“A Drop in the Bucket”: Third Country Nationals and Vietnamese Repatriates in Guam, 1975

The evacuation before and during the “Fall of Saigon” in April 1975 is remembered through an iconic photograph of an Air America helicopter on a hotel (at the time, it was mistaken for a photograph of US embassy rooftop). Many of the evacuees ended up in temporary refugee camps inside and near US military bases afterwards waiting for immigration processing and health screenings, but not everyone who was displaced fell neatly into the definition of refugee.

The evacuees leaving South Vietnam were multinational due to the US federal government’s decision to involve Asian states in the Vietnam War, and their motivation (or lack thereof) for leaving Vietnam were complex. Out of the various subgroups of evacuees who transited through the overseas US military bases, South Korean “Third Country Nationals” and Vietnamese “repatriates” faced an extended limbo in Guam (an organized, unincorporated territory also known as Guåhan in CHamoru) that outlasted the Vietnamese refugees who were resettled in continental US. The South Koreans and Vietnamese were not contrasted against each other in the early phase of the evacuation, but from the late summer and onwards, each became the good and the bad immigrant stereotypes in local media. Despite their small numbers, the Third Country Nationals and the Vietnamese repatriates exemplify the weaponization of immigration issues in diplomatic communication during the Cold War. Also, the way governments categorized these people into a liability and a potential tool for negotiation shows the other side of the large-scale humanitarian missions remembered through Operation New Life.

Third Country Nationals were a few hundred evacuees who were not considered by the US federal government to be fleeing persecution in South Vietnam and Cambodia. The total number of Third Country Nationals is unclear because the group was constantly in flux. The diplomatic records between the Korean Consulate in Guam and the Minister of Foreign Affairs in May 1975 shows that 39 South Koreans were in refugee camps in Hagåtña, with ten accompanying their Vietnamese wives and children. South Korean diplomats noted that most were migrant workers, and except for 5-6 people, no one had the money to repatriate themselves back to South Korea or another third country due to South Vietnamese currency becoming unusable. As of August 1975, Third Country Nationals included 113 Koreans, 6 Chinese, 6 Filipino, and 1 Indian. They were given an employment permit in Guam, similar to an H-2 visa. With the rhetoric of “immigration crisis” being amplified through the media, the US borders were shutting down again by the end of the summer. 1975 was also the year when Filipino nationals in Guam, invited as parolees to work for the US military, were ordered to leave the island. In September 1975, a number of South Koreans filed for immigration exclusion hearings. They were motivated to remain outside South Korea and sought legal status in the US by arguing during immigration court proceedings that they should be permitted to stay, as they cannot return to their former point of exit in Vietnam. South Korean consulate in Guam kept a close surveillance on the behavior of South Koreans in Guam’s refugee camps—especially those who were unwilling to leave the island. While they might not have been a source of anxiety for Government of Guam, the South Korean government viewed Third Country Nationals in Guam as a liability in its dealings with foreign governments including the US federal government, Pahlavi regime in Iran, the new communist Vietnam, and its “nemesis” in North Korea.

During the same time period, approximately 1,500 Vietnamese from South Vietnam demanded to be returned their country, with 13 people charging the US and Thai militaries for drugging and bringing people to Guam against their wishes.¹ Others were evacuated out of Vietnam with misleading information that they would be sent to refugee resettlement camps in Thailand to be reunited with their families. The repatriates resisted through protests and hunger strikes. So when the South Korean Third Country Nationals petitioned to extend their work permits, Government of Guam used this opportunity to contrast them against the “problematic” case of Vietnamese repatriates. On July 3, 1975, Governor Bordallo wrote to President Ford that sending yet even more repatriates to Guam “will do great injustice and disservice to our people and a betrayal of that spirit of hospitality and generosity which the people of Guam have unselfishly displayed towards Vietnamese evacuation effort.” He bristled at the possibility of having more repatriates, because it would also “destroy the only viable economic activity currently sustaining our island, our tourist industry” due to “such negative image” created by protests. Later, on Sep 19, 1975, he sent a telegram to the White House to argue that the repatriates are the “enemies” within Guam:

It is my feeling that these people should be treated no differently than the refugees who have been welcomed into American society. They too…refuge with us. They too, volunteered to serve the cause of the former South Vietnam gov and now find themselves dislocated through a cruel stroke of fate. …this kind of arbitrary discrimination is not in line with the basic democratic principles upon which our country was founded. There are some here in Guam who feel that with the current repatriate situation we face, the US is treating our enemies better than we treat our friends. …you [should] do everything you can to allow these people to become part of the US.

The Vietnamese evacuees often appealed their cases to the media outlets in Guam. Fearing that the public opinion towards Vietnamese refugees might turn hostile, the Guam American Vietnamese Association (GUAVA) publicly wanted to “counter the unfavorable publicity created by the repatriates in Camp Aspan.” GUAVA was also concerned about the legislature’s resolution to send repatriates to Wake Island, and hung banners with slogans such as “Guam is Paradise Island” and “Vietnamese Are Grateful to Guam Soldiers Who Died For Freedom.” Meanwhile, Vietnamese repatriates such as Vu Toan wrote to the editor of the Pacific Daily News to explain their position:

The story of the Third Country Nationals is more foggy. A few years later, on July 14, 1980, the Commission on Immigration and Refugees visited Guam, meeting South Korean community in Guam. Hesburgh notes that the Third Country Nationals were “in a kind of limbo, not being able to visit their own families in Korea, since they would then lose their parolee status in a US territory. Once they step out of this territory, they are no longer parolees and yet many of them have not seen their families in five to ten years.”

1975 provides a moment in history when immigration became a source of heated public debate. But even after 1975, the weaponization of immigration did not stop, nor the use of US military barracks as the logistical center for shipping and flying migrants. During the First Gulf War (1990–91), the US military carried out Operation Pacific Haven to evacuate 6,600 Kurdish refugees from Iraq. In 1999, GovGuam received Chinese asylum seekers, with a tent city resurrected outside a prison. Asylees from Burma (now Myanmar) also passed through during the early 2000s. And now, nearly fifty years after the Fall of Saigon, Andersen Air Force Base has become a stopover point for undocumented Indian deportees—with Guam “expected to be a staging point for more of these deportation flights.”

1. Jack Anderson, “Guam Refugee Drugging”, Pacific Daily News, Aug 27, 1975. ↩︎