My family and I were among those prioritized for admission to the United States during the Cold War—a migration I discussed in my first book, Havana, USA. Not all who seek refuge are as fortunate, however. Less than one percent of refugees worldwide are ever resettled in the top resettlement nations like the United States. My scholarship examines how US refugee policy has evolved in response to humanitarian, domestic, and foreign policy concerns and agendas.
I wrote
State of Disaster: The Failure of U.S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change
The United States was conceived as a place of refuge, and the nation has accommodated many different types of refugees since its founding. Despite these ideological origins, a distinct and permanent track for refugee admissions within the immigration bureaucracy was not institutionalized until the Cold War.
Bon Tempo examines the reasons why this distinct track emerged during the late 1940s, how the track evolved over the next forty years, and how the track was used to accommodate millions of people fleeing communism during the Cold War. By the end of the Cold War, US refugee policy had become intertwined with Cold War foreign policy, and the term “refugee” had become synonymous with anti-communism.
Unlike the 1930s, when the United States tragically failed to open its doors to Europeans fleeing Nazism, the country admitted over three million refugees during the Cold War. This dramatic reversal gave rise to intense political and cultural battles, pitting refugee advocates against determined opponents who at times successfully slowed admissions. The first comprehensive historical exploration of American refugee affairs from the midcentury to the present, Americans at the Gate explores the reasons behind the remarkable changes to American refugee policy, laws, and programs. Carl Bon Tempo looks at the Hungarian, Cuban, and Indochinese refugee crises, and he examines major…
Espiritu’s book is a foundational text in critical refugee studies, an interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry that underscores the agency and resilience of refugees rather than their status as objects of rescue.
Histories of refugee policy often downplay the role resettlement nations have played in the displacement of the populations they resettle. Espiritu reminds us that US militarism in southeast Asia contributed to the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom were then forced to seek refuge in the United States and its territories. Their “rescue” cannot ever legitimize or justify the militarism that produced their displacement.
Espiritu’s examination of Vietnamese displacement is especially important for its discussion of the politics of memory and the commemoration of the Vietnam War.
Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence - and the history and memories that are forged in…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
The recent arrival of unaccompanied minors at US ports of entry is not a new phenomenon. In this book, Anita Casavantes Bradford examines the history of child migration to the United States since World War II.
Readers learn about the foreign policy, domestic, and humanitarian concerns that shaped U.S. policies towards unaccompanied minors; the governmental and nongovernmental actors who advocated on children’s behalf; and the emerging notions of children’s rights in U.S. society that contributed to the often-heated debates on immigration policy. She provides a much-needed historical context for understanding the challenges child migration poses today.
In this affecting and innovative global history-starting with the European children who fled the perils of World War II and ending with the Central American children who arrive every day at the U.S. southern border-Anita Casavantes Bradford traces the evolution of American policy toward unaccompanied children. At first a series of ad hoc Cold War-era initiatives, such policy grew into a more broadly conceived set of programs that claim universal humanitarian goals. But the cold reality is that decisions about which endangered minors are allowed entry to the United States have always been and continue to be driven primarily by…
Laura Madokoro offers a fascinating discussion of Chinese refugees during the Cold War as they sought protection in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. These historically white settler societies had long restricted or barred Chinese migration for racist reasons, so the accommodation of Chinese refugees fleeing war and persecution was never guaranteed. Indeed, even their refugee status was questioned.
The book examines the governmental, humanitarian, and faith-based actors who shaped national responses to this migration and, ultimately, determined the fates of millions of displaced people.
The 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution is a subject of inexhaustible historical interest, but the plight of millions of Chinese who fled China during this tumultuous period has been largely forgotten. Elusive Refuge recovers the history of China's twentieth-century refugees. Focusing on humanitarian efforts to find new homes for Chinese displaced by civil strife, Laura Madokoro points out a constellation of factors-entrenched bigotry in countries originally settled by white Europeans, the spread of human rights ideals, and the geopolitical pressures of the Cold War-which coalesced to shape domestic and international refugee policies that still hold sway today.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Jana Lipman examines the Vietnamese refugee camps in Guam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong in the decades after the fall of Saigon. She asks us to consider how camps function as liminal social and legal spaces where refugees forfeit rights with the hope of eventually securing membership (and rights) in a resettlement society. It is in the camps that refugees try to prove their ‘worthiness’ for admission to society, and where they navigate a cumbersome—and often hostile—bureaucracy that ignores their humanity, often with dire consequences.
The book examines the implementation of refugee policy at the local level by local actors, as well as the role of Vietnamese activism—in the camps and in the diaspora—in asserting refugee rights.
Robert Ferrell Book Prize Honorable Mention 2021, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History Honorable Mention 2022, Association for Asian American Studies
After the US war in Vietnam, close to 800,000 Vietnamese left the country by boat, survived, and sought refuge throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This is the story of what happened in the camps. In Camps raises key questions that remain all too relevant today: Who is a refugee? Who determines this status? And how does it change over time?
From Guam to Malaysia and the Philippines to Hong Kong,…
My latest book examines U.S. responses to environmental disruptions in Central America and the Caribbean since 1995 to see what lessons might be learned for shaping humanitarian and immigration policies in an era of accelerating climate change.
I chose the case studies in this book for what they reveal about climate shocks, the internal and cross-border migration that follows, and the lack of legal protections for those displaced by environmental drivers and forced to migrate. The case studies offer a view into some of the humanitarian challenges of the present and the future.
