Historical Context
The end of the Vietnam War left millions of Southeast Asians displaced. In South Vietnam alone, the war had created over 6 million refugees from 1965 to 1971. Preceding May 1975, the United States policy for Southeast Asian refugee had been to assist by resettling them in safer areas of their home nations. As the war began to come to a close in early 1975, the State Department prepared an evacuation plan for U.S. forces as well as 18,000 Vietnamese refugees, but it quickly became apparent that this evacuation plan did not meet the incredible need of the refugees. When the South Vietnam government rapidly deteriorated in April 1975, President Ford authorized an evacuation of up to 200,000 refugees.
Read more about this topic: Indochina Migration And Refugee Assistance Act
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or context:
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Parents are led to believe that they must be consistent, that is, always respond to the same issue the same way. Consistency is good up to a point but your child also needs to understand context and subtlety . . . much of adult life is governed by context: what is appropriate in one setting is not appropriate in another; the way something is said may be more important than what is said. . . .”
—Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)