Was the CPA humane or a retreat from the right to asylum?

The short answer

• Compassion fatigue. More than a million Indochinese had been resettled by the mid-1980s. The crisis attracted less news coverage, public enthusiasm faded, and resettlement quotas fell even as departures continued. The 1979 bargain had relied on onward movement from first-asylum camps; when places failed to keep pace, the camps stopped emptying. Governments providing first asylum sought other ways to limit the burden.
• A changing exodus. The people leaving Vietnam were changing too. Later departures more often came from the North and from people without ties to the old regime. Years of failed planning, a trade embargo and the cost of occupying Cambodia had contributed to poverty. Officials in Hong Kong and elsewhere concluded that many arrivals were economic migrants. Đổi Mới, Vietnam’s 1986 reforms, also made persecution seem less systematic to them, strengthening their case for individual screening.
• Fear of a pull factor. If a place in the West encouraged people to leave, host governments reasoned, detention and the prospect of return might discourage them. This belief helped shape policy. Its factual force remains debated: conditions inside Vietnam were changing as well, so departures cannot simply be attributed to the promise of resettlement. Similar arguments appear in asylum debates in Europe and Australia today.
• The Cambodian stalemate. Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia from 1979 to 1989 and the resistance war kept hundreds of thousands near the Thai border. Great-power support for the resistance coalition, including the Khmer Rouge, prolonged the conflict. Each side wanted the population as a base, and no one would resettle it. The camps endured for the duration of the regional Cold War stalemate.

What it changed

Screening becomes the norm. In the 1990s individual screening became a model for asylum systems around the world, as Europe received refugees from Yugoslavia and arrivals from farther afield. The CPA showed both the promise of a hearing and the danger of officials disbelieving applicants. Chapter 12 compares it with group recognition of Hungarians in 1956, when individuals were not asked to prove a personal fear.

Return as a solution. UNHCR came to prefer voluntary repatriation in the 1990s, including in Cambodia, Mozambique and Afghanistan, after it had been rejected for most displaced persons following 1945. The CPA was an early test of return to a state people had fled, accompanied by international monitoring. Some emphasize the lives protected; others emphasize choices denied. Its experience also showed how difficult the boundary between voluntary and forced return could be.

A diaspora formed. The crisis created a worldwide diaspora. By 1995 about 2.5 million Indochinese had found homes abroad, more than a million in the United States, with large communities in Canada, Australia and France. The Amerasian and Humanitarian Operation programs added about 90,000 and 167,000 people respectively. Communities remember 30 April 1975 as ‘Black April’ in California and Journey to Freedom Day in Canada; the epilogue returns to those memories.

Cambodia comes home. The Paris agreements of 1991 and the UN transitional authority made return possible. In 1992–93 more than 360,000 Cambodians went home from the border, and Site 2 and Khao-I-Dang closed. For most returnees this was the outcome they wanted, fourteen years after the crisis began. The epilogue compares their long wait with Europe’s speedier settlement.