inquiries almost immediately and is now working to connect families with refugee-resettlement agencies in the Seattle area.
To date, one family who reached out to Ms. Tan’s group has taken in an Afghan family, she said.
The group is also working on a longer-term effort aimed at providing financial aid and help refugees learn English and acclimate to American culture.
“I grew up in a Vietnamese community with a constant wave of refugees coming all the time and saw what it took,” Ms. Tan said.
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