Vietnam WAR: The Migrating Ripple
By Carmina Osuna
I’ve never
been a person that has
been interested in the history of wars or anything that has to do with
violence. This is mainly because I have a week stomach for the kinds of
things
that coincide with war.
After
arriving in Vietnam
most of my friends had gone to visit the Museum
of War Remnants of what is
known to
us as the Vietnam War and to the Vietnamese as the American War. When they returned many had mixed emotions of
sadness and regret for going. To some,
their reasoning was that the museum was really gory and to others it
reminded
them of when their fathers served. This
is not say that some didn’t really enjoy looking at the war through the
“opponent’s” perspective.
Ultimately
I decided to go to the
museum and when I stepped in the first things I saw were the left over
U.S. Air
force planes, and the U.S.
army’s tanks, guns, and bombs. I was
shocked to see this mainly because I didn’t expect to see U.S.
owned war objects in Vietnam. It all began to fall into perspective after a
few pictures of the devastation of both Vietnam
and its’ people. It was after I started
to walk to the ship when I began thinking of the war as the beginning
point of
a migration ripple.
In class we
discussed some of the
policies and world feelings towards refugees and asylum seekers. The people who are refugees and asylum
seekers fall into the category of “forced migrants” rather than
“voluntary
migrants.” Stephen Castles and Mark J.
Miller’s book, The Age of Migration,
informs us that “the U.S.
military presence in Korea,
Vietnam
and
other Asian forged transnational links… [proving that] the Vietnam War
caused large
scale refugee movements” (155).
After the
Vietnamese War, over 3
million people fled from Vietnam,
Laos
and Cambodia.
Over a million of those who settled in the U.S never returned home. When Vietnam
introduced the ‘Orderly Departure Program,’ which permitted legal
emigration
primarily to those with family abroad, gave way to one of the two
“largest
Asian enduring exoduses since 1945” (172). According
to the World Refugee Survey from 2006 Out of 12
million
refugees and asylum seekers 7.89 million have been in refugee
warehouses for
five years or more. Vietnam
is ranked as one of the top ten countries with the greatest number of
refugees
and asylum seekers with 305,500 people. The
approximate ratio between the population of the U.S.
and the refugee population is 1:1678.
The war
museum definitely opened my
eyes not only to the bias of American media but to the suffering and
harm that
war creates. Even with all this I still
don’t understand why most refugees are treated with such violence and
put into
camps when they’ve gone through enough suffering already.
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