Thread: Illegal Vietnamese Face US Deportation

Illegal Vietnamese Face US Deportation

Tuesday January 22, 2008 2:31 PM
By MARGIE MASON
Associated Press Writer

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - Thousands of Vietnamese living illegally in the United States now face deportation after the two countries completed an agreement Tuesday following a decade of work on the pact, a U.S. official said.

Vietnamese who entered the U.S. illegally after the former foes normalized relations in 1995 could now be forced to return to their birth country, said Julie Myers, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

About 6,200 Vietnamese were given final deportation orders before the agreement's completion, and 1,500 more are involved in proceedings to eventually be sent home, Myers said during a visit to Vietnam.

She did not say how many Vietnamese are believed to be living illegally in the United States.

The repatriation agreement provides steps for the U.S. to deport the Southeast Asian country's citizens who lack required documents, and for Vietnam to receive them.

The deal has been under negotiation for 10 years. Vietnam had previously been reluctant to accept citizens back.

``Vietnam has actually been a country that has been problematic for a long time, and this agreement we believe marks a new step toward making this process move more smoothly,'' Myers told The Associated Press.

More than 1.5 million overseas Vietnamese - the largest population outside Vietnam - live in the United States. Many fled their native country in boats after the Vietnam War ended in 1975 and northern communist forces took control of the former South Vietnam, which the U.S. had backed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/s ... 70,00.html

It seems that every time we get involved in a no-win Asian war, we wind up accepting millions of Asian Third World refugees who never want to return home. The same thing is about to happen in Iraq.

Meanwhile Catholic Family Charities is scouring the world in search of other refugees to bring home to America's heartland. Somalia and Congo are among their main recruiting regions.

This is a totally misleading article. These Vietnamese are not illegal aliens who snuck in or overstayed a green card, they are legal immigrants who committed felonies. In the past the US could not deport them because Vietnam would not accept them back. It sounds like finally the US put enough pressure on Vietnam and will finally start deporting them.

Deportation pact highlights changing U.S.-Viet relations
IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY PROTESTS MUTED
By Jessie Mangaliman
Mercury News
Article Launched: 01/23/2008



In two months, the U.S. government will begin deporting more than 8,000 illegal Vietnamese immigrants as a result of a long-sought repatriation agreement signed Tuesday by Washington and Hanoi.

The pact deals with a once-forbidden subject in the emigre community - the forced return of Vietnamese nationals to their communist homeland - and it underscores how close Vietnam-U.S. relations have become.

In addition, the muted reaction Tuesday in San Jose's 100,000-strong Vietnamese community illustrated how much emigre politics have changed in the once rigidly anti-communist stronghold.

Although some worried that the communist regime might retaliate against repatriated emigres, most Vietnamese-Americans interviewed Tuesday seemed to view the agreement as a natural outcome of the growing ties between two former enemies.

"It's normal," said Hoang Co Dinh of San Jose, a member of the Vietnam pro-democracy group Viet Tan.

A good step


Antoinette Haupt, a Palo Alto hairdresser who immigrated from Vietnam four years before the Vietnam War ended in 1975, called the agreement a good step to address illegal immigration.

"If you take illegals from one country, you should take them from all countries," said Haupt, who in the past has joined demonstrations denouncing Hanoi. "It has to be equal."

Under the renewable five-year agreement signed in Hanoi by Vietnamese Foreign

Ministry officials and Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, officials of Immigration and Customs Enforcement can now repatriate undocumented Vietnamese who have been ordered deported by an immigration judge.
Most of the illegal immigrants - about 7,300 Vietnamese - have criminal convictions that made them subject to deportation, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Others overstayed visitor visas.

It was unclear Tuesday how many of the undocumented Vietnamese live in San Jose and the rest of the Bay Area. But Santa Clara County has the second-largest concentration of Vietnamese in the country, so it's suspected that hundreds of undocumented Vietnamese live here.

Many who were ordered deported were released on parole from immigration detention. These include Vietnamese who completed jail time for crimes that made them eligible for deportation. Although they were required to regularly report to immigration officers, many were able to establish semi-normal lives and obtain work permits because they were in legal limbo.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision prevented the federal government from holding the undocumented immigrants in detention for more than six months.

The repatriation of the Vietnamese has been in limbo for more than a decade since the United States stopped admitting refugees from Vietnam in the early 1990s.

Even with a judge's order in hand, the U.S. government was unable to deport undocumented Vietnamese because Hanoi refused to accept them. But as diplomatic and economic ties grew since the United States lifted a trade embargo in 1994 and normalized relations a year later, discussions of repatriating undocumented Vietnamese began in earnest.

"Agreements such as this are the building blocks of diplomacy," Myers said in a news release. "This agreement allows us to carry out a judge's order to remove individuals from our country in a safe and humane manner."

The U.S. government will pay for the cost of deporting the Vietnamese nationals, a process that is expected to begin in two months. About 6,400 have final deportation orders, and an additional 1,668 are in deportation proceedings, said Mike Keegan, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Washington, D.C.

Future treatment


Loc Vu, a former colonel in the South Vietnam army who now runs a refugee resettlement agency in San Jose, said he agrees that the United States is simply trying to enforce its own immigration laws. But he expressed concern about the treatment of those deported once in Vietnam.

"Maybe they will be welcomed at first," he said. "Then after a few months, who knows?"

The deportation of the Vietnamese nationals will have a far-reaching impact on the lives of their families. Many will leave behind children, parents, husbands and wives who are U.S. citizens or living here legally.

"Does it really justify breaking up families?" said Diem Do, another member of the pro-democracy group Viet Tan. "To me this is a very emotional issue. I look at this as more of a humanitarian issue."


http://www.mercurynews.com/valley/ci_80 ... ck_check=1