Background
There has been relatively little direct immigration to the United States from the northern portions of Vietnam, although nearly one million North Vietnamese had already immigrated to the South during the partitioning of the country in 1954 and many of these subsequently immigrated to the U.S. from the South. This lack of immigration is partly due to the fact that the United States had refused to admit refugees from northern Vietnam. (In the mid-1990s, relations between the U.S. and Vietnam improved under President Bill Clinton, although many old-guard Vietnamese anti-Communists—many of them veterans of the ARVN in the Vietnam War—in several Little Saigon communities still strongly oppose formal U.S. diplomatic relations with the Communist government of Vietnam.). Today, comparatively newer Vietnamese immigrant arrivals hail from diverse regions from throughout Vietnam.
After the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnamese refugees began settling in refugee camps of Camp Pendleton, California, of Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, and of Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. They were intentionally spread out of fear by the U.S. resettlement program that the new Vietnamese arrivals would cluster in "ghettos".
Read more about this topic: Little Saigon
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